Feels like a good day to say my first born is named after Rosalind Franklin.

I was at the Sierra Club during the period described in this article and although I have my criticisms, it gets the issues in the Club fundamentally wrong. A 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/u...

Burying the lede here, which is ACB celebrating women's right to "choose" (her words) the size of their family and between family and career.

Posting about the election and campus free speech debates, as one does: cooperativeoverlapping.substack.com/p/trans-subs...

I regret to inform you that "child of radical academic with relatively thin political CV who does great on TV wins high executive office" is *also* the outline of a Pete Buttigieg 2028 campaign.

This thermostatic stuff is a relief I guess but also? It's just incredibly depressing how much avoidable suffering and death will happen because voters are irrational. No one even *wanted* fascism they just weren't paying attention? Or wanted a show? Who the heck knows?

Huge climate news.

Waiting for the polls to close in NYC is really testing my "never hope" mantra for protecting myself from electoral trauma.

Recently learned from @oaklandreviewofbooks.org that Osha Neumann is Herbert Marcuse's stepson and I feel like this is the Berkeley-est nepo baby revelation ever.

Platner's tattoos has apparently re-triggered the "Dems out of touch with [narrow racialized & gendered sliver of] the working class" discourse so I'll repeat what I said after the election which is the whole convo betrays the fact these guys have terrible class analyses.

What To Know About Data Centers https://theonion.com/what-to-know-about-data-centers/

I'm sorry but What The Actual Fuck. One of those moments that break through & bring actual terror: through shutting down the government and blatant illegality Trump has effectively converted the state capacity with guns to a private army.

Yup, totally Trump's "friends in tech" and not an instantaneous response from the community that physically blocked agents from the Bay because they decided to stage from an island with only one bridge.

I believe gerontocracy has atrophied the Democratic party and led to bad policy outcomes as much as the next person but the one thing I know about Janet Mills is she stood up to Trump to protect trans kids and before the tattoo all I knew about Platner is he had an ad about how Manly He Is, so...

Apparently some of you didn't learn a lesson from Fetterman. (Which I was taken in on, too!) Perhaps, uh, we should think hard about whether it's redistributive economics or cultural markers of masculinity that's driving our politics, huh?

Evidence increasing by the day that we're all background characters in a rather clumsily written TV series/novel

In addition to being strategically brilliant, the inflatable costumes trend makes it way easier to convince my four year old to walk the length of a protest march so thanks for that, Portland guy!

somewhere in portland, there's one person, or a small handful of people, who came up with the inflatable costume idea, and I feel like they deserve our immense respect for defining the obvious developing aesthetic of the contemporary battle against fascism

Amazing sign being held by a small child

Pedantic 17th century English political theory historian says what you really mean is "No Tyrants" because Trump is claiming more authority than post-1688 kings but y'know what? I'll let it slide.

Holy crap Kara Walker chopped up a Stonewall Jackson statue and revealed a monster

Not sure there's a better case for court-packing in our present moment than just reading the mid-1930s SCOTUS cases. "Do you run a business? Yeah, guess what YOU LIVE IN A SOCIETY, take your complaints to the polls, man."

I know Marxism teaches to not get hung up on the individual idiosyncracies of capital owners and look for the underlying trends toward consolidation at the expense of the masses but also extreme wealth just seems to give way too much power to random wackos. www.wired.com/story/the-re...

Remembering about 15 years ago when Kivalina sought funds from BP to mitigate the costs of climate change and was told, nah, EPA's got it covered, your claim is preempted.

Lots of talk about the neoliberal university as a form of internal management and resource-stripping (all correct), but is there stuff on the university as complicit in the neoliberal hollowing out of public capacity? (She asks while sitting on the Stanford shuttle from Caltrain)

When Sassoon quit, I commented to a friend that I wondered whether the motivation of the former Scalia clerk was primarily outrage at the mob-like behavior of the President or frustration that a Black mayor would not be prosecuted as she felt he should. I think I have my answer.

Shared courtesy of my Penn History colleague, Ben Nathans

Adding to the schroedinger's nature of current fascism is fact that Internet diminishes capacity to use state to control information in the way they clearly intend but *also* the deterioration of the information environment on the internet is part of what produced the fascism

Hell yeah Chicago.

Yup. bsky.app/profile/mega...

I'm a product of public "gifted" education and I think it is *both* and important pathway into elite spaces for kids of color and poor kids *and* that "gifted" ed is used to let white parents keep their kids in segregated schools w/o leaving the urban district www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/n...

This is not a criticism of Pritzker specifically, but this plea is an implicit concession that *cops don't work for our elected leadership*. Imagine if they did and we had a professional force of trained intervenors prepared to step in and protect people?

When the country's largest grid operator puts a stranglehold on cheap renewables to protect their incumbent stakeholders but roll out the red carpet for speculative AI data centers, this is what happens.

I know "local car dealership owner" is a lazy shorthand for the petite bourgeoisie MAGA but because it's 2025 reality is just that on-the-nose. (Before the election I said it was a battle of car culture vs transit culture while criticizing the limited political horizon of the PMC transit user)

I think it was around 2008 when Sunstein wrote an article where the thesis was "ok so we know the death penalty has no effect on crime rates but if it did, it would be morally mandatory to execute people" and this is of course much funnier but it's been clear who he is for a while

You know you're doing a hang-up job as an opposition party when a spontaneous consumer boycott forces ABC to backtrack on a Trump-directed firing but after a disastrous congressional hearing Trump doubles down on the RFK Jr alignment.

Governor of Illinois quoting a Star Wars extended universe cable show on a micro-blogging site in support of the return to television of a comedian who got his commercial start joking about women on trampolines and everyone who reads it instantly understands it as a cri de couer against fascism

What's shocking to me about this is not that this court would act lawlessly to overturn precedent (Dobbs) *or* that it would capitulate to Trump (immunity) it's that the justices seem genuinely motivated to make new doctrine *for* Trump *fast* and not just continue their own ideological campaigns.

Hahaha what is "the law" anyhow?

Prohibiting abortion is authoritarianism. If you think you can "compromise" on that to stop fascism, you don't believe women are equal citizens.

Damn @gabrielwinant.bsky.social is brutal (complimentary). Doesn't even give abundance a whole sentence. lpeproject.org/blog/marxism...

generally speaking, and with the glaring exception of november 2024, the more directly democratic an institution has been, the better it has checked Trump (eg grand and petit juries); the more elite and insular, the less effective (the Senate, the Supreme Court, big business)

State health department recommendations are great, but unless they were going to buy and distribute shots, this is the ballgame and I'm very relieved to see it. (And mad that insurers, not elected officials, are the critical actors here, but that's the next fight)

Re-upping my take on the Trump assassination attempt b/c I *do* think school shootings are often political (inasmuch as misogyny is political); what we know so far about Robinson puts him with and Mangione as the exceptions that prove the rule. cooperativeoverlapping.substack.com/p/our-very-o...

anyway remember how Donald Trump drew a naked picture of an obviously prepubescent girl as a gag gift for a billionaire child molester

Hell yes, Chicago. Not the first time I've been proud to call you my hometown, and won't be the last. (Continue to be confused by how we got The Only Good Billionaire, but I'll take it.)

This is class solidarity. In case you’re at all confused.

The Charlie Kirk hagiography is honestly the first time I've felt like I'm living in a 20th c. fascist media environment. He was a bad person who hurt people, who made money by hurting people, and specifically was a bigot who led a campaign against campus free speech.

Look this is literally the least important thing happening right now but it has occurred to me, the mother of an eight-year-old, that tariffs are going to be a real bummer for the 50% of tweens planning to be a KPop Demon Hunter for Halloween.