A Trader Joe's employee cat toy has got to be a sick joke. I can only imagine the conversation going one way: —Hey Miss Kitty! Any fun plans this weekend? —DISEMBOWELING YOU?

may have finally cracked the key to getting boomer parents to not talk during a movie — watch The Substance and they won't even know what to say

Not to be dystopian but as far as I can see, the plan for those with power/money is: cut everyone else’s budget so they can eat more caviar until all the caviar is gone bc they killed the ocean, while the circle of ppl who can afford it shrinks, each of them thinking they’ll be the last man standing

i really think there is legit political space for running on "we are going to dismantle ICE"

this cat is everything

gals, gays, and theys, what are we supposed to talk to family about over the holidays when they've never heard of Rosalía or Heated Rivalry?

I spent some 15 years arguing against the post-9/11 expansion of surveillance authorities. I was routinely told I was paranoid because robust layers of checks guaranteed the political abuses of the Hoover era could never happen again.

Syd is definitely the one in charge now

"As the university trades its teaching mission for “AI-tech integration,” it doesn’t just risk irrelevance—it risks becoming mechanically soulless. Genuine intellectual struggle has become too expensive of a value proposition."

Not sure if any single part of academia felt more like a weird cheat code than Interlibrary Loan. Like, I just say a book I want, basically any book, and this crack team of experts just *get it*????

i'm not sure if my kitten's aversion to Rosalía makes her an insufferable atheist or a stubborn catholic

An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.

And I swear, once again, this is not dunking on kids. We are seeing this at all levels--even grad students. AI + social media has had a profound impact on how we think and process our world, and we can't stop to reflect on it, because billionaires keep hurling addictive tech at us.

cannot process the level of cuteness that is this kitten

god grant me the the strength to survive the onslaught of AI-generated content that my boomer parents are sending me on a daily basis

Why Marjorie Taylor Greene should be the next president of Harvard.

just about everything is awful but two months ago I adopted this kitten who has recovered from a near-death experience before being saved by the person from whom I adopted her and now she's living her best life and is everything to me

I clicked and they’re looking for humanities professors to evaluate AI outputs—so if you need a side hustle or just, you know, a day job when your uni closes your department, there’s always AI quality control, at least til they don’t need us for that either

Whether it’s Barack Obama, appearing in a tan suit or Donald Trump appearing 1700 times in Jeffrey Epstein‘s emails, both presidents made some highly controversial appearances.

seems to me that those democrats inclined not to fight perceive themselves as living through a somewhat ordinary cycle of presidential overreach and backlash and not something much more significant and dangerous

Do people know that politicians get paid to do politics? That politics is actually their JOB?

For the love of God stop calling capitalism “Technofeudalism.” This is not a mutant regression off the track of benign capitalism’s progress to utopia. This is capitalism doing capitalism.

Polls show that only 33% of Americans blame Democrats for the shutdown. But at this Atlantic staff Zoom meeting, that percentage feels much higher.

The average age of U.S. homebuyers is now 56, up from 49 last year. In 1981, the year trickledown economics began, it was 31.

Happy official publication day to Close Reading for the Twenty- First Century

if i had the opportunity to ask a question of anyone in the administration, given this "war in chicago" messaging, i would ask them how many americans the president intends to kill in his war

William Maxwell, superintendant of NY public schools in 1913 being a BOSS.

It isn't until the 26th paragraph that there is mention that what Trump is doing is being challenged as illegal. And it accepts Trump's stated rationale to act. Here is what I think: Trump is illegally deploying the military in blue cities to set the stage to interfere with the 2026 elections.

The crux of their argument is that if they're found liable, then the consequences of their own actions that no one forced them to take could ruin them and the rest of their industry that undertakes similar practices. To which I say motherfucker did you never hear about Napster

Anyway I came on here to BEG academics to stop using AI in their journal submissions. Yes, that includes for proofing, arranging reference lists etc. I am currently staring at a perfectly decent article, written by a human being, with a useless AI-generated bibliography full of errors.

If you read only one thing today please make it this, by the great Vanita Gupta You May Not Be Trump’s Target This Time. But You Could Be Next www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/o...

Israel is not "throttling food supply" It is STARVING PEOPLE AS PART OF ONGOING GENOCIDE.

Thinking too about how right-wing authors are always “best sellers” because some rich dude or think tank just buys thousands of copies on release to sit in a warehouse

Iran did not have a nuclear weapon. Iran did not have a nuclear weapon. Iran did not have a nuclear weapon. Iran did not have a nuclear weapon. Iran did not have a nuclear weapon. Iran did not have a nuclear weapon. Iran did not have a nuclear weapon. Iran did not have a nuclear weapon.

I talked to 15 teachers/professors about how AI and ChatGPT is ruining their lives: www.404media.co/teachers-are...

my takeaway from this feature is that in a functioning political system there would be televised congressional hearings over the fact that one of the most influential people in the white house is a total maniac www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Until recently I hadn't read "Scapegoat," a book that is never mentioned in the now 6-year-long Dworkin revival going on (even though it seems in many ways to be her magnum opus). It's the book where Dworkin finally says what she thinks women should do. The answer she comes up with may surprise you.

This is really the perfect use of generative AI: to create a report whose purpose is solely to exist as A Report, which no one is supposed to read because no one involved in its creation even pretends to have the slightest genuine interest in the actual facts at issue.

reputable medical journals keep saying that RFK and his pro-disease friends are full of shit and so naturally they must be shunned www.politico.com/news/2025/05...

“Preserving art, literature, and philosophy will require no less than the creation of an environment totally and uncompromisingly committed to abolishing the linguistic alienation created by AI and reintroducing students to the indispensability of their own voice.“

"History will say..." No. People are dying now. Listen to us now. Do something now.

Enjoying Peter Szendy's latest: “[…] read whatever happens, read for the sake of reading, read no matter what you read, despite what you read, even if, or precisely because, it is unreadable.”

Ocean Vuong tells us that the novel, is in fact, a bottom that contains multitudes.

The AI slop summer book preview/supplement in the Chicago Sun-Times is about what's happened in media more than what's happening with AI. This Slate piece gets it and I have some thoughts from the perspective of someone who writes about books for a major Chicago newspaper. slate.com/technology/2...

it's a cold and rainy evening in Wisconsin but my neighbors are setting off fireworks. are we celebrating the death of habeas corpus? the dawn of fascism? or just cheese curds?

At my university, a provost said that they didn't like having English department people on committees because we were constantly asking about context, comfortable with ambiguity, and generally able to point out flaws in logic.

The more people you force through already-overstuffed "business-friendly" degrees, the more unemployable a lot of them will become.