Sure, why not

Oh God I got to experience one of these garages myself recently in LA (the Michael’s on Sawtelle IF YOU EVEN CARE). So creepy, especially because all of the signs were like, “Good news!! We’re watching you! 😄🚗👍😘🦄”

the vice president is a klansman

Geez

There is a tremendous opportunity for a brand new generation of media outlets to rise up right now because many news outlets that spent decades painstakingly building their credibility are seeing it torched by bootlickers with incredible speed.

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

I'm not in marketing but an angry guy shrieking "Guess what asshole...AI isn't going away so you might as well accept it!" doesn't strike me as the way you'd pitch an ostensibly useful product

Great idea for helping new history students understand “bias.”

I’ve been thinking about the discourse on quality vs. cost of living and I’m no kind of economist, there’s a lot I don’t understand. But when people point out that people in the ‘50s and ‘60s didn’t have smartphones and laptops—I mean, did we get a choice? Did anyone ask if we’d prefer a house?

An immigrant works a dangerous job to protect Americans. It puts him in medical debt. Now he also has to worry about being deported by ICE when he goes to work or takes his kid to a soccer tournament. Feel safer?

We believe these data “demonstrate that UC Merced has actively divested from instruction, showing a pattern of deprivation of the instructional budget relative to ourselves and other campuses.”

Years ago, when I applied for a job at a bookstore in SF (maybe it was Green Apple?) I had to take a test on my literary knowledge. I failed badly bc, even though I read a lot, I’m ignorant about certain genres. Anyway, good for the bookstores! www.fastcompany.com/91461983/ind...

Anyway we’ll be requiring undergrads’ Zotero libraries to contain a copy of everything they cite next quarter, which I guess is one very labor-intensive way to check.

Earlier this year, I couldn’t understand why ILL responded so combatively to a hard-to-track-down paper I’d asked them to get. Now I see why. 😬

Amazing how many of these papers are about “ethical use of AI in education.” It’s harsh, I know, but I do think if you incorporate a hallucinated reference it should be incredibly damning for you. There should be professional penalties.

Should scientists apply to OpenAI's fund for research on AI & mental health? Should policymakers consider it a credible safety effort? Avriel Epps & I see it as "grantwashing," and it's an insult to anyone whose loved one's death involved chatbots. We explain: www.techpolicy.press/beware-of-op...

It’s the entire point. There’s no plan to make this meaningful for students. No plan to use it administratively. Its design and implementation signals its only real intent. It’s best and easiest use case is for systematic harassment and to scare faculty into complying in advance.

Sabrina Tavernise did a nice job reporting this. She quoted people talking about everything from vacations to eating out to their closet, but really she's tracing the cultural reverberations of the fact that housing costs too much. The average first-time homebuyer is now 40 (up from 28 in 1991).

We have to do the work to kill this in the senate. There's nothing near a guarantee that it'll die on its own. Please, please contact your Democratic senators and demand they oppose it. This is literally a life-or-death bill for trans kids.

The AAUP is seeking transparency & accountability on the extent of Palantir’s role with the Department of Education. Higher ed should not be treated as a security threat to be monitored by Palantir. Rather, it should be treated as a public good that strengthens our democratic values.

Really disturbing.

Straive is the name of the company that provides publishers with these AI tools, so you might want to watch out for that name when you’re considering where to publish.

I think…that if you come close to getting a job but don’t get it, it’s pretty devastating, and people will say a lot of stuff to you to make you feel better.

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

I asked a “what’s your dream job” icebreaker-y question in our STEM-heavy undergrad course and a surprising number of them said “professor.” Still wondering about that. No idea.

DEI isn't why you didn't get a job. THERE ARE NO JOBS. YOU DIDN'T GET A JOB BECAUSE THERE ARE NO JOBS. If all the older professors retired? You still wouldn't get a job! Not in the humanities! Because they'll replace at best half of those lines! There will still be no jobs! None!

"Has feminism failed women brought to you by bank of america" is my MKULTRA sleeper agent activation phrase

even more importantly imo our grad unions need AI policy/protections in our contracts

The University of Florida spends about $21 per month per student on library materials and database access.

I wrote about a conference marking the culmination of tens of millions of dollars of philanthropic spending to transcend neoliberalism. lpeproject.org/blog/post-ne...

What kills me is that we promised our little girl that we could keep her safe if she lived the truth of who she is, and I’m afraid we lied to her.

Yeah, I think this is true. It’s not really about what students believe; it’s what they do in a world in which their paper is due tomorrow. We are expecting undergrads to somehow display a level of discipline and integrity that (as has become obvious) challenges professional writers.

Here are some actions you can take to defend gender-affirming care in your hospital system.

Very happy to introduce a new tool, BookReconciler! You can take spreadsheets with book data and add subject headings, descriptions, ISBNs, HathiTrust IDs, & more. You can also cluster editions & variations of the same "Work." Led by @thisismattmiller.com and supported by @post45data.bsky.social.

Finally (!) switched browsers from Chrome. I chose to go with @floorp-browser.bsky.social. It took like two seconds and I feel silly for taking so long to do it.

Slides from my keynote address at FIRE'26 conference titled "Emancipatory Information Retrieval: Radically Reorienting Information Retrieval Research to Resist Corporate and Authoritarian Capture of our Information Ecosystems". #FIRE2026 bhaskar-mitra.github.io/files/emanci...

13yo made me a(n unsolicited) “#swiftie” button with her new button-maker and then got mad when I tried to wear it on our trip to Target. Teens are baffling.

Fuck these people.

Super fucked up, @propublica.org - extremely wild that a newsroom based on public trust would be unwilling to take these basic steps in bargaining

Just noticed this myself. Who asked for this?

More or less done with the reading list for History of the Database. You could take a lot of different approaches, but this is the one I went with.

We “are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education.” Thanks for this, @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social and Christopher Nygren.

Update from my continuing journey through Golden Age detective fiction: Margery Allingham is pretty delightful!

2. On Wednesday, GLAD Law, a major LGBTQ+ legal advocacy, filed a formal complaint with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities over the decision by Yale New Haven Health and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center to end gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

Merry Christmas! It's the Hater's Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog! defector.com/the-2025-hat...

Thus exact same problem of probability is what plagues police use of face recognition. They see a 52% likely match and think it’s good enough and likely their suspect.

I worry that the inclusion of a probability score makes people think these tools are more reliable than they are. Even if you know the tools are unreliable, you might see “92%” and think: well, odds are pretty high. But if the entire methodology is faulty, then the probability is, too.

I remember writing years ago about a then-new initiative by Amazon to disrupt local government procurement of things like office and school supplies. Turns out Amazon's become very popular with school districts, and it's using dynamic pricing to rip those schools off. prospect.org/2025/12/17/a...

OK well, apparently you can combat Firefox with Waterfox.