Let this be the moment that catalyzes the movement, it’s so long overdue. George Floyd and Renee Nicole Good both deserved so much better than what this country gave them. We all do.

Today I described someone as “wise usually, but it also kinda feels like they want to sell you supplements”, and I feel like we need a more concise way to describe this type of very common person 😆

The American Dialect Society chose it as our word of the year in 2023! Shit is not new!

Despicable and cruel. Also, there’s zero evidence of fraud in CA, NY, IL, or NY. He picked the states that hate him the most and decided to literally starve our children by stealing money that WE SENT TO THEM.

I was trapped in my home in DC on 1/6/21, afraid that armed traitors were going to burn down our city. Our collective failure to hold any of them, including Trump, accountable for sedition, is currently threatening to burn down the entire country.

Today, the woman doing my hair told me she uses ChatGPT for literally everything. She also told me she knows her 6 year old sees her using it and doesn’t want her to do the same for everything. When will people care about kids more than a system that rewrites their *texts* for them?

This country was literally built by slaves…people kidnapped from their homelands to make the U.S. rich. In all his xenophobia and racism, he never addresses that fact because it’s an inconvenience to his narrative. And because he quite literally believes that non-white people are not humans.

I stg, this man and his cronies are trying to start World War III, because they think they'll just get richer and everyone they don't like will die. They don't understand that war doesn't work like that. And yet 50% of the country still supports him because of hate and misinformation.

If you’re a person that celebrates Epiphany, remember that the magi engaged in righteous civil disobedience when they took another road home and didn’t snitch to Herod. The lesson is that the right thing is often the opposite of what elected leaders want you to do.

Trump says they're going to make a "lot of money" from Venezuela's oil, oil companies say that's not possible, Rubio says they're not doing regime change and is now in charge of the government but there's still a Venezuelan government in place, they said it's about fentanyl but no charges mention it

This stunt is going to get thousands of people killed and destabilize the entire western hemisphere, all because Trump, once again, cannot get over the fact that a black guy was president once. It’s always greed, hate, incompetence, and racial resentment all the way down.

The human rights violations on our own soil and the extrajudicial killings in the water were bad enough. But the actual kidnap of Maduro and murder of Venezuelans there is a full scale declaration of war. So many more people are going to die for decades because of his narcissism and stupidity.

“Everyday above ground is a great day, remember that” -Pitbull The greatest poet of our time!

A student wrote that told my “shoe game is 🔥” and that I’m the “drippiest professor at Berkeley”. It wasn’t exactly unhinged, I just like to bring it up whenever anyone asks about compliments because it was my favorite non-pedagogical comment ever 🥹

There’s a bottle of champagne in my fridge that I considered bringing to an NYE party tonight. But then my husband reminded me that we’re chilling that bottle for when IT HAPPENS. So here’s to hoping we get to drink that one in 2026!

All of America watched the LAPD try to beat Rodney King to death in 1991. When they invoke the good old days, they purposely never mention that those days were pretty bad for everyone who wasn’t a rich white dude.

If you take a domestic flight in the US, you might see threatening signs trying to bribe you to “self-deport”. Only in Spanish, so you know who they’re targeting. Horrifying and anti-American. Meanwhile, every single business we passed near the airport, including the TSA itself, was hiring.

On Tuesday, I sat next to a guy on a flight to Watertown, SD. Today, I went to one of two breweries in town, and ran into the same dude. Small towns are like a different universe, but I do think there’s something so nice and human about knowing that anyone you see is someone you will see again.

There is a special place in hell for a person who thinks it’s a joke to attack a sovereign nation, in the name of religion, on a day where Christians are supposed to be celebrating a miracle that saved all of humanity. There is no humanity in that man or any of his enablers.

If anyone happens to be flying Delta over the holidays and would like a free drink voucher, let me know and I’ll send you one. I got that good status but I never need the drink coupons!

The academic job market is 75% qualifications, 5% not being an asshole, and 20% blind luck. Even in the “wokest” fields in the 2010s, there were plenty of white dudes getting jobs because they were excellent, or because they weren’t but still got the benefit of the doubt of being the most qualified.

Received a paper rejection because I didn’t use a “balanced sample” (they wanted 100 white monolinguals). I’m never submitting anything to a journal that might get reviewed by non-sociolinguists again. We study real people who are harmed by bias, and I’m not apologizing for including black people.

The folks in this Discord just wanted to chat about games with online friends, and an AI fanatic (who also makes a ton of $$$ from Claude) hijacked their space because he’s entirely incapable of telling the difference between real humans and his little chatbot. These people are so dangerous.

Another school shooting. Another mass casualty hate crime. Another atrocious family murder. It’s the guns. And the hate.

No student or faculty member should ever have to worry about being shot on their campus. It is an impossible moment to be in higher education, and the ways in which all of us are targeted from all sides are just more and more overwhelming. Praying for my friends and colleagues at Brown.

FWIW, this nuance around the Bob Cratchit discourse is exactly why we can’t let “AI” replace expertise. Chat GPT could do the math that arrives at the original claim “we’re all poorer than Cratchit now”, but it takes an expert historian to contextualize class, wages, and buying power holistically.

Kaiser Permanente gave me surgery, reconstruction, chemo, & radiation for $300. They’re also the largest provider for MediCal, and I would’ve gotten the same treatment if I were destitute. The main difference is my provider and insurance company were on the same team. GTFO with these scare tactics.

I thought technology that punishes workers for “talking wrong” was the most anti-worker use of AI, but then they went and reinvented phrenology. Every one of these things is an excuse to impose a “scientific” racist hierarchy that lets companies hide behind “the data” while trampling on our rights.

If your technology is actually helpful for people, you don’t have to beat them into submission to get them to use it. I’m looking at you, all of higher education 👀

There would be almost no linguists if college was just vocational and everyone was locked into a major at age 18, because our field has a PR problem. And more linguists in the world is an unequivocal good, so we have to give students time and space to explore.

ICE should be prosecuted for attempted murder, of this citizen and of every other person whose life they have endangered.

Self-hate is an important part of any creative process, but it doesn't work if there's no self to hate!

Please, please explain academic ranks and roles to your students at every chance you get. I have seen so many applications from students who want to work with emeritus faculty, and it's very sad that they wasted their time. But also, they need to understand who has power in these systems!

Picking anyone up at LAX is a heroic move, but my husband surprising me by coming to get me at 10:30pm reinforces my belief that I must’ve done something great in a previous life to end up with him. @bjhat.bsky.social, none of us deserve you ❤️

Do you know Zoom & other companies are encouraging discrimination against employees for things like "pausing too long" or not sounding sufficiently "charismatic"? Read all about our dystopian present in my new paper, out today in JASA! (Seriously, read it. It's important) doi.org/10.1121/10.0...

Imagine if universities could prioritize education instead of pretending like they’re football teams who occasionally offer classes.

What’s the worst question someone can ask after you tell them your profession? For linguists, it’s definitely “how many languages do you speak?”, but I’m curious what else is happening to the rest of y’all out there?!

Excellent thread on how bots decontextualize information, and why that’s especially a problem for students. Being 90% right 90% of the time is a mess if you can’t ever trace the 10%.

“When a topic is banned, we lose the ability to reason critically about it…If you don’t know what the best arguments are on the other side and how you would reply to them, you don’t really understand your opinions”. www.dallasnews.com/opinion/comm...

“When teachers value the polished but anodyne text extruded from these systems over students’ authentic voices, we reinforce harmful linguistic ideologies”- @emilymbender.bsky.social www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

BINGO. This is why I’m not in the business of teaching “AI literacy”. “How do I assign students an AI-generated essay for assessment if they don’t have the basic knowledge to parse said essay? I can’t and I won’t.” www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/set-tr...

When students say they’ll never need to learn to do stuff without LLMs, I often remind them that they could lose their job and be publicly disgraced in the New York Times. Not to mention the part where they robbed a guy of justice because they were so lazy and unethical.

Hilariously, I just had a reviewer recommend a rejection of my paper because I used an ethically and gender diverse sample, in a study that showed that an LLM was biased against women and people of color. I guess they wanted me to use a group of white men to illustrate the bias?

These symbols are violent threats. If a student came to a class with a noose, or left one in my office, we'd be on a lockdown. But Coast Guard officers are supposed to be cool with "colleagues" using these objects to torment them. This is clearly part of the resegregation campaign.

Important commentary! "The collective knowledge base has been overwritten with received wisdom, fourth-hand opinions, and counterintuitive pop social science that flatters our cleverness while sparing us the effort of understanding anything deeply". nymag.com/intelligence...

Sure, the machine gives you something that looks like thought & reason & passion. But you know it has none of those, and that it fakes it by stealing the hard work of all of humanity. Do you care so little about other people that you’re content to spend your life watching bots exchange messages?

I’m on an admissions committee and I desperately wish that we only asked for letters after the first round of cuts has happened. Because I’m also writing a cumulative 22 letters of rec for graduate admissions and fellowships this season, and I know half of those will never be read by anyone.

The casual strut of a person who DGAF about the country or any of the people in it.

Plainly racist, but also would make almost everyone I know ineligible for federal research funding ever again. If you happen to have even met someone from China, the federal government would bar you from funding for 5 years. The attacks on academia never stop. www.science.org/content/arti...

Sixty-five years ago today, four first-graders desegregated New Orleans's public schools: Ruby Bridges at William Frantz Elementary School, and Leona Tate, Tessie Provost, and Gail Etienne at McDonogh 19 Elementary School. They faced violent mobs and threats to their lives. They were 6 years old. 🗃