I have consistently made $200-400 each year on average in class action settlements for at least the last 8 years or so. is this a common experience? it just takes a few minutes of filling out forms online per settlement... it's wild

death by a thousand small apocalypses

pretty hard to feel good about your LA public school kid having Cesar Chavez Day off on a NORMAL new cycle...

what's more neuroatypical: * watching ASMR videos, or * watching ASMR videos with the sound off because it's too much

Every time

Jesus Christ, this is terrifying

finally got so exhausted I accidentally said "meat flaps" instead of "vocal chords" in office hours today. gonna just fire myself I guess

losing an hour on International Women’s Day feels right

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

women FTW "Instead of Googling Epstein, Aaronson, then 29, turned to what he considered an even more reliable source: his mother. She did some checking. “Be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here,” she wrote back"

OCD 6yo organizing the liquor cabinet at 7am, referring to the Bacardi as "bat juice"

my kids say "yeet" instead of "throw" almost exclusively now and it brings such unexpected joy into my life

How to delete your cɦɑtgpt account. If you try via settings on the website (and you have a free account), it won’t let you (keeps it locked). privacy.openai.com/policies/en/

gonna be a reckoning soon between semanticists who care most about language and those who care most about logic I am sick of trying to convince people in my own profession that a semantic theory is responsible for empirical predictions about adjacent phenomena or languages

just teetered over the apex in my career where more meetings are organized for me than not; as privileged as that position is, my calendar is now full of meetings named "Meeting with Prof Fars" and I have lost all bearings

Wow: AI as faculty union bargaining issue

couldn't be more impressed with UC faculty for implementing this project to help employees move their retirement investments out from not just weapons manufacturers but inequity-promoting tech companies like Palantir. if you're a UC employee, take advantage ASAP! ucmoveyourmoney.org

dedicating this paper to all the students who stayed away from office hours this quarter

Wesleyan University President Michael Roth, a leader in organizing college presidents, has proposed Democracy Summer 2026, evoking the heroic Freedom Summer of 1964 that aimed to advance voting rights in Mississippi, now employed to safeguard the midterm elections. From Bob Kuttner:

search all of Epstein's emails here: jmail.world Chomsky and his wife exchanged 4,431 emails with Epstein, one of the highest rates of his celebrity acquaintances (more than Bannon!)

suck it haters (this includes UCLA admin and regents)

it seems impossible to defend the claim that, if you're a bastard in your personal life, you're necessarily a bastard in your professional life, and vice versa. but surely we can agree there's a correlation, and that learning about one should prompt us to critically evaluate the other

“That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder." -- Noam Chomsky www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

"should the government kidnap 5 year olds and deport them? We asked seventeen ethics professors and they all just screamed"

linguists it's true, I hate fucking wugs, can this be our mascot instead?

just woke up from a stress dream where I was lecturing with a microphone and then a student gave me a popsicle so I had to try to do both

my students and I are trying to figure out the meaning of "slash," as in "I'm an actor slash writer", contrast "and" "or" and "and-or" we've worked that, in a context in which A & B are holding their office hours together: I'm going to A { and / *or / slash / *and-or } B's office hours 🐦🐦🐦

speech acts are paralinguistic, by definition! I am now assigning semantics papers within this broken genre (including one of my own) by asking students, "If you were to receive an electric shock every time you said the phrase 'speech act,' how would you describe this phenomenon instead?"

I had a colleague whose grant was cancelled because it had the phrase "linguistic diversity" in the title, so Palantir is dumb as a rock in addition to being evil

my students tell me that, sometime between my generation and theirs, the marked context has changed from "/s" to "/gen" (its opposite, /genuine) and I think that means we are in the Nihilism Era

absolutely uncanny we decided to pivot from email to text just as we pivoted from hyperlinks to QR codes so now every fucking kids party invite comes to me via text as a flyer with an embedded QR for the gift list that I have to screen shot and email to myself so I can use my phone to get the link

oh my fucking God I need this so bad

Harper's Letter folks are being kind of shy lately about free speech issues. Maybe they are writing an extra long letter this time.

10yo starts giggling because to him it's obvious if you want to spell the tongue depresser sound it's "AA" or perhaps "AAH" but "AHH" is clearly the being chased by zombies noise 🐦🐦🐦

UPDATE: the fun people are three hours late

for NYE plans we had to choose between fun, flaky people and less fun people who can be trusted to show up relatively on time and prepare appropriately for the event and I'm begging us as a society to push back harder against the apparent fun / responsible dichotomy

6yo asked me why churches all have big lowercase ts on them when 'church' doesn't start with T and my answer has rattled him to his core. weird how much crazy-ass shit religion has us normalize

niche linguistic content but after over 20 years I have the trickiest time in Australia with their French loan words (e.g. fête --> [fait]), especially with the word-initial stress, e.g. in croissant 🐦🐦🐦

This quote is from a piece that’s 8 years old now.

Because it'll probably get cut, I wanted to post this footnote here for posterity

Things are going great over at X, The Everything App

just so. fucking. validating. for this woman's kid, good for her

my French is chugging along nicely because I refuse to think about the numbers

I've realized, after talking to a bunch of philosophers, that I have a strong but suss take on AI: * philosophers who conclude AI is sentient are using a niche, technical definition of sentience * laypeople who think AI is sentient are confused about what AI is

everyone is outraged about this except the UC administration ("That's fine! We get it!")

Kudos to the Brown University students who are posting continuous live updates, spaced just minutes apart, on the campus shooting. A lot of grace and professionalism under immense pressure. www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

Shrooms 2 just dropped

Well, there's a photo I never expected to see in my life. Noam Chomsky palling around with Steve Bannon.

packing for Australia, bracing ourselves as always for an abrupt and painful bagel detox