The SPLC has filed its motion to dismiss for vindictive and selective prosecution. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

As a social scientist, my ideological priors affect the type of questions I ask, but not the nature of the answer. What felt damaging about Wurman's video for a non-lawyer was that it suggested that legal reasoning starts and ends with priors & the right set of priors are a professional fast-track.

A Trump-appointed US Attorney with no experience told grand jurors they'd hear about “bad guys” and “murderers” who “did what you are going to hear about.” He handed them business cards. The cases got tossed—and three days later, he got confirmed. Extraordinary via NYT/Alan Feuer buff.ly/xpnVcJ7

It’s going great.

The president of Cornell hit two students with his car, lied about what happened, and got away with it. The story illustrates an under-reported crisis in higher education: administrators and the trustees they answer to are increasingly hostile to the idea of college itself. I wrote about it here:

The way Ron DeSantis has turned Florida’s previously top-notch university system into a lavish slush fund for his friends and co-segregationists needs to be the subject of a withering political campaign. Everyone who touched this process should be made radioactive in polite society.

We’re talking about a man whose company was convicted of criminal tax fraud.

And there it is, folks. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05...

from @kfaulders.bsky.social of ABC News. Trump & DOJ apparently trying to get out from under any potential judicial supervision of his $1.776B slush fund "settlement" of Trump v IRS.

Trump's attys say his motion to dismiss his $10B lawsuit against IRS is "self-executing"—a done deal. He's just giving notice and no "judicial action" is required. (He's saying there will be no judicial supervision of his settlement with DOJ.) storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

This plan is just root and branch unconstitutional: Trump & Todd Blanche colluding to steal $1.7B from taxpayers to mete out to Trump's friends & thugs in Trump's sole discretion. abcnews.com/US/trump-adm...

They had contracts for prison labor at these camps?? Before they even bought them? www.projectsaltbox.com/p/contracts-...

New piece in Science: Sudden elimination of USAID grants triggered waves of violence in affected regions in Africa, undermining civic governance and fueling civic unrest. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

BREAKING: The Supreme Court HALTS the 5th Circuit's decision blocking telemedicine mifepristone nationwide. Alito and Thomas dissent. Thomas suggests that mailing abortion pills violates the Comstock Act. www.documentcloud.org/documents/28...

Justice Alito pissed with all these unreasoned shadow docket rulings. 🙂 attn: @stevevladeck.bsky.social

Literacy is essential, actually. And we should be doing all that we can in our own ways to improve and to increase literacy. This is simply not controversial. It really is not. Let's fight about other things.

73% of mothers with kids under 18 are in the workforce. More than flowers or brunch, working moms need: -Paid family leave -Equal pay -Universal childcare -Universal healthcare (But get your mom flowers, too)

This 1952 memo from the Pentagon UFO files is superb There is no point preparing for aliens ‘because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic.’ 🤣 www.war.gov/medialink/uf...

A very Strength In Numbers-coded article today: It looks like Republican Supreme Court justices made a very rudimentary, but willful, statistical error in their effective invalidating of the VRA in the Callais decision. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-05-08...

You do not hate the DOGE people enough. Boys with toys breaking things they were too arrogant and lazy to understand.

New memoir coming from @levarburton.bsky.social in November!! 👀 I already put in a preorder! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/769414...

Local nerd disappointed he didn’t get the long form census

Heroes in a race against darkness www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

A detail I didn’t know: “The Herald entered the Epstein series for a Pulitzer Prize that year, but it was not a finalist. Alan Dershowitz … who helped broker Epstein’s original deal, wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that year, urging them not to honor Brown’s work.” share.inquirer.com/THMiUZ

NEW: Schwab's donor-advised fund operation has cut off donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center, just like Fidelity and Vanguard did. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/b...

Strong oped that adds to my thinking on the mechanisms necessary for achieving a new Reconstruction generally and in higher ed particularly Gift link www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/o...

"He was more than a hero. He was a union man." - Miles O'Brien #MayDay

happy may day! every right you have as a worker was written in blood ❤️

I do frequently wonder what the average citizen of the U.S. knows about Reconstruction. As Du Bois would later point out, the backlash of lost cause propaganda didn’t just create mass disinformation about the civil war itself, but about the opening for actual democracy that briefly came after it.

To understand what the Supreme Court is doing, you have to recognize that this is how authoritarians in Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela consolidated power. Scholars call it autocratic legalism. The Court isn’t complicit. It’s an active participant. Roberts is following a script.

Re the Voting Rights Act: I've used this graph a lot to illustrate how the VRA largely ended the historic pattern of blocking and burdening Black voters in the south. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

"The dean of the graduate school has told faculty members not to share the memo [explaining the new rules] with prospective students and to limit talking about it with them, according to an email obtained by The Chronicle." Everybody seems very proud of the decisions they've been making

When people talk about self-censorship, they often focus on campus events or classroom discussions. But self-censorship of research is different and more impt. Big difference btw "I don't want to offend others" to "I don't want to speak truth to power" www.chronicle.com/article/near...

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

"We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite!"

Sigh, terrible that I don't even need sourcing, I know this quote so well. The cite for this is in the alt but you can also learn about it's context here. theintercept.com/2022/08/25/s...

Most striking to me about these memos is the radically different assessment of the harm imposed by the president not being able to pursue his initiatives. Over the last 15 mos., that harm has in numerous cases been treated as almost per se serious and irreparable. Here, it gets no analysis at all.

This is such a good idea. We should do this in NYC. "All Chicago Public Schools students now have access to nearly everything the city’s libraries have to offer — including physical items like books as well as extensive digital resources." blockclubchicago.org/2026/04/08/c...

So I need to stop a panic attack, then call my reps to beg someone to stop him, then do my job answering emails and collecting data. Do I have that right?

“I will NOT sacrifice the Oxford comma. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They assimilate the em dash and we fall back. They capture ‘not just X but y’ and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!”

lol okay now what would you do if you were a senator

In a rare move, Bruce Springsteen authorized the ACLU to use the iconic anthem ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ in support of our Supreme Court case challenging President Trump’s attempts to end birthright citizenship.

Clearly, he's not a student of history. Because if he was, he'd know that the one time the federal government did "take care of daycare," they did it *because of a war* and used defense funding to pay for it. 1/🧵

A lot of SCOTUS decisions are dumb, badly reasoned, even dangerous, but merit compliance out of respect for the rule of law and the Court's position under Article III. A decision denying birthright citizenship is a challenge to the constitutional order and should be understood as such.

in 2016 a group of strangers in Kazakhstan saved a dog from drowning by forming a human chain to reach him. they just unveiled a statue commemorating the event and I'm genuinely about to start sobbing

Your cats don't have to roam to be happy, but you can give them safe outdoor access (if they enjoy it) with a catio, harness walking or even a pet stroller!

This is how disciplines die. Now that Sociology courses don't count for GenEd credit, far fewer students will take them, let alone choose Sociology as a major. And so, Sociology department budgets will shrink, meaning fewer faculty and fewer courses offered. www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...

Donald Trump called mail-in voting “mail-in cheating” on Monday. That same day, news broke that he just voted by mail in a Florida special election.

Cartoon by @dennisgoris.bsky.social