I forgot to get a lemon at the store for a recipe, and my husband was like, “why would you buy a lemon, they’re literally growing on a tree in the yard?”. And my Ohio-born ass needs to remember that every time I complain about the rent 🤣

Respectfully, this dude has no business teaching. Imagine doing a Ph.D., publishing dozens of articles, and teaching for years, to come out believing that a chatbot has more value than you. Parents at graduation thanked me for caring about and inspiring their kids. Claude could never.

Looking for a progressive voter guide in LA? You could do worse than The Knock’s, though I recommend cross checking with @calmatters.org very informative guide. My main complaint is that I’m just not gonna vote for an unqualified billionaire with no relevant experience knock-la.com/knock-la-pro...

I heard this episode in the @99pi.org feed, and now can't stop listening to the season. Turns out there were people arguing for the right to have hookworms 100 years ago, under the guise of "medical freedom". Grift as old as time, disasterous for public health always www.drugstory.co/p/on-ivermec...

Personally, if people kept trying to assassinate me, I might consider the impact of my choices. But that’s just me 🤷🏽‍♀️

Like I buy that non-consumer-facing "A.i." has limited positive uses in science and social media content moderation. But I haven't seen any use of consumer-facing "A.i." that wouldn't be better served just by paying humans a living wage to do. 🤷

Thank you for your service, unless you don’t have a penis. Where are the “support our troops” folks now?

Go Bears! So proud to work at the best public university in the country, where people give a damn about whether law students actually learn to do the job.

The ads now explicitly say you have to outperform the plagiarism machines in order to deserve a job. Further down, there’s another ad that says “We find out what AI can’t do, then we teach it”. You have to be better than the system so you can teach it to replace you. Dystopian nightmare mask off

When I was at Ohio State, we had an escaped cow situation on campus. I am begging these people to remember that places like Stanford are very weird and in no way representative of the average student experience.

"Black people will not have outcomes on par with their non-Black counterparts when they are enduring chronic stress just to exist...And so I don’t see a solution to this problem without actually confronting the fact that racism is incompatible with life and health". news.berkeley.edu/2026/05/18/f...

“My read is that the vibecession was likely magnified in cultural discourse because it was felt most intensely among the higher-income households”. This is the part that always bothered me….the “messenger class” complaints were too often about DoorDash and concert tickets. Not exactly sympathetic.

I was making sure seniors who had worked their asses off through college still had a chance to graduate, and that freshmen who had spent their whole lives trying to get in still learned something. Honestly fuck this dude…teachers and professors moved mountains with absolutely no help from his people

Berkeley won’t even let me use ANONYMIZED voice data from adult participants that *could* be used to train an AI model without jumping through a million hoops. What is going on at Washington and why didn’t anyone’s IRB flag the hell out of this?

This should be the only message of every single campaign ad for the next 2.5 years.

Taps sign: AI PRETENDING TO DO SOCIOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL THINGS REPRESENTS A FUNDAMENTAL DANGER TO HUMANS. People will be manipulated. People will be blackmailed. People are going to die.

On Rooster, Katie was hired as a “Full Professor”, but then convinced the dean she was a perfect candidate for tenure, which would be a 5-year process. But then the president told her it could be a 1-year process because of nepotism That’s not how any of this works! No wonder no one gets academia!

I am no longer “Acting” as an Associate Professor. As of July 1, I’m a real Associate Professor at Berkeley. That’s right, folks…it’s Tenure 2, 2 Fast 2 Furious 😆

In #ASA session about creaky voice, & more and more I think there was basically a conspiracy against “vocal fry”. People didn’t hate it until they were told to hate it, because it was a “young woman thing”. But younger people don’t really have that association, so they don’t evaluate it negatively.

The first three people I interacted with after landing in Philly each called me “baby” or “sweetie”, and I just desperately miss affectionate vocatives when I’m in California!

Out today in Phonetica (pre-print), a paper by a bunch of brilliant Berkeley grad students that I had the pleasure of working with... "Identity and personality in the social perception of synthesized voices: perceptions of OpenAI’s text-to-speech technology". www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

And even if we were to just give tech all the data, there's nothing in the technology or the implementation that would guarantee improved functionality at all. In fact, given the systemic issue with the environment of the data, I would say that we'd end up with MAGNIFIED issues.

And at the time, most white people called them terrorists and demanded that they be executed or imprisoned forever. Just something to remember.

No one should ever use this b.s., especially not in the social sciences. The fact that we’re constantly inundated by this stuff is atrocious for the future of research.

“AI Literacy” and “Ethical AI” are marketing slogans serving as Trojan horses for the colonization and ultimate ransacking of the education sector.

There are many stereotypes abt Black ppl. Most of them negative. But the ultimate truth about our legacy is simple. The legacy of the African American is that we won rights for every demographic. Every domino that fell, it began with Black liberation struggles. Freedom of movement? We gave you that.

I don’t wanna brag about the fact that I never rely on Canvas for anything important, but my students turned in a paper on Monday, and that shit was Google Docs, which I downloaded immediately. Between surveillance and enshittification, I’m 4-5 seconds from going fully analog for everything.

It is literally the flag of enemies of the nation, and should have never ever been allowed to fly again after the Civil War. Burn every single one of them and remind those traitors what happened to them the last time they enslaved fellow citizens.

*Cries in “I’d like to take a year to write a book but I’m scared of what happens if I don’t publish 4 articles instead” * I’m so productive that the transition to working on “mid career” big projects is terrifying.

My homies and I talked to NPR about rhotics! www.npr.org/2026/05/06/n...

Oh hey, I'm featured in Berkeley News :) "My linguistic research has always come back to one question: “When we hear speech, what properties do we attune to that enable us to make social judgments about each other?”. news.berkeley.edu/2026/04/29/w...

In discussing Clarence Thomas' confirmation, Crenshaw says he won the moment he described the hearings as a "high tech lynching". But this part took my breath away: "Like when has anyone ever been lynched for anything that was done to a black woman by anyone?" slate.com/podcasts/wha...

This is bad, real bad, Michael Jackson. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/t...

The post-Civil War era represented an opening to address this country’s racist origins, and for a while, we actually did. We had Black Congressmen in 1870! But they were all gone by 1901. The election of Obama was a parallel moment, so now we’re in a parallel backlash. White supremacy never stops.

I talked to NBC News about 8647, but the tl;dr is that it just means "get rid of", with no implication of violence! www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

Happy Intertextual Meme Day!

I had a little extra time at the end of my last sociophonetics class today, so I did a little AMA with the students. Bad news: I found out that none of them had ever heard of Bluesky 😆 Good news: They insisted on a class selfie 😍 I'm gonna miss them so much!

The brilliant @annehelen.bsky.social has a great newsletter series “Big No Kids Energy” and today it features a powerful interview with Chef Min Lao. “There are vastly different mile markers and wish lists for adult life, and none of it has to be tidy and linear”. www.patreon.com/posts/big-no...

Interested to see discussions on race re: Cole Allen. I knew he was biracial from the 1st photo, but he mentioned it in the manifesto (to counter arguments that PoC shouldn’t be the ones fighting) There will be standard antiblackness but we’ll also see discussions of him not being “really black” 😑

Commenting because there’s an interesting cultural difference here. I don’t think there’s a single film I’ve seen 6 times, and I’ve never seen a Star Trek, LOTR, or Ghibli movie. The Marvels and Disneys I’ve seen have mostly been against my will, except Black Panther.

This is gonna be so great for the state of California, I’m sure. Regardless of who this person was, whether he did anything illegal, or his ideology, all 40 million of us are gonna be punished for it.

I feel bad for the waiters and the hotel employees only. The rest of them are just calming eating their salads like absolutely nothing happened. Meanwhile, the workers are making very little money serving some of the worst people on the planet, and risking their lives to boot.

This is such a flagship moment for where America is right now. Gun violence, showmanship, celebrity, mass confusion, and also according to C-SPAN, people are opening the bottles of wine still on the tables.

Silver lining: the more we see him, the likelier it is that we’ll all get to watch live when It Happens™️ 🤷🏽‍♀️ www.yahoo.com/news/article...

I drive a Chevy Bolt and the only thing that would ever make me want an SUV is the fact that trucks and SUVs are constantly trying to run over my little car. But I’m not about to buy one and be part of the problem because WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY. And because sometimes I have to parallel park.

NOPE NOPE NOPE. Healthcare discrimination is rampant, and there is no way that I would want an unknown company to have sensitive information about me that they could sell to the government or highest bidder. As always, the researchers have a much more thorough discussion of this via the link.

“Two or more races” is the demographer’s version of “mixed with what?”: it doesn’t actually provide useful information about exactly how people identify, which becomes even more challenging with a massive dataset like the Census" Me in 2019, for Dictionary.com www.dictionary.com/articles/whe...

I have taken the same flight, BUR-OAK every Monday and Wednesday during this semester, and I almost always walk into the airport as they announce the flight is boarding. I’m not waiting around in Burbank at 6:30am for no reason other than anxiety!

Very, very important work about our perception of what “everyone” thinks is skewed by very few people online.

I would’ve died from cancer and been broke from the reconstruction without rules saying insurance had to cover it. Actually, I would’ve died from asthma as a child without insurance covering my $500/month inhalers. These dudes as the definition of ungrateful and short-sighted.