Academic CV pet peeve: Serious people listing edited volumes and monographs under the same category? I mean, yeah, they’re both “books,” but you only wrote one of them. Maybe I’ll start listing all the articles I referee under my list of “journal articles.”

R u still using gmail?

"A modern-day concentration camp ... People have been killed by the staff here." Irish citizen Seamus Culleton has been in ICE detention since September, despite having a valid work permit and his own business in the US.

ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps. If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight. www.ajc.com/politics/202...

“In 2020, 3% of all TB in the U.S. occurred among incarcerated people—about four times the rate you would expect based on population demographics—and 327 people were diagnosed with TB in ICE custody.” Public health scholar Katharine S. Walter on the role prisons play in fueling the spread of TB:

“Two ICE agents said that in Buffalo Culleton had signed documents agreeing to be deported. Culleton said he did not agree and that the signatures were not his. The judge noted irregularities in ICE’s court documents but sided with the agency.”

“If you are integrating yourself into the American sphere of influence, or whatever Mr. Trump’s national security apparatus calls it, you are integrating yourself into antiquity — or worse.”

The Washington Post downsized its motto. It’s now just “Darkness”

Immigrants in USA: Paid more in taxes than received in benefits every year 1994-2023. Generated ~$10.6 trillion more federal/state/local taxes than the gov spending they induced. Saved $14.5 trillion in debt over 30y period (accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt).

There are no bounds to the Islamic Republic’s evil. After massacring thousands, they beat and now plot to murder doctors for having treated the wounded

Ever wondered why separatists in both AB & QC echo MAGA these days? Straight line to far right US influence on Brexit (Cambridge Analytica/Robert Mercer/Breitbart). “The [AB] separatist party has adopted similar themes to the UK’s Brexit movement.” Bc Brexit has worked out so well for the Brits.

!! Près de 6300 travailleuses de la santé, dont beaucoup ont été recrutées à l’étranger dont en France et incitées à venir s’établir ici… , menacées désormais d’un départ forcé du Québec à cause de l’abolition du PEQ par le gouvernement Legault.

Survey of Quebec students: 1/3 of students using AI get it to write part or all of their work; same proportion use it to summarize texts they don’t read.

Some background. And that is all I will say about MG.

🤡

After dismantling many of the climate policies put in place by the previous government, Mark Carney has quietly directed his government to craft a national electricity strategy. Expect PCO clerk Michael Sabia, the former Hydro-Quebec exec, to be heavily involved.

Prime Minister Carney’s “Middle Powers” speech is about as substantial as they can get.

The most interesting thing about this article? Average sentence length: 4-5 words. Written by “language strategist” and “persuasion” teacher. The key to persuasion, apparently, is to write for 4 year olds. The fat cat sat on a mat.

“People are emboldened in part by the weakness of the regime, but also because society has been brimming with energy from both previous national protests & daily claim-making by nurses, teachers, truck drivers, farmers, pensioners, oil workers & many others. These protests don’t exist in a vacuum.”

Feels like something cracked today in the transatlantic alliance. Europeans have been swallowing their pride, bitting their tongues, and bending the knee. That strategy may have bought them time but it has now clearly failed. It also had a major cost - it has made the WH think Europe will cave. 1/

I have a bunch of reservations but they’re not nearly as important as the bottom-line things this gets right. Didn’t expect David French to put The Dual State in the pages of the NYT.

😂😂 Brazilian law allows you to reduce your sentence by reading books! Problem: Bolsonaro isn’t a bibliophile and approved reading list includes works on Indigenous rights, racism, environment, and violence of the 1964-85 dictatorship.

Texas A&M continues assault on free academic inquiry: after banning Plato passages, now cancelling ethics course (bc race and gender were to be discussed systematically)

The Islamic Republic apparently exporting its ideology and tactics further abroad

Montreal smart news

The president of a university actually defends forcing a professor to remove Plato from his course by saying, "We didn't ban ALL Plato." Um, first, no one said you did. Second... dailynous.com/2026/01/13/a...

The Islamic Republic has killed an estimated 12000-20000 of its people in just a few days.

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Texas A&M no longer a university.

Universal Language may be the most wonderful, batshit crazy love letter to any city, ever. The fact that it is specifically to Winnipeg, with inside jokes buried a mile deep (Rod Peeler bus stop ads in Persian, Revolutionary Modernist posters of Howard Pawley in Portage Place) just fills me with joy

Bahram Beyzai, director of Bashu the Little Stranger, has passed.

“Elicitory Structural Power and Agential Power” is now out in 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘌𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘗𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘺. I defend the notions of structural power as a species of “elicitory” power (which does not operate by way of one’s intentional actions) and power efficaciously wielded without causing outcomes.

We’re excited to announce the launch of Philosophical Logic at the Open Library of Humanities. This follows another mass editorial resignation at Springer Nature (open letter linked in the announcement). Read more:

Do you work at an academic publishing house? This self-paced scholarly publishing training is for you, from #CRAFT-OA. It outlines the potential to automate certain stages of editorial work, e.g.,DOI registration & the use of Google Sheets as a publishing dashboard. iblpan.gitbook.io/craft-oa_tra...

Montreal gains 15th spot in the 2025 Copenhagenize Index’s global ranking of bicycle-friendly cities, 1st in North America, and the only non-European country in the top 25.

Vietnamese food has a concept I don't often see in western cuisine - "ngán." It's translated as being bored but applies when your palate is dulled by the sameness in texture, taste. We want our food to hit different notes. A bánh mì is simultaneously soft and crunchy, spicy and cool, fatty and sour.

Arendt’s warning: “Though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it first of all destroys the national institutions of its own people.”

Congratulations to Ryan Pevnick, whose article “The Representation-Enabling Approach to Campaign Finance Reform” has win the 2025 Rockwell Prize for the Best Article on Ethics, Leadership, and Public Policy. #poliphil #polisky #PolTheory

Call for applications: The Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP) invites applications for its 2026 manuscript workshop award.

Nyt article on randomly selected citizen assemblies in Belgium

Misinformation, democratic breakdown, social identity: An excellent set of reflections from @samuel-bagg.bsky.social

O wow: Chrystia Freeland (Prairies & St Antony’s 1991) has just been selected the next Warden of Rhodes House and CEO of the Rhodes Trust. #canpol

I reviewed Thomas Holden’s excellent new book, _Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion_, in NDPR. TLDR;: theological expressivism yes, justified theism no, rational piety yes.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🎤 If you’ve read this far and still need convincing, please check out our preprint arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 and this infographic: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 10/10

Over the past months (and at least 11 versions!), I was lucky to work with 11 amazing colleagues on a call to action to reform academic publishing. Not another declaration, but an appeal to our powerful friends, research funders & institutions, to Stop the Drain of Scientific Publishing. 1/n

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

Back to the future: 1934 ad for electric car charger

Do they DID know that smoking was bad for health in 1934