December is ghost story season, which means it's a perfect time to acquire a skeleton orchestra, available on various objects: www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/5872...

Everyone is understandably sharing the Miller quote, but I found this response from photographer Christopher Anderson to be notable, too.

Okay people, I have determined that morale is low and we need cute little old things. Right around the end of the medieval period, scribes started to get fancy and put little drawings of the kings (and queen) at the front of legal rolls. Starting off with little Edward VI, who was around 10 here:

Photographer Christopher Anderson on the Vanity Fair photoshoot

Is the MTA making merch with the F M Swap icon cause they should be

I swear the only way most people even learn about the complex Native history in NC is by accident since the press is so derelict. I learned that the Cherokee land in WNC is not a reservation but land *outright owned* by the Cherokee from a *state agency style guide*

This news is kind of huge in my world. apnews.com/article/lumb...

if, like me, you are fascinated with the mechanics of photography and politics, you might like this piece wapo.st/49ixYtq

venture capitalists evaluating NSF grants makes me want to throw up

You want to talk to me about how estrangement narratives need to reckon with what poverty or racism did to parenting? Great! You want to talk about your adult children as units of debt? You are doing a very different project.

I tend to have nuanced believes about family estrangement but mine are reported in histories of oppression whereas this need seems to very much be about white children as white property and not some nuanced critique of kinship ties.

I realize this is "strike" as in "labor action," but on the first read, a part of my brain was imagining a team of doctors appearing like the Avengers and treating flu sufferers with painkillers and electrolytes before wrapping them in blankets. "The doctors have struck again, TENDING THE SICK."

That's me, in the process of writing my next book, thinking about how to phrase it best, and while being disturbed by incoming (e)mails ... #amwriting

Behind the Books: New Immigrants and Multilingual Linguistic Landscape in Taiwan

Oh my god y'all I had not seen the rest of the Vanity Fair photos holy shit. Christopher Anderson deserves a medal. Look at this. He left the LIGHT SWITCHES in the edited photos! These assholes look like their well-meaning mom took a picture of them on their first day in a grown-up job.

my friend, the comedian sami shah said that he lost his muslim faith as a child when an imam told him not to joke about allah; “i thought, how powerful can he be if he can’t take a joke?”

I was asked this, recently. „Where is the copilot key?“, and I felt old and angry and exhausted.

it's a funny combination of views: 1. that ai is so good it's going to be ubiquitous in the workplace in the near future, and 2. that it's so crummy that the only way it's gonna work is a bunch of people are specially trained to prompt it just right so that it works

Bottom line on how to have a better chance for you and/or your children to be multilingual... Make language fun and incorporate it into everyday life

A white American family leaves the US; later, one of the children returns, falls in love, and must grapple with identity, home, and family A movie with this plot will win an Academy Award in the next 10 years

50k ♥️ this year. And now tell me again, Bluesky has no impact or reach. www.madebyolof.com/bluesky-wrap...

A thread of recent BBC articles on Finnish racism. We used to be the happiest country in the world, now we are the happiest country for the racists?

i know this is hardly a new take but isn’t it WILD that wikimedia has to ask for donations to keep itself afloat when every LLM in the world has been trained on wikipedia data?

Reflecting on Brexit during all these Erasmus reports it's sad to consider how many people must have decided 'let's leave just in case' rather than 'let's stay just in case' when they were clearly confused and didn't know half of what the EU does.

Yes! Don't miss out meeting my amazing colleague Maryam and her #ReproducibiliTea session on legal and ethical aspects of linguistic data collection 👇 You can join her talk online! #BLinguistik #linguistics

One of my Bluesky highlights this year:

I have heard from Canadians who don't plan on visiting for the next five years. Five years!

First of all "AI" can't come up with ideas. If it "comes up" with an idea, a person had it. Second of all there is a difference between "we are running out of ideas for how to solve problems" and "we have ideas for how to solve problems but the ultra wealthy might have to pay a little so no thx"

Work to start digging a new Hudson Tunnel is set to begin this spring as two tunnel boring machines custom-built for the project are on their way to New Jersey. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Great typeface choices here!

Kim's Convenience ❤️ why did I not know about this show

🧪 graphics.wsj.com/infectious-d...

From Will Golay: Light is composed of an electromagnetic wave, encoding information about its orientation. Learn how observing polarized optical light from one of the most extreme types of events in the universe enables us to study the origin of its light! ⚛️🔭☄🧪 astrobites.org/2025/12/16/v...

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how the first half of my life was filled with scientific 🧪 advances 📈 that have benefited all of us 🌍 — and how my second half is going to feature, at best, stagnation. Or more likely, decline 📉.

Studying how mice see is giving neuroscientists new insight into how the human brain turns light into vision 👀 theconversation.com/gazing-into-... 🧪

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At the risk of hugging the third rail, the truth of the academic job market, at least in history or classics, is neither DEI or anti-DEI. It is that that 1) there are no jobs and 2) our hiring culture treats candidates like they 'spoil' after a few years. No one knows who is mediocre or not.

This just in: S T R E T C H

The theme for today is miracles! It's day 2 of Hanukkah, a holiday where - in theory - people spin a top that spells out "a great miracle happened [here/there depending on your location]." In the wake of Rob Reiner's death, many people are watching The Princess Bride which features Miracle Max.(1/5)

Wooking For Love: Jennifer is a New York City lawyer in her 30s. Needing a break, she visits a B&B in Burlington, VT where she meets Jimmy: a man who is fighting to save a local concert venue. Will she find love? Will Nectar's be saved? Phish show up in the end and play a 25 minute YEM!

muntjac deer (in a park) prairie dog or gopher or something (near a highway in Alberta) fox (urban) squirrel pigeon

On this day in 1987, both MOONSTRUCK and BROADCAST NEWS opened in theaters. I mean, dang, y'all.

None of them had the time to raise their own (mostly adopted) kids—they hired nannies. One actual quote was “you have to be ok with your kids loving the nanny more than you, because she’s with them more.” 😓 and a LOT of divorces.

I went to a “Women in Academia” meeting for grad students to talk to professors about life in academia and it was fully fully this. I left like 😱😱😱. All the speakers who waited to have kids til they got tenure couldn’t have their own; those who didn’t wait didn’t get tenure;

When this bubble bursts, so many companies are going to ask for a bailout.

The thing about my profession is that even though I swear I won't I take on additional projects, and I can totally tell when a project is coming my way, I'm too soft hearted to turn a project away.

Unbelievable. This would be a terrible blow to American science, writ large. It would decimate not only climate research, but also the kind of weather, wildfire, and disaster research that has underpinned half a century of progress in prediction, early warning, and increased resilience.

Your occasion reminder that the Vivaldi browser—made by some of the people behind Opera, before Opera went to the Dark Side—has made a point of *not* adding AI or crypto features. (It's Chromium-based; whether that's a pro or a con is up to you.)

Every few years there's a bunch of "pivot to video" discourse about how creatives should all start making videos instead of doing text-based work. And every few years we discover again that the supposed "popularity" of video is based on fake audience numbers created by the video platforms.

Yes. As with the first travel ban, this one also appears to exempt any athletes, coaches, and their families traveling for the World Cup. However, fans are not exempted, so if they don't have tourist visas already (current visa-holders may still enter on a valid visa) they are just out of luck.