Entering our Too Lazy to Manufacture Consent era

Killing in the name of… nothing

official, from me: Album of the Year: The Spiritual Sound by Agriculture Song of the Year: Radioactive Dreams by Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo

The vast majority of Americans are opposed to AI and oligarchy, but both of our major political parties are too corrupted by billionaire control to stand up for the people.

Microplastics are here to stay; that's why we need to eat them responsibly in the classroom

Just finished @chrislhayes.bsky.social *The Sirens’ Call* (very good!) and want to think about attention and religion. I tried (unsuccessfully) to write a review essay a couple years ago on Kindig’s *Fascination* and Smith’s *Thoreau’s Axe*. What else should I read on attention and (dis)enchantment?

The Olivia Nuzzi story and the Bari Weiss at CBS story are the same story, which is that the upper echelons of legacy media are absolutely rife with people who worship power and don't feel burdened by any sense of responsibility to their profession or the public.

Time for another Forbidden Course at the University of Austin. Or perhaps an open letter. Or maybe some adjunct at a branch campus needs to be pilloried for giving a bad grade. In any case, Free Speech must be defended.

LOL "Bari killed this meticulous story because it was unfavorable to the Trump administration" is literally the story they're giving to their stenographer

Current issue of @theonion.com nails it again.

These are the people the mainstream media is constantly telling us to understand and sympathize with.

What's most clear from this speech/order is that Hegseth knows very little about the chaplain corps -- its history, its purpose, and its operations are not what he imagines them to be.

David Brooks, who wrote in the NYT last month, "The Epstein Story? Count Me Out" is... in the latest Epstein photo dump published by @oversightdemocrats.house.gov. He should absolutely be fired by NYT for this. Major conflict of interest that he didn't disclose.

pursuing the dream of a life lived as pure "data creation," with the ultimate goal of being completely manipulatable by the data processors who have a plan for your life

this is not behavior becoming of a FIFA Peace Prize recipient.

Fucking incredible dystopian shit, comparing super rich people risking millions if not billions of lives just to make more money to people that risked their life actually building incredible things that would then make millions of dollars for super rich people.

Feels like the US has spent the last 5+ years on the verge of some kind of secular moral revival that keeps getting channeled into weirdo lifestyle puritanism

I mean, in what sense will you be able to say the college “survived”?

The AAUP Ad Hoc committee on AI and Academic Professions & colleagues will discuss ongoing strategy building in the movement for tech justice and freedom from surveillance. We also want to hear from you – what you are thinking about, your needs & how you engage with the topic of AI in education.

In these cases, AI is being used to solder together the libertarian goal of dismantling administrative capacity with the fascist goal of ever present control and enforcement. This mediating function between contrasting desires is at least as important whether it actually works.

I find the Nuzzi/Lizza jokes as funny as everyone else does but then you remember why the scandal matters at all and the whole thing feels as sinister as the situation calls for

Is the whole Nuzzi book not kind of satirical? Is the writing intentionally bad, to be funny in a way? Obviously not worth blowing up your career for (although, did she?), but, post-facto, maybe this is intentionally written this way, to provoke this kind of reaction, etc. Maybe too much credit, idk

For those following DHS's entry onto religious property-- No More Deaths is affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson.

a lot of people debating the merits of that dogshit essay meanwhile the girl’s mom is retweeting demands to ban all trans people from teaching at any level. it’s forest for the trees shit

every trans person i see post about the OU suspension knows that the suspended target is trans & a grad student, & has an innate awareness that this is about purging trans employees. every cis person i see thinks the target is a rando professor & that this is about giving conservatives good grades

the primary thing that TPUSA provides to young conservatives is a blueprint for weaponizing the abject cowardice of university administrators against individual teachers and instructors, and university admins should take a long look in the mirror and think about what that says about them

“Democratic leader’s proposed alternative to MAGA comes from a venture capitalist’s book title” is so on the nose it sounds made up. These people have anti-juice. It’s been years since they’ve had a normal conversation with a normal person. They can’t remember what it’s like. They’re so cooked.

There is a direct correlation between how fake your job is and how much value you see in AI

yep. also really can't overstate how much nuzzi is very much the product of an environment that rewards amoral ambition and frowns on people who sincerely believe anything

I wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

No bailouts. The US should extort these companies when the crash happens so they get minimal compensation in return for nationalizing the entire panopticon industry and then destroying it once harvested for socially useful parts. It won’t happen but it should

In April 2009, the Washington Post asked 10 writers to make the case for something that deserves to be tossed out as part of "spring cleaning." I chose Larry Summers. Better late than never. Unlocked version of my 16-year-old article below. naomiklein.org/why-we-shoul...

Some of you are not seeing history as one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of your feet, and it shows

Nuzzi's fawning coverage of the sociopathic conspiracy crank she was having an affair with aided his rise to political power, which he is using to perpetrate the worst intentional public health catastrophe of our unnecessarily shortened lifetimes, and THAT is the STORY.

here at the Paper of Record, when an open white supremacist leaks someone's college application in an attempt to imply he got unfair race-based special treatment, even though he was rejected, we know what to do: publish it immediately prospect.org/2025/07/09/2...

Amazing reporting from @chalkbeat.org: Christian Nationalist law firm Alliance Defending Freedom was involved in setting up Colorado's first "Christian public school" specifically so it could get another case to the Supreme Court over whether public money can fund religious schools

caliper-wielding eugenicist freaks are gonna keep saying this, keep circling the toilet bowl talking about predicting someone's sexuality or personality or ethnicity or whatever else w/AI and it being bullshit won't matter; it being a pretext for state/admin/other violence will be all that matters

At this point, anyone—a university, a law firm, a corporation, a Democrat—bending the knee to Trump is doing it because they want to, not because of any political reality.

Election day and keeping fingers crossed for NYC! Resharing my June article on Zohran Mamdani and the Islamophobia of the mayoral race, which has only gotten more egregious in the last weeks: arcmag.org/zohran-mamda...

Anyone religion scholars (and/or Boston residents) going to be at AAR a day early and want to see a Stay Inside show with me on Thurs, 11/20?

On top of this, there's been a proliferation of conceptually flawed popular and academic writing on polarization and tribalism built upon psychology and behavioral science that's made academics inordinately pessimistic about the public.

i really hope i live to see a time where it again feels like education for its own sake is seen as a social good

Good time to revisit this clear - and, it turns out, prescient - book from Finbarr Curtis. If you would like to think about profanation, civility, Trump, etc. (e.g., AI videos of the president dropping shit on people), read this. cup.columbia.edu/book/going-l...

people online are constantly saying shit like "the average person is now post-literate and returning to medieval peasant mindset" while neglecting the corollary, namely that our elite aristos are once again scrying for angels, summoning demons, distilling elixirs of eternal life, etc.

the dork in question is Jed Rubenfeld, husband of Amy Chua of Tiger Mom fame, who also mentored Vance. The fix was in, and it was most likely a very gentle 'debate'

perhaps the biggest story TFPever ran was a catastrophically shoddy argument that George Floyd ackshully died of an overdose. When confronted with irrefutable evidence that the piece was simply wrong, Weiss didn’t take it down, she asked her critic, @radleybalko.bsky.social, to come on a podcast.

“You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line” lmao

I would really like to read an article analyzing the Peloton hashtag #irideforcharliekirk. I am sure there is some useful theoretical framework here, but it’s a bit beyond my reach.