OUR BATHROOM MIRRORS ARE VITAL TO OUR NATIONAL SECURITY

My latest column for the Chronicle of Higher Ed is now live. It's an argument for including AI-critical voices in campus conversations and policymaking workgroups, and I'm proud to get this dissenting piece into the mainstream genAI/higher ed discourse. Please read and share if you're so inclined 🙂

calling autism a “tragedy” and saying that there should be fewer autistic people are eugenicist talking points. Everyone who opposes such views also needs to recognize the ways in which everyday ableism left the door wide open for a person like RFK Jr.

Faculty position open at the UC Berkeley, School of Education on artificial intelligence in STEM (K–12 /Higher Education). Interested in scholars with a background in learning sciences, educational psychology or cognitive psychology. Submit by October 23, 2025: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05125

Trans rights are not the rights of a tiny minority, trans rights are everyone’s rights to self-determination, control of our bodies, and a society where opportunity and aesthetics are not restricted by sex assigned at birth You should support and defend trans people because trans people are people

Submit to #ISLS26 in Irvine! Can’t travel due to disability, caregiving duties, or visa challenges? No problem! ISLS has an easy, quick accommodations process for scholars to present their work virtually! See a previous info page: 2024.isls.org/isls-2024-re...

I guess I will have to watch again tonight my favorite Robert Redford movie: Sneakers.

Psychologists, apply! Apparently we've mainly gotten CS applicants so far. I'd (selfishly) love to have a psychologist. Interests in AI in relation to e.g., implicit bias; cultural influences; fairness; perception; learning & memory; decision making etc. would be a good fit!

Gov. JB Pritzker signed an executive order Friday to authorize medical professionals to provide updated COVID-19 vaccines to nearly anyone who wants it in Illinois, despite an effort by federal officials to limit access to the life-saving shot. @wttw.bsky.social

‘Booty’ and ‘butt’ are synonyms. ‘Call’ and ‘dial’ are synonyms. But, a ‘booty call’ and a ‘butt dial’ are VERY different things.

What an expertly called shot

It's unclear to me how one can teach any social science in Texas under these conditions.

imagine believing this is remotely a positive thing

The psych job market may not be dead... but it is gravely injured 😬 So far it's looking like the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed/research are going to have more than 2x the impact on the job market as the covid-19 pandemic. #psychjobs #neurojobs #academicjobs

This really resonated with me. Maybe partly b/c I spent a long time thinking that it would be better to have my PhD in physics rather than in education b/c then the physics people would take me more seriously when I talked to them about learning and teaching. Eventually I saw the error in that.

the two americas

“This is yarn-ageddon.” I’ve been knitting all summer. And yes, things are very bleak right now for the yarn-based crafting communities in the US. I was luckily able to get a big haul from Denmark before the tariffs hit, but I have no idea when I’ll be able to get more at a reasonable price.

The AI and Education discourse is maddening. "Does AI improve learning?" is a dumb question. What form of "AI" and in what context? What do you mean by learning? Improving on a test or knowledge for use? If you're asking that question, you don't actually care about a real answer.

Minneapolis Mayor Slams Talk of 'Thoughts and Prayers' After Church Shooting: 'These Kids Were Literally Praying people.com/minneapolis-...

uhhhh

“Am I allowed to burn the flag?” is also: am I allowed to criticize the government? Am I allowed to paint an unflattering picture of the president? Am I allowed to sit out patriotic events? Am I allowed to dress in a way the president doesn’t like? Am I allowed to say no to the president?

As one can imagine, I have some thoughts. Here’s a thread no one asked for: 1. SCIENCE IN THE US IS POLITICAL. No matter how much you want to ignore that fact, it is supported by taxpayer dollars and is therefore, political by nature. 2. BUT it has had bipartisan support for decades, which…

I often find myself saying "what a time to be alive" but friends, today, defector.com/it-took-many...

"It’s not like I’m losing my job," @betsyjwolf.bsky.social said. "It’s like I’m losing my field, my entire career pathway." Excellent, though harrowing, article on how the field of education research has been hit:

"If your books were uploaded to LibGen/fed into the LLMs, add your name to the potential class action lawsuit by tomorrow." Details: LibDem database: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a... Attorney form: www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-au... (This information comes via a reliable Discord source.)

Damn the landscape for educators this year is bleak. Don’t get bogged down in business as usual. Take care of your students, and yourself, and direct the brilliant energy and passion of your students towards things that matter—whatever that might be for your community.

This, from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social, perfectly sums up the quandary that educators find ourselves in: “AI hollows out the foundation of learning because it strips you, gets rid of the mistakes, it gets rid of the opportunities for serendipity.” Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/o...

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

The number of times I yelled “what?!” at my phone while reading this was a lot.

So much ed tech is sold as a panacea for a whole host of learning/teaching problems. When we’re lucky, some piece of tech can solve one narrow problem pretty well, but even that doesn’t come without its challenges and trade-offs.

We could have had cancer vaccines, and instead the United States will contribute nothing whatsoever to mRNA research, condemning millions of people worldwide to unnecessary illness and death

What the F are we doing, people????

Mister Rogers never misses

My department is hiring an assistant professor of educational psychology who researches and teaches motivation in schools! My contact info is in the job posting, please reach out if you have any questions. www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/440...

Well, I changed my email signature from Assistant to Associate today. So that's a little bit of something good happening.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down operations after loss of federal funding:

i know this is quaint of me but the white house renovation is crazy illegal and actually really emblematic of how trump sees the presidency as belonging to him

Unquestionably the most dangerous and corrupt attack on the independence of US economic data in American history. Trump is firing the head of the BLS, a longtime civil servant confirmed 86-8 by the Senate, simply because the job numbers came in below his expectations today

Update: A Trump administration effort to block all funding that flows to outside health researchers was scrapped Tuesday evening after senior White House officials intervened www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

1) All these universities giving into Trump aren't even going to get money 2) This is a profoundly evil move 3) This is, unquestionably, impoundment and illegal

Affiliated departments at UNC are hiring an assistant professor position for the study of AI. Happy to connect folks w/ questions. I would say that there is an emphasis on the “socio-technical”. unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/303... (Issued with all sincere sympathies about the job market.)

If you're teaching at a public university*, there is a pretty good chance that you will be affected by an open records request in the near future, with the data being thrown into AI to process. *Private nonprofit colleges are also publicly governed, as shown by recent actions.

Not only has Columbia agreed to give political commissars oversight over admissions, including a mandatory annual data transfer, they did so while agreeing to language emphasizing that nothing in the deal prevents the government from launching more investigations, reviews, and litigation.

New Trump EO: "when ideological biases or social agendas are built into AI models, they can distort the quality and accuracy of the output" ...so henceforth the US government won't do business with you unless your LLM is built to echo our ideological bias and promote our social agenda.

FYI: Submission deadline changed to August 1!

From @jessgrose.bsky.social “The myth persists because there’s always a market for anti-feminist backlash, and now that we’re in the middle of an anti-education backlash as well, a mostly female teaching force is sadly an easy target.”

"girls have been getting better grades than boys since before women had the right to vote." 😂😭 This is so good. Reminds me of Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Never Were.

‘Back to the Dark Ages’: Education Research Staggered by Trump Cuts With contracts severed and grants rescinded, experts say Washington’s hit to K–12 research will set back the field for years. @the74.bsky.social www.the74million.org/article/back...

5. The right-wing enthusiasm for AI science is not about doing better science faster. It’s about eliminating one of the most effective forms of societal resistance to authoritarian control.