In 2023 I became obsessed with videos of dads in cargo shortswaiting in parking lots during Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. So when she came to town, I grabbed a camera and headed down to talk to them. I thought it'd be funny. It turned out to be something else entirely.

The Bad River Band is suing to protect its wild rice from an oil pipeline

ebooks are the best last-minute gifts (maybe the best gifts?) and for the person on your list who is involved in activism, loves speculative fiction, or just needs a little hope at this point in the year (and really, who amongst us doesn't), try the acclaimed anthology WE WILL RISE AGAIN:

We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope share.google/KCZNTpaVW8a0...

I wrote about WE WILL RISE AGAIN, edited by @older.bsky.social @drkarenlord.bsky.social and @annaleen.bsky.social , for @ancillaryreviewofbooks.org 's 2025 Notable Books! ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/12/22/a...

The Mighty Slinger by anthology co-editor @drkarenlord.bsky.social and @tobiasbuckell.bsky.social is a novelette with enough story for a novel. It's about the power of music, collective action, and how small actions can achieve great acts of resistance. It's a reprint, and you can read it here!

More information on the 1MW charger… 🧪🔌💡☀️💨💧🔋 electrek.co/2025/03/26/b...

🇧🇷Guaracava-de-crista-branca 🌎Elaenia chilensis Conservação: Pouco Preocupante A guaracava-de-crista-branca é uma ave passeriforme da família Tyrannidae. 📷 Alexandre Toda Faitarone

Apostroph Restaurant; Piața Crișan 7C, Sibiu 550400, Romania https://www.google.com/maps/search/?api=1&query=45.7721274%2C24.136939&query_place_id=ChIJg87uoHFdTEcREBoZolbS09s

really great theater titles we too often take for granted (a partial list) A Streetcar Named Desire Damn Yankees Do I Hear a Waltz?

Oh, preorder this book from @uncpress.bsky.social with 30% off with code 01HATM30 uncpress.org/978146968490...

You can donate to Abdul and his family here: chuffed.org/project/1624...

Please help Hani's family

Also reminds me of a long-running debate about whether or not “critical thinking” exists as a domain-knowledge-independent thing. My recollection was the consensus came out as “not really” but the details are now hazy. Except this all feels much more bad faith than that did.

It’s similar to the distinction between academic freedom and free speech. Academic freedom is a context of *disciplined* speech where academics are free to pursue research and teach with a degree of collective autonomy. We as communities decide what counts - and can allocate jobs & etc accordingly.

Higher ed is not compulsory and within most universities students have immense discretion over what courses to take. But if you sign up for a course, you are obligating yourself to learn certain things. Otherwise, what are we even doing here?

Not just that but Tolkien also said, “Evil cannot create anything new, it can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.” Sound familiar? 🙄

Techbros seem to love Tolkien, so here's an analogy to help you understand what genAI is. GenAI is The One Ring. You think your use is justified, b/c you don't have evil in your heart. But it came from evil, it is intended for evil purpose, & anything you do with it will be twisted to that end.

🪺 Birds of eastern Canada Ottawa, J. de L. Taché, Printer, 1919. [Source]

chuffed.org/project/1368... Give life. The only way we can. ( for now)

... But after reviewing still non-public correspondence between Blanche’s office and McGuire, Judge Crenshaw found otherwise. His ruling might also shed light on why Ben Schrader, a former top AUSA in Nashville, quit rather than participate in the case. 4/4-end

Winning a vindictive prosecution motion is a very hard thing to do. But in this case, the Trump admin keeps handing the defense more and more evidence of vindictiveness, and they're not exactly making the judge sympathetic to them either.

Right now, things aren't looking great for the Trump DOJ in the Abrego Garcia criminal case: - A ruling that they mislead the court will be made public next week - Blanche and his deputies may be forced to testify. - They're facing a motion for sanctions for Gregory Bovino violating the gag order

The US Attorney prosecuting Mr. Abrego claimed he had no political purpose in bringing the case, and made the decision all on his own. But emails disclosed to the defense made clear that Todd Blanche's office was leading the charge from the beginning, checking in frequently with the US Attorney.

This story is another BIG problem for the Trump admin; in Abrego Garcia's criminal case in Tennessee, evidence shows the DOJ seriously mislead the judge about the extent to which Deputy AG Blanche and his office were involved in filing the case, bolstering the case for dismissal.

Went to (finally) buy my copy, but they’re sold out… which makes me happy.

Life After Cars spotting at @portersqbooks.bsky.social in Cambridge, MA.

Ebikes are game changers for parents!! All they need is to test one out & they are purchasing one. Thanks @bunchbike.com for helping more parents transport their children outside the car.

In all these cases, it's his own insecurity that's driving it.

The group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up…. Many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

It kills me because someone with range would discuss the longstanding practice of women reading mm romance books with a critical lens. Instead we, too often, get this "golly gee, did you know that women read about *men who date other men*" trend nonsense.

#Flu surges in #Boston; still not too late to get vaccinated, city says www.universalhub.com/2025/flu-sur...

Good thread

Like plagiarists, slopmongers will continue to exist—and they're worse. Adjust your level of contempt accordingly.

Treat a published work that was later divulged to be AI-generated the same way you would if you found out it was manually plagiarized from a different book. Same situation, just the plagiarism has been automated and averaged out a bit, and the plagiarist is also a scab and a cultural arsonist.

The only real way is to formally require divulging any degree of AI usage, in much the same way that we all already declare in contracts that out work is original. Plagiarists will simply lie here, but at least there are consequences when they're caught later. Establish those consequences as norms.

A reasonable question here is: how do you *identify* slop consistently? At some level, you really can't—certainly not if someone has already fixed it. I don't propose a whole new infrastructure of policing here. It would be pointless. The answer is to back up the question a level.

The only reasonable position is zero tolerance: the AI industry must end sooner rather than later. It is culturally, socially, environmentally, and economically destructive, and all the Silicon Valley marketing in the world isn't going to make it otherwise.

E.g. If writers are being forced by employers or publishers to use AI, then entities representing the interests of writers should expose and protest that coercion.

The AI bubble will pop at some point, sure, but this is about limiting the damage it does to working writers. This is about protecting the field from the industry in the meantime.

We will get paid less, many of us will be forced out of the field and/or the industry, generations of new writers will find their development stunted and their early-career opportunities limited, and ultimately, the quality of the work available to readers will suffer.

AI is a direct threat to our livelihoods as well as the future of our professions, not because AI is capable of doing any of the work, but because our industries will use the threat of AI to make us all increasingly precarious. Uncertain futures and worse working conditions.

Translators, illustrators, researchers and editors all do creative, human work that is important and cannot be reproduced in part or in whole by AI any more than writers. Their interests are our interests. To legitimize the use of AI to replace them is a failure of principle as much as strategy.

There is no ethical use of AI because the continued existence of the AI industry is directly harmful to (alongside everyone else) the interests of everyone whose labour makes books exist—writers of fiction & nonfiction, illustrators, translators, researchers, editors, everyone.

This is what I said (somewhat paraphrased from memory because I didn't save it before posting lol):

There are many people who simply do not understand the stakes and either understate or overstate them. The issue is not that AI will replace writers or w/e: it can't. The issue is that AI will make our working conditions significantly worse and harm the development of new artists in our fields.

The survey is open to non-members (I am not one) and to readers (who here is not &c.) so I encourage you to share your feelings on the matter. Don't assume that everyone already understands that AI is bad or why! I mean, people *should*, but you could say that about a lot of things.

A) This course looks incredible B) My reading of The Teaching Archive really has me thinking about the entanglement between our research & our course design C) Reason 1 of 937 that outsourcing course design to AI or boxed curriculum prevents the very sensemaking that makes good teaching possible

#Georgia 🇬🇪 @rsf.org has recorded 600 attacks on the press in the last 12 months, and calls on the government to "end the physical violence, threats and abusive prosecutions" of journalists. buff.ly/NlGN6L0

Superb reading by Reading the Ending.