Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

This a million times forever

News you can use!!

In case anyone was wondering how it’s going over on American Girl doll Instagram

It is genuinely insane to watch capital decide that allowing this shit to go on is better for them than having to allow the FTC to do mild monopoly investigations and require cancellation buttons on websites.

Someday corporations and technology companies will pretend they were always against this

Wow, sure would be pretty crazy if a ton of experts in the artificial intelligence field relentlessly warned everyone about this state of affairs being inevitable over and over for years.

boy that gyre sure keeps getting wider

I'm at the combination

A friend who teaches theology shared with me a post about CS Lewis's Mere Christianity, which discusses foundational Christian logic across denominations. It reminded me of Dale's tweet below, and I wanted to share some thoughts here regarding modesty and respectability, which are often hot topics.

Kids! They give the worst course evals!

Week thirteen of the semester, every time

I just kind of think all these people should, after a fair trial in which they are zealously represented before a jury of their peers, be eaten

Voters want a Democratic Party that fights back against the forces that have rigged the system and made their lives more difficult. A party that comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable —not a party that buckles and capitulates. When will party leadership learn this lesson?

Once again, @mcsweeneys.net does not miss. ------------------------------------------------ "In 2004, you saw some college guy using me and thought, 'What a lazy cheater.' Now you’d think, 'At least he’s not asking Gemini.' In a few years, you’ll say, 'Wow, look, a human being who can read.'"

"One of them told her he had consulted ChatGPT to find tide times before deeming it safe to venture out to the island early on Wednesday. He said: “I made the mistake of using ChatGPT for research to see when the low tide was" The death toll from this tech is only going to rise

A terrific AFP fact check uses reverse image searches to expose how a White House video took scenes from Florida, Texas, South Carolina and Nebraska and lied that they showed "Chicago is in chaos." factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com....

Some teachers are using AI to grade and few are talking about it. Scantrons are one thing, but automating grading, feedback, and assessing written work with AI poses massive ethical challenges and should not become the default or go to choice in education. 👇 in comments

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“The Onion stands at the ready to act as a mouthpiece of the world’s elite, using its distinguished reportage to parrot whatever the party line happens to be. Genocide, eugenics, incest—no topic is too taboo to find support in our paper so long as it has been approved by a trustworthy establishment”

This is the playbook, folks. If you're not paying attention now and doing something about it, then you're going to have to sit down the rest of your life because democracy is being taken away. Do not be quiet in this moment.

Freaking the fuck out every day is fun, huh?

I hate it here.

If you say 'heteronormative' or 'unhoused person' or 'food insecurity' you're basically talking gibberish and nobody can understand you but if you say you can see inflammation in children at the airport and that vaccines lower IQ or that germs are a myth you get to fire all the scientists.

Peterloo Massacre happened #OTD 1819, estimated 15-18 people killed. Came during turbulent period of explosive population growth, food shortages caused by climatic disruption after a volcano erupted in Indonesia, aftermath of war, stresses of urbanisation and industrialisation.

As always, Ted Chiang is great in this interview. cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

Someone finally wrote the data-center/electricity inflation story. @nytimes.com #CPI www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/b...

Evergreen

i’m not seeing here in the constitution where it says every single day must be insane

TIMELINE: ok i hear what you're saying. but what if things got dumber

"The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power." Students Want the Liberal Arts. Administrators, Not So Much. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/o...

Thinking a lot lately about how we have for some time treated the reading of books as a means to an end in school rather than the books themselves as a worthwhile end. Lots of complicated thoughts on this but it's definitely something I've been wrestling with.

What’s true for Putin’s Russia is equally true for Trump’s Amerika.

NYC Comptroller Brad Lander: "I don't think the line for the [Democratic] party right now is between progressives and moderates; I think it's between fighters and folders."

Yes, this the problem, especially since this gendered dynamic is hard to change

hell yeah

💔

This is everywhere. Every academic institution I know is held together by some exhausted woman in her early 40's who waits until the old white male professors have finished their vague rants and says, "alright, so concretely can I propose the following next steps..." She makes half their salary.

When Americans raised concerns about RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine views, he said he was "not gonna take away vaccines from anybody." But now he's taking them away from millions of mommas and babies. Vaccine recommendations should be based on science, not RFK Jr.'s political agenda.

Fed Chair Powell graduation remarks to Princeton nod toward our current predicament: "Look around you. I urge you to take none of this for granted. When you look back in 50 years, you will want to know that you have done whatever it takes to preserve and strengthen our democracy."

The fact that we are debating things like 'is preventative dental care good' is a truly dismal state of affairs.

"Everybody who uses AI is going to get exponentially stupider, and the stupider they get, the more they’ll need to use AI to be able to do stuff that they were previously able to do with their minds" gizmodo.com/its-breathta...

Oh, you're a people pleaser? Then name 3 people who are pleased with you

At one of the talks I was giving to college faculty last week I mused off the top of my head that the first handful of institutions that pivot AWAY from AI and promise a human/bespoke experience in their marketing will have a positioning advantage. Not everyone is looking for the AI-forward place.