"But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché." Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).

Concepts such as democracy, sovereignty, and self-determination no longer carry the same weight in everyday discourse. It is deeply concerning that they have become empty signifiers today, especially considering how much was sacrificed to achieve them.

Before federal agents killed a Minnesota mom, they killed a man in Chicago and shot a woman 5 times. blockclubchi.co/4jxafcA

What are we looking at here? A protectorate? A mandate? A trusteeship? Perhaps historians can help us make sense of it. www.premiumtimesng.com/news/top-new...

"Oversight" is nothing but a vulgar euphemism. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/u...

Sound is one of the sensory dimensions that becomes most distorted after a bombing. Every vehicle, motorcycle, or whistle heard in the distance triggers an involuntary panic response

In Spanish for now, while I adapt the main ideas into English. open.substack.com/pub/carlosri...

Tras la experiencia del trauma masivo, la escritura surge como un deber ético y una vía para reconstruir la paz mental arrebatada. Les comparto mi memoria de ese momento. open.substack.com/pub/carlosri...

In social terms, the city of Caracas appears calm, but remains under a veil of tense expectation. Uncertainty and fear predominate in an environment with few certainties.

Electricity has been restored, though it might only be temporary. Slowly, the neighbors and I are trying to return to our routines. We've been meeting up to provide each other with support.

Once again, we are without electricity. The efforts to restore service have been complicated because the electrical substations were the first to be bombed. When they plunged everything into darkness that night, the horror began.

A medida que pasan las horas, empiezo a procesar la magnitud de lo ocurrido. Mi mirada se detiene en las prácticas sociales de justificación: en cómo se articulan discursos para gestionar profundas contradicciones; en esa negociación social que pretende, sin éxito, preservar la coherencia del yo

There are still some power fluctuations due to the repairs right here where I am, in the areas closest to the heavy bombing

The first challenge is: how to narrate an intense lived experience with objectivity? It is, as Jorge Semprún suggests, a perspective tinted by trauma that must reach a certain temporal distance to find some semblance of truth.

La electricidad ha sido restituida en mi zona después de los bombardeos. Ya puedo compartir detalles de lo que vivimos en la ciudad de Caracas, Venezuela. #caracas #venezuela

Electricity has been restored. I can now recount the specific details and intensity of the bombings here in Caracas, Venezuela. Please help me share this information. #Caracas #Venezuela

40 hours after the bombings here in Caracas, my area is still without power due to the destruction of the electrical stations. The mobile signal is intermittent. Physically we are fine, but emotionally shaken.

Ambiguity, which in literary contexts entrusts meaning to the reader, takes on entirely new dimensions in the era of post-politics.

Does the TikTok feed lean right? Exposure to Political Party Content among non-partisan users during regional and federal elections in Germany osf.io/preprints/so...

Evaluating topic models (and document clustering methods) is hard. In fact, since our paper critiquing standard evaluation practices four years ago, there hasn't been a good replacement metric That ends today (we hope)! Our new ACL paper introduces an LLM-based evaluation protocol 🧵

This is an interesting article on LLMs as semiotic machines by Vromen (2024) with references to Derrida. arxiv.org/html/2410.13...

It is always worth remembering that Fascism usually has a forward-looking dynamic.

These kinds of "impulse to demolish," mentioned by Linker, contrast with the affirmative nature of desire as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari. open.substack.com/pub/damonlin...

Micropolarization: performances of antagonism and struggles for recognition during the Covid-19 pandemic https://osf.io/czn3a This article theorizes how political divisions permeate social interaction, transforming the political into the personal in everyday life. Drawing on affective po #sociology

Zeitgeist... www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/w...

"If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society..." 𝘋𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘶𝘻𝘦 & 𝘎𝘶𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘪. 𝘈𝘯𝘵𝘪-𝘖𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘱𝘶𝘴: 𝘊𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘻𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘢.

In uncertain times, access to reliable information is more crucial than ever. Revisit this paper by Zachary McDowell and Matthew Vetter to highlight Wikipedia’s community policies and procedures. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

"The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual, which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible, paralyzing thought." Friedrich Nietzsche on 𝘗𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘰𝘱𝘩𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘤 𝘈𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘬𝘴.

Why Do People Avoid Discussing Science and Religion on Social Media? Findings from a National Sample https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/23780231241275430?ai=2b4&mi=ehikzz&af=R Social media is increasingly important for discussing a myriad of topics, including the sometimes cont #sociology

Chronicle of a Foretold Warming www.euronews.com/green/2024/1...

As a non-native English speaker, I find it difficult to translate Franco "Bifo" Berardi's concept of skin as a "sensitive interface"; instead, I invite you to consider this concept (or its absence) by trying to feel the textures of the attached images. Photos by Jude Infantini on Unsplash.

While it's not always wise to make extrapolations, it's important to recall that Bourdieu wrote in the 90s: "The political dangers inherent in the ordinary use of television have to do with the fact that images have the peculiar capacity to produce what literary critics call a 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘦𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵."

Over 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water – and this is set to rise due to climate change. What collective steps need to be taken to address global water insecurity? Jo Trevor & Padmini Iyer of @oxfamgb.bsky.social explore #LSEInequalitiesBlog

What types of survey questions are prone to interviewer effects? Evidence based on 31,000 ICCs from 28 countries. https://share.osf.io/preprint/E00C1-195-713 Interviewer effects are a common challenge in face-to-face surveys. Understanding the conditions that make interviewer variance mo #sociology

🧵 Netflix's adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a timely reminder of the closeness between Yoknapatawpha and Macondo, not so much for their similar circustances, but more for the importance of ambiguity. www.netflix.com/title/81087583

With this Spacy plugin, you can easily integrate PDF and Word documents into your Spacy pipelines, and then utilize the full capabilities of NLP techniques. github.com/explosion/sp...

"Every love is an exercise in depersonalization." —Deleuze & Guattari, 1987

A palpable sense of nostalgia permeates many Bluesky posts, drawing comparisons to the simpler days of early Twitter. This observation invites us to consider how nostalgia can serve as a form of social expression on digital media.

Bluesky is my social media debut. I've never had a personal presence on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. It's a blank slate for me. Even though I've been analyzing and reflecting on their effects.