Thrawn bleeding out after being stabbed by Rukh: “But … it was so artistically done!” (There are maybe 20 people on this site who will get this reference and they are by definition the best people)

Useful reminder from Peter Kellner on the problems we refuse to acknowledge are getting better, and the politics of hopelessness that this breeds open.substack.com/pub/kellnerp...

It is okay to grieve for the choices Israel could have made over the past two years, but didn't. It did not HAVE to act this way, and let nobody tell you otherwise or call you a fool for wishing it chose differently. But one must acknowledge the choices it did make. Bc that's the world we live in.

Watched @gianmarcosoresi.bsky.social ‘s new special “Thief of Joy” last night. It was hilarious, but I will say the editorial choices regarding which words to censor and which to let fly free were *fascinating*.

technologically advance a band: Bitcoinback

I asked ChatGPT list my publications. All made up, and the top 3 were said to have been published in the Stanford L Rev, Yale LJ, and Harvard L Rev (none of which I’ve ever published in). Conclusion: students should not use LLMs to research me, but I highly encourage my tenure reviewers to do so.

We kept a Missouri Senate seat in D hands one cycle longer than we should have because the GOP candidate was an anti-abortion extremist.

Starmer's letter to Palestinian president Abbas about the recognition of a Palestinian state

I unfortunately didn't realize it was homecoming party weekend here, and I let my 11 year old walk the usually tranquil streets between me and where several of his friends live. He received antisemitic harassment from McMaster students 3-4 times. ...

So um. This is what's been up with me for the last year. I hate hate hate asking but very much appreciate your support. www.gofundme.com/f/fund-me-if...

I agree with this wholeheartedly. There are serious problems with @thefireorg.bsky.social ‘s methodology (as I recall, they also exempt religious/service colleges from analysis, which I think is a mistake), but at least they’re genuinely collecting/analyzing data, and it takes data to beat data.

Nobody's claiming direct quid-pro-quo of course, but it sure looks like France's decision to recognize the state of Palestine helped facilitate the PA's arrest of a man wanted for one of the deadliest antisemitic attacks in post-war French history.

a big reason companies are caving this hard is that they're banking on hunkering down for the next 3.5 years and then coasting by when the dust settles Democrats need to make it very clear that there will be future consequences for defecting in this prisoner's dilemma

This is an important time to remember that responsibility is not a zero-sum game — recognizing one person’s fault does not necessarily diminish another person’s. The Trump administration is fascist. And ABC cynically caved and abandoned American values for money. Both are worthy of your contempt.

“Super-Sparta” sounds so much nicer than “Hermit Kingdom”. Though I do appreciate the historical irony of the leader of the Jewish state instructing his people that they must adopt the ways of the Greeks.

I’m sorry, but I can’t get over the same people simultaneously arguing that (a) the Israeli govt is fascist and censorial for pulling funding from Israeli film institutes and (b) those same Israeli film institutes are “complicit” and warrant a boycott bc they receive funding from the Israeli govt.

I had never seen this passage from Orwell on the sort of person who very abstractly adores political violence—often from the safety of a polity where such violence is significantly contained—and it is resonant and brilliant.

So you don’t think it’s a “genocide”? Fine. If it was “just” ethnic cleansing, it should have been enough (dayenu). If it was just starvation as a weapon of war, dayenu. If it was just torture at black site prisons, dayenu. If it was just pogroms in the West Bank, dayenu. Enough is enough.

Testimonies of Israeli doctors from the torture camp of Sde Teyman. By my colleagues Hagar Kotef and Meirav Amir. theconversation.com/israeli-doct...

Most Jewish Americans oppose Trump’s university funding cuts that the administration claims are about antisemitism, poll shows www.latimes.com/california/s...

I'm pleased to see this. It would also be great if someone could create a group with a name like "Jewish Faculty Against Antisemitism" and then file their own suit challenging Trump's abuse of Title VI. He is not fighting for Jews, he's fighting against us, and we need to frame it that way.

We are no longer in the era of First Amendment Lochner-ism. We are in the era of First Amendment Coronado-ism -- where we see the hyperexpansive First Amendment protections that allegedly defined an era come to a screeching halt the minute they stand in the way of conservative policy priorities.

Battle doomscrolling by posting five small pleasures in life: 1. Something you were going to buy anyway is on sale 2. The smell of hot chocolate 3. Introducing someone new to your favorite anything 4. Perfectly loading groceries into your car trunk 5. Watching a sleeping baby on the monitor

Democracy dies in darkness was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/demo...

We are now accepting applications for our online and in-person Environmental LLM and MSL programs at Lewis & Clark Law School! Start as early as January 2026 and take the first step towards shaping the future of environmental protection. law.lclark.edu/programs/env...

Einstein once was reportedly asked if he ever regretted being born a Jew. “Yes, but only bc I wish I could have converted.” Likewise, my only regret about canceling my WaPo subscription months ago is that I can’t cancel it now.

The @washingtonpost.com has changed its slogan again, from “Democracy Dies In Darkness” to “Know Your Place.”

I've gone on and on about how easy my baby is (has slept through night since 6 weeks, super mellow, happy to play by himself or just hang out in the crib more or less indefinitely), to the point where I've joked that "if they find my body, it's almost certainly another new parent who did me in."

As he cements his status as one of boxing's all-time greats, I have to ask: Has anyone been so dominant for so long while being so far off the public's radar screen as Terence Crawford?

Some people on the left think just repeating “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” frees them from the work of thinking critically about what is and is not antisemitic. And a whole lot of people on the right think being a strong Zionist functions as a “get out of antisemitism free card.”

Murder is wrong. Pogroms are wrong. Using a murder to incite a pogrom against a small and vulnerable group in society is wrong. (If I’m not mistaken, an assassination was the excuse for the wave of mob but state-sanctioned violence in Russia in 1881 that gave us the term “pogrom.”)

I do believe most NYers don’t know who CVH is, bc most people don’t know their own senators let alone those of another state, but it’s still a very bad look for Jeffries’ camp to keep lashing out at fellow Dems like this.

Legend-making performance by Bud Crawford. Instantly enters the conversation as one of the all-time greats.

The frequency with which I’m seeing people conflate “Kirk’s views were reprehensible” with “Kirk deserved to die”—even in the face of explicit repudiation of the latter—makes me wonder if they just genuinely can’t comprehend not wanting to murder someone who they think had reprehensible views.

US unis take billions of dollars from the federal gov. Is the progressive position on that (a) That funding should be continued, and efforts to eliminate it are instruments of repression, or (b) Taking that funding makes the university part of or complicit in the broader repressive state apparatus?

I know these “interviews” with Justice Barrett are carefully scripted. But if she’s going to keeping urging Americans to “read the opinions,” and not just commentary, it sure would be nice if someone would ask her what we should do when—as is so often the case these days—there’s no opinion to read…

They say democracy doesn't come cheap, but they never saw the 30% off flyer on my book. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

It's so nice that the GOP is bringing back the classics.

"The left is cheering Kirk's murder" is wildly overstated, but it is a useful lesson that if your "leftist" strategy is observationally indistinguishable from something neo-Nazis would do, right down to the target, it's probably a bad strategy.

"Browncoats"? Guys, we've finally found the perfect use-case for this meme.

“Every political movement in history, including the most bloodthirsty, has condemned political violence by its opponents. The only real test is whether you also oppose political violence by your allies. This is a test Trump has repeatedly failed.”

The Second Circuit badly botches First Amendment law by suggesting that hostility to a view (for non-religious reasons) is anti-religious hostility in any case where the holder of the view happens to do so for religious reasons. That cannot be right.

Re @ilyasomin.bsky.social 's update to this post, I'd observe that the claim that George Soros was a "Nazi collaborator" for actions he was (in effect) forced to take while living under an assumed identity is a very popular one on the antisemitic conspiratorial (but I repeat myself) right.

Today's highlights included: (1) Touring the preschool we plan to send Nathaniel to; (2) Signing Nathaniel up for "swim lessons" (at 8 months, I assume the quotation marks are well-warranted).

rarely have I more acutely felt the dynamic by which Dems are held responsible for the rhetoric of every random left-leaning person on the internet and Republicans are not even asked to answer for their own personal words

One of the infuriating ironies about the attacks on DEI, typically conjoined with laments about the lack of "intellectual diversity" on campus, is that in my experience the academic offices most concerned with facilitating inclusivity to diverse political views are overwhelmingly DEI.