As you’re preparing for your Thanksgiving meal, remember the skilled work it took to get that food to your grocery store. Tell us your favorite Thanksgiving dish, and we can share some of what we know about the work behind the ingredients.

Impeach, convict, remove. And if our current leaders won’t do it, they need to step aside for people who will.

This is a really personal one for me because a huge proportion of my partner's students are Haitians who are alive thanks to the TPS. They're kind, hardworking students who've been through hell to get here. Even if they weren't, I'd be happier with them here than Noem and Trump.

We get there in different ways, but I think the Pope and I see the same problem here: LLMs are soulless in almost every sense that that adjective can be used.

This is an amazing denial of responsibility. "Yes, our LLM encouraged a kid to commit suicide, but we explicitly said it was against the rules for the LLM to do that, so not only can't we be held accountable, it's actually the user who's wrong for breaking the rules!"

There's a real problem in contemporary reporting of choosing one technically-true facet of a story to focus on over the others. When you're dealing with people who are generally honest, that's okay, because they're not going to outright contradict themselves. But we're not writing about such people.

This is cool

I'm never going to try to enforce my language use norms, but I have to say, the US got these two right.

Sorry for a possibly goofy thread, but... There is a bad habit within American politics of saying "aha! but the thing you want would mean our government no longer adheres to the precise definition of the category I have chosen for it". Take it from a linguist: words do not matter more than ideas.

YES the cake has THUMB TABS

Leading up to NYC’s election, politicians launched a barrage of racist claims against Zohran Mamdani. Mainstream media outlets have barely covered it. @ahjohnson.bsky.social reports on the Islamophobic vitriol, threats of deportation, & virtually no coverage.

In a rotten world, you have to take your victories where you can. It's gotta feel great for the staff of the Harvard Crimson to be threatened by Larry Summers on November 10 and then get to publish an expose on his emails to Jeffrey Epstein three days later. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

This article on designing services to be digital by default focuses rightly on older people, but it has implications for us all www.thejournal.ie/readme/opini... #accessibility

I had trouble parsing this headline: "Oil and gas demand to rise for 25 years without global change of course", and it's a nice demonstration of a weird thing about how we interpret #language and #grammar.

The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

This is what my self-doubt tells me in my darker moments, browbeating me that all my unhappiness is the result of being around myself all the time. If anyone, let alone Joyce Carol Oates, said this about me, I would never leave the house again. I'm glad she said it about Elon Musk instead.

I received this email about Democrats caving to end the shutdown from one of the SNAP recipients I spoke to:

I just accidentally referred to the washing machine as a "laundry machine" while talking to our cat (identifying the noise in the next room for her). I'm trying to figure out whether that's an acceptable term in my lexicon and I'm not sure. Anyone use (or know someone who uses) "laundry machine"?

Gender-inclusive language is good. It's been around forever. Language changes constantly, including due to societal norms. And if Stock's concerned about mistreatment of "pregnant women", she oughtn't accept being interviewed by a guy who was arrested for assault against his pregnant girlfriend.

This is one of the funniest misdisambiguations I've ever seen. (Also, is "misdisambiguation" a word in anyone else's lexicon?)

Cornell agreed to pay $30m, hand over admissions data with demographic breakdowns, produce annual "campus climate" surveys to check on antisemitism and changes "since October of 2023," and—here's the dumbest part they agreed to—that the govt can open new investigations whenever it wants. Appeasers.

When people propose AI systems that are obviously both biased and absurd, I always wonder: do the proposers think AI can't be biased, or do they just think the rest of us think that? They're stupid, or they're evil, or they're both. The problem with phrenology wasn't that it didn't use computers!

Jury nullification is good and it's a good sign for America's path out of authoritarianism that juries are recognizing their power to nullify.

Last week, a unemployed Texan barred from getting a job in his field by a noncompete agreement stepped up to intervene in the federal lawsuit and defend the FTC's ban on noncompetes that Trump's FTC won't. @whitneycwimbish.bsky.social talked to Ric Davidson about his story & why he decided to fight.

When I was a baby youth worker I used to play a media literacy game with my students called "two truths and an opinion" where they had to highlight those in news articles and very often they would have trouble finding sentences that didn't contain leading words.

I've been wishing I could be out in New England for the foliage (San Diego does not, you may be surprised to learn, look particularly interesting in autumn), but this is an even worse thing to be missing out on! Wish I could be there and I hope others can take advantage of it.

It's still a damn shame the way Chesa Boudin got run out of office, but at least Krasner's sticking around and doing good work.

this result sticks out as deserving more attention!

My god this is for real one of the most incredible speeches I’ve ever seen by an elected US politician: ‘And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is to dismantle the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This not only how we stop Trump, it’s how we stop the next one.’

We can't tolerate the racist, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, and anti-social campaigns of guys like Cuomo any longer. Voters are saying that it's time for solidarity and standing up for each other. We don't have space for losers trying to split us apart to gain power for themselves. Good riddance.

Oops!

A TPUSA goon invented a story about these costumes, which had to do with teaching math and not Charlie Kirk. He urged followers to harass the teachers and school. And when he learned the costumes were worn in 2024... he still insisted the teachers were evil. Because he's a lying piece of shit.

If you live in a place worth living in, people are going to move there. To think of that as a cost of living there, or a problem to be stopped, is insanity. Every migrant or immigrant is a testament to the strength of a place, not something that undermines it. (I hate Cuomo so much.)

One thing that used to be nice is that people wouldn't get a big platform to say things unless they had thought them through properly. It is good for everyone if you have to let your thoughts sit for a while before you say them.

people don’t realize what’s really going on. they view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. they don’t realize that there’s this lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything

"You leave, or I put this grenade right in front of you. I'm perfectly fucking legal, bitch." ICE to a bystander in her car, in front of which he then throws a flashbang before driving away. eyesupapp.com/video/1e32e9...

A writer tried dating alt-right men as an experiment to learn about them. There is so much going on here I don't even know where to start www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/...

Being "tough on crime" is just a call for deterrence. And study after study has shown that deterrence doesn't work, except to sate society's demand for vengeance, to treat "criminals" cruelly. And THAT isn't even deterrence at all. It's retribution, and it precludes rehabilitation.

All this "academia is too woke" garbage really burns my beans. Here's a little secret that everyone outside academia ought to know: it ain't some pure and perfect meritocracy. We need more representation of people who aren't me. Sorry for this, but it's story hour. 🧵

Some nights I'll listen to a shuffle of all the music on my computer, and occasionally a song will hit me differently, and better, than usual. Tonight, it was Billy Idol's "Dancing with Myself". Way more of a bop than I had remembered!

Here's a photo of my friend and colleague, Jorge Bautista, getting shot in the face with a flashbang grenade. The ICE Agent is so afraid of Jorge (who was posing no threat) that he has wet himself. Please share this photo. Everyone needs to know what cowards ICE agents are.

I know I'm being unfair (judging a book by its cover and all that) but I struggle to imagine any aspect of Trump's destruction of a part of the White House that concerns me less than "so where's Melania's new office?"

I don’t know if there’s a more perfect illustration of the utter fucking nonsense that creative pollution by AI will produce than this choice to illustrate the power of Paramount’s new “localization” and “customization” technology by face-swapping Brad Pitt into the lead role of GET OUT

Worth listening to @techwontsave.us on how news is increasingly consumed through social media and now "AI" platforms www.techwontsave.us/episode/288_... and then reading this BBC piece...

They instantly jump into doing racist shit, it’s the *first* instinct.

WELL HOW ABOUT THAT "A millionaire levy in Massachusetts has generated $3 billion more in revenue than expected without forcing significant high-profile departures from the state." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

well that's a fresh one! I suppose giving your victims brain asphyxia would be helpful for woo woo charlatans

I generally don't like my state's fondness for propositions, which sometimes put complex issues directly in the hands of people who don't understand their consequences (myself included!). But I sure don't mind this one!

A small Lofoten tourism group announces they're shutting down their guides and possibly going bankrupt thanks to the loss in revenue from chatbots that steal and rephrase their content None of this shit is inevitable. Fuck the slimy tech bros. www.instagram.com/p/DPyRB-tDBf...