This is nicely put. The machine that subordinates all life to its own algorithm of self-expansion is already operating: It’s called capital. www.newyorker.com/science/anna...

Cliffs of Moher / Inis Oírr, Ireland 🇮🇪

reporting live from Delaney Hall in NJ, where protesters are out in droves (along with the media) in support of hunger striking detainees, in a movement spreading to other detention centers in Texas, California and NM

I well recall the online debates where the majority of debaters opined that zero traffic deaths is an utopian goal and would require methods that would kill Helsinki, if not bring about totalitarian communism

Pretty good piece on LLMs and the university, and quite scary, to be frank.

Chapter 3: Water | The Elements of Mutual Aid “Colonization & capitalism are dams holding us back from each other. This chapter is all about breaking them down so we can let mutual aid flow between us…

This is astonishingly evil and cruel. It targets the people who have come here lawfully, done everything right, and qualify for a path to citizenship. It means they must leave the families who live here and the jobs that are the very reason they can work here. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Today I'm at Washington University School of Law mentoring at the 2026 Model Constitutional Convention — prime time for a new generation of constitution nerds.

Rest in peace, Ran Hirschl — a giant of comparative constitutionalism and an extraordinary mentor who I was lucky enough to have on my committee. The screenshot, from my dissertation acknowledgments, says the rest. In memoriam: www.politics.utoronto.ca/news/memoria...

"Resistance" connotations aside, framing our fight as one against AI "empires" — and the harms caused by their imperial ambitions — is a powerful one that taps into the kind of anti-corporate collective action we need right now airesistlist.org

“On Tuesday, Wahl said that Kaziha and Awad drew the attention of the attackers and drew them ‘back out into the parking lot area.’” “Without distracting the attention, without delaying the actions of these two individuals, without question, there would have been many more fatalities.”

Here we fucking go again

tl cleanse 😌

My job market paper is finally in print and open access! Check it out if you get the chance.

Probably the best reporting I've read on GenAI's water usage. The only way we can truly understand the environmental impact of LLMs is by forcing Big Tech to disclose technical details like parameter counts, rather than relying on voluntary "sustainability disclosures." www.wired.com/story/karen-...

The South Carolina House has passed the new congressional gerrymander to eliminate Clyburn's majority-Black seat, sending it to the Senate: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/u...

How long until they bury Google Scholar next?

Anyone writing on AI try not to use an image of an anthropomorphic robot as cover art — challenge level: impossible

Did they purge the anarchist elements from the training data, or is that scheduled for the v1921 release?

Cuba's oil reserves have run dry amid the U.S. energy blockade. My friends tell me of near-24hr blackouts every day. Food spoils, hospital patients die, a whole country descends into darkness. My heart is heavy. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/w...

Revised working paper out now 📄 "Constitutional Cherry-Picking: Constructing 'The People' in Participatory Constitution-Making." The earlier version of this paper received a substantial theoretical and methodological overhaul, and I'm very happy with the results. 🔗 mattjmartin.com/research/wor...

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

Crucial reporting from @petrinkae.bsky.social @prismreports.org

My musical obsession as of late is a subgenre of vaporwave known as "barber beats," defined by its suave yet brooding instrumentals, brutalist aesthetics, and, in some cases, "plundering" smooth jazz and lounge music from the 1980s–2000s. Perfect working music. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu9I...

Learning about my future congressional representative, Joe Wilson

Good job everyone for holding him accountable!

Just in time for our move to Columbia 🙃

This is the very type of intentional racial discrimination that SCOTUS claims is still illegal even after Callais. SC is 25% Black but Norman says Black voters shouldn't be able to elect a candidate in any of the state's 7 districts

Dems once again choosing Respect For Process over victory.

The plan does not address the scenario where, with the gas/diesel tax gone, fossil fuel companies simply raise wholesale prices to absorb the savings before they reach consumers at the pump. Bad policy machine go brrrrrr

Yeah, I'm not gonna lie — despite people trying to dunk on this piece, it just reads as a reasonably measured take on how the author is attempting to use GenAI appropriately in his academic writing. Paywall bypass: archive.ph/202605051754...

Stoking and channeling boiling contempt for the ultra-rich is a pretty essential element of what needs to happen if we're gonna get out of this. And folks, they've given us a lot to work with. Don't tone police that shit. When it gets out of control, remind people why that's happening.

The AI debate in academia is routinely framed as an individual consumption choice with shifting moral goalposts, rather than a collective action problem grounded in anti-corporate politics. The same corporations own the tools we've already normalized, and an atomized response serves their interests.

In the paradoxical standard set forward by the Supreme Court, the only way to tell if districts were drawn for racism is if the people drawing them say so. But if the districts are drawn so that Black voters in the South get almost no representatives, that's not racism.

These reflections from Paul Musgrave are worth a read. This passage in particular hit home. The interpersonal has been and always will be political. Building trust with students — and finding new ways to do so amidst the polycrisis — is no less than fundamental. musgrave.substack.com/p/political-...

GitHub repo and paper appendix now live, too.

Soft-launching a heavily revised version of my working paper, "Constitutional Cherry-Picking: Constructing 'The People' in Participatory Constitution-Making." New methodology (LLM-based classifier) and new theoretical framing (constructivist representation theory). mattjmartin.com/research/wor...

As AI slop enshittifies, well, everything, there's a nostalgia for the early internet as a kinder technological revolution. Every transition of this scale (industrial, internet, AI) has been exclusionary, uneven. Treating the 90s web as the egalitarian exception flattens the analysis we need now.

We got our hands on internal ICE records that show how widespread use of force, like punches, kicks, takedown maneuvers, restraint holds, and less-lethal weapons such as Tasers and pepper spray in detention centers has grown wapo.st/4tdgBRA (1/)

You never have to defend politicians. You really do not. When you feel the urge bubbling up, drink water and keep it moving.

Happy May Day to all. May it be a day filled with joy, resistance, and solidarity. My friends in Cuba put together a poster expo in celebration, with contributions from eight countries: exposicionanarquistainternacional.wordpress.com

By weakening Voting Rights Act protections against racial discrimination in redistricting, the Supreme Court has paved the way for the largest-ever drop in representation by Black members of Congress. n.pr/4edJ5XA

The Comparative Constitutions Project's latest paper — "Expanding Your Vocabulary: A Framework for Topic Integration in Texts" — is out now (open access) in @sscratsage.bsky.social! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Put together a week of readings for my qualitative methods grad course. Very excited (and a little nervous 😬) for these discussions in the fall.

Ya es viernes y el cuerpo lo sabe

A US special forces soldier involved in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was arrested for allegedly betting on that operation, netting him $400,000 in profits, according to a person familiar with the matter. www.cnn.com/2026/04/23/p...

Today is Yucca's 5th Gotcha Day (2021 → 2026)

Working on a rewrite of my last dissertation chapter

The last time this many labor unions in NYS publicly backed taxing the rich to a significant degree—and thereby knowingly courted the ire of the governor—was 2009, when NY WFP first passed the "millionaire's tax" (still in effect today). Now, NYC-DSA + Zohran are also helping pull labor to the left.