i keep seeing writers who want both: * to be bold iconoclasts going against the pretenses and trends of the day and * to have a perfect 5.0 review score on goodreads and like, I'm sorry. those things don't go together.

accommodations didn’t exist when i was in college in the early 00s. of course there’s a “spike.” that’s a good thing; it means we’re getting better at educating all students.

Spent four hours in the ER with my daughter (she's fine!) and overheard the patient on the other side of the little curtain -- a college student freaking out because she has midterms and can't waste time getting treated. Students, take care of yourself. I promise you, your profs will understand.

It's transphobia because it's treating any potential "trans outcome" as wildly undesirable, as if human individuals must always conform to what society desires of them.

"Gender non-conforming children continue to get the strong impression… that they’d be better off being something other than what they are.” Like: yes! True. It's impressed upon them over & over again they should better conform to their gender assigned at birth. With social consequences!

Homophobia is transphobia. Historically, bigots w/ PhDs told parents "your kid will grow up gay if we don't do conversion therapy" and, once being gay was removed from the DSM, told the same parents of the same kids "your kid will grow up trans if we don't do CT."

In the Venn diagram of "People who are against trans women" and "People who are genuinely OK with femme-presenting and -acting men", the overlap requires a microscope to see.

CIDRAP Op-Ed: The COVID vaccine myocarditis signal was real but is now resolved. ACIP's March agenda pretends otherwise. by Jake Scott, MD bit.ly/3NehbiY @cidrap.bsky.social @jakescottmd.bsky.social

if you make a bad historical analogy though, i get it's irritating when actual experts note your analogy was bad. but when I say some science fact wrong and a scientist points it out, it ain't the scientist at fault, even if sometimes they are kinda surly about it.

Lunar eclipse this morning!

The model of unpaid academic labor required good jobs with ample unstructured time.

Also as I note, similar conversations are happening in blue states right now. Because OBBB made *massive* cuts to Medicaid over the next decade, and every state is figuring out how to make that work, budget-wise.

What's scary about this story is the surveillance it hints at. This trans woman had changed her name, legally, but chose not to change her gender marker. She was apparently flagged in the DMV system as trans and her license was invalidated under a law that supposedly only concerned gender markers.

What if none of these things is a distraction from the other things and instead they're all just horrible things

I know this isn't what any abled person wants to hear, but hey, could we NOT do this weird ableist stuff? As it turns out, sick & disabled people, including the ones in wish-granting programs, are **real human beings** who are also major targets of Trump et al.

I have to say the Post chose a hell of a moment to lay off all their foreign correspondents

The Trump administration talks such a big game about wanting to support Jews on campus, but the only way for a Jewish Studies scholar to get a grant under these new guidelines is to do terrible history about how the Hebrew Bible influenced the Founding Fathers.

v cool but also v far from being shown to working in people

Humanizing includes being held accountable for human responsibilities and behavior

I know that I sound like a broken record but I think once this society was ok with accepting mass covid deaths just to be able to eat at Applebees then all bets were off.

#birds In Louisiana this week. Went Kayaking in the bayou and came along this Barred Owl.

I forgot about posting. Is it fun

Chlorine dioxide, a chemical used for disinfecting and bleaching. Pressurized pure oxygen. Raw camel milk. Under RFK Jr., the FDA has taken down a webpage warning about these and other dangerous remedies claiming to treat autism.

Does anyone know why in English, "cis" ends in /s/ but "trans" ends in /z/? I'm pretty sure the Latin sources would've been /s/ for both, so is there a reason this happened in English? #linguistics

I hope somebody loves me someday the way centrists love white male Democrats with a modicum of charisma. There are *still* people caping for Al Franken out there!

I'd be more inclined to believe that Graham Platner is merely a dumbass if he was making different kinds of "mistakes" instead of one very specific type of "mistake" over and over

"We would have lost so much if we'd driven him away" is the justification. But we lost all those girls. We lost the women they would have become. We lost the work they would have done. Why was his future work so much more valuable than theirs?

Post-cantrips D&D is like ttrpg carcinization: every setting convergently evolves into Eberron.

Honestly a more impressive move would have been covering the missed income of transgender drivers now out of a job

So many politicians posting *really important* statements about current events as images w/o alt-text. Shame on you. Alt-text makes images "readable" for those w/ vision-impairment, dyslexia, cognitive/learning disability, etc. Do these people not deserve to know your position? Do. Better.

And not to be histrionic, but the book that the article is discussing (Picky, by Helen Zoe Veit) is a classic example of survivors bias and will absolutely do damage to folks with ARFID, food aversions, and the neurodivergent.

Last night I was down a rabbit hole of why fish can't exist deeper than around 8000 meters and I realized that the deepest a fish has ever gone in the ocean and survived was in a submersible. The fish were people. All vertebrates are fish. I hope this helps with ~~the horrors~~

Tonight on D&D in order to crack a code we had to play Six Degrees of Wikipedia and as a group we needed to get from the page "Listed buildings in Lichfield" to the page Spelljammer 5e by clicking as few links as possible and somehow we managed to do it in 4 clicks?????

A new Nature Medicine study on ChatGPT Health isn't encouraging. The system under-triaged 52% of emergencies, telling folks with DKA to wait 24-48 hours. It does fine on routine stuff, but fails at clinical extremes. I'll take a deeper look 🧵 #MedSky #ChatGPTHealth

Airlines have a one-size-fits-all approach to passenger assistance, and it sucks. It also saves airlines a ton of money because they outsource the responsibility and then stop caring. A strong piece from @thatjohn.bsky.social @theupfront.media on the issue: theupfront.media/disabled-pas...

I interviewed Josh Turek, a retired Paralympian running for #IASen, about how Democrats can reconnect with working people and he voluntarily brought up ending subminimum wage labor for people with disabilities. That's never happened before. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

Good thing to remember online right now is that everyone here is very emotionally dysregulated and dealing with that by posting

I'm constantly trying (/failing) to get this point across. If you're a trained expert in a field, then it may be worthwhile to question the scientific consensus of your peers. If you're not, the scientific consensus is absolutely the best you can do and it's arbitrary foolishness to disregard it.

Summers should’ve been kicked the curb when he said: There are “innate differences” between men and women and that might explain the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. So this is loooong overdue, and frankly allowing him to step down at end of year… is more grace than he deserves

Fish & Chips is owed to three waves of refugee migration (French Huguenots and Sephardi Jews in the 16th & 17th C, and Ashkenazi Jews in the 18th). It's considered quintessentially British *now* but it might never have existed without immigration.

Looking for public domain & open license images? “Openverse is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone... [searching] 800 million images and audio tracks from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset.“ Also, attribute authorship with one click 📸

I have said this before, but eliminating programs that teach a lot of students but don’t have many majors is like a restaurant not buying flour in its grocery delivery because people aren’t ordering flour on the menu.

i’ve said this on here before, but a fun* game is asking cishet white men when was the last time they were told “no” and they had to respect it and couldn’t negotiate their way out of it, and watching what comes to mind. masking stories were still hot as of last year.

Not gonna lie, forgot I had this account for a second. I still don't know how social media works though, so mostly just a lurker.

Check in with @nolanews.bsky.social today. We have dozens of reporters working on finding out more, and our paywall is down.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that people like Jeff Landry and John Kennedy *actively hate* New Orleans. I think that’s why they feel fine with smirking and simpering and joking their ways through a press conference dealing with a mass casualty event.

In my experience working for a union, struggles over dignity and material issues were inextricable and mutually reinforcing. Hotel housekeepers had to organize and fight for the right to wear pants. Is that idpol? Or materialism? A good union knows that either way it builds the union.

It's unfair and nonsensical to demand that every person, in their everyday life and work, follow best practices for clear political messaging, just in the off chance that some national pundit will clip their work and post it out of context. We are not all public figures or spokespeople.