they’re shooting crowd control munitions at crowds that include multiple members of congress, the governor, and a sitting united states senator. they fired pepper balls at the senator. they cannot and will not be reigned in by democracy, whatever’s left of it.

Three things said about AI and social science: it's a topic to study, a thing to critique, a tool to use. My new Daedalus essay argues these aren't three conversations; they're one. A 🧵 on "Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object, and Tool." www.amacad.org/publication/...

Trans people have been around your whole life. You’ve been sharing bathrooms with them your whole life. They’ve been in your communities your whole life. They’ve even been playing sport your whole life. And you didn’t care *at all* till a few years ago when every right wing org decided you should

The lesson I would take from this is that solidarity across ranks and including students works.

For those who keep saying “ABA” isn’t like that anymore”, a coauthor is the director of research at the New England Center for Children, a treatment and research conglomerate that *currently* has a staff of 1,200 people and serves 15,000 autistic clients.

Hard agree. At least in my field, most of the poor quality papers are a net negative for research progress, not an incremental positive like many people seem to think.

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

E.g., Gail Jefferson (1990) on three-part lists in social interaction. We mustn't fool ourselves into letting the gibberish machines take credit for the rich repertoire of interactional resources humans have devised in order to conduct human business. This is human social technology. It is art.

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

Published with some minor changes! Please share widely. 😊 Guest, O., Suarez, M., ... & van Rooij, I. (2026). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Digital Culture & Education, 16(2), 85–118. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Journal: www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/volume-162

FWIW, because this seems hard to find, this was at the University of Central Florida, and the speaker is Gloria Caulfield, "VP of strategic alliances" at Tavistock Development Company, which the more I google the more it sounds like a villain in a Mission Impossible film. www.ucf.edu/news/ucfs-sp...

They spent at least $50 BILLION over 2 months to bomb people in Iran. I don't want to hear a single thing about what can and cannot be funded in this country. Ever. The End.

In the second, conceptualized & led by the brilliant @katiekat.bsky.social, we examined how white saviorism and ableism showed up in special educators' talk about their working conditions. This study STRETCHED ME, and I am so incredibly grateful to Katie for the experience!

Excited to share 2 new papers just out in Exceptional Children, both using data collected for my IES early career grant, both focused on special educators' working conditions in self-contained classes for students w/EBD. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The #AutINSAR #INSAR2026 recap is live! AutINSAR is an online and in-person discussion about autistic priorities in autism research, and is an invaluable resource for researchers who want to help autistic people live their best lives: thinkingautismguide.com/2026/05/auti... #neurodiversity #autism

like the global geo-political climate, public discourse around AI is fast deteriorating and I feel it everyday 1/

Today in Confirmed By Research: When people face more than one kind of discrimination—like being part of a racial minority & being autistic—a combo of racism & ableism might make others' opinions even more negative. @desirjones.bsky.social & @noahsasson.bsky.social: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41236918/

ABA in 2026: behavior analysts claim punishment (RIRD) to reduce "stereotypy" in autism is justified "when researchers explicitly identify why stereotypy is being targeted..." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... & very falsely claim there is "compelling evidence" that autistics prefer punishment

Postdoc available! There are two T32 positions at Minnesota focusing on developmental psychopathology, with a large selection of potential mentors. I could serve as primary mentor for someone interested in intersections with metascience and/or diversity. Apply now! drive.google.com/file/d/18SoO...

I know we get inured to stuff, but it is hard to fathom the cruelty here. At a time of tax cuts for the most powerful, they are trying to remove basic supports for the most vulnerable. The Trump administration's war on people with disabilities continues.

We're in the waiting days to see whether the FDA will ban shocking autistic and other disabled kids as punishment, which only one school, in Massachusetts, continues to do. The decision is slated to come before May. New from me at @motherjones.com. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Not only that: we have seen the push to prevent youth with an autism diagnosis from receiving gender-affirming care

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

paper out, hope it's useful doi.org/10.1017/S009... #linguistics

This is excellent, and especially thrilling because it's the first thing I've read on this topic that gets past its supposed inevitability to assess what AI ed tech is actually like, and what it actually does. www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

Now: Ruoxi Guo: Discussion of intervention intensity must include discussion of intervention harms, also by @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social, who was not able to be here. So let's talk about adverse events in intensive interventions. #INSAR2026

If anyone needs a CA transcriber or RA. I have an exceptional undergraduate in need of work. (US based)

OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse Media and universities: AI is here to stay

Yousof Azizi, Iranian researcher, journalist, commentator and PhD candidate at @virginiatech.bsky.social with valid legal status, has been illegally detained by ICE. He was taken from in front of his home, has been denied access to a lawyer, and may be transferred to a detention center in Louisiana:

Trump: We're winning. We're winning, and we're winning so much. So much more than- because, JD? Is JD here? Vance: Next to you Mr. President. Trump: If we can find JD, he just got- it's very rare, an executive commendation from The Pope. Where is- Vance: (holding back tears) Sir- uh, no.

This is horrific. A U.S. citizen describes the facility in Arizona that her husband was brought to while he waited to be put on a deportation flight. Dozens of people were crammed into tiny cells, there was a "chain of people vomiting" from filthy toilets, no medical care, and only one meal per day.

What terms do autistic & other neurodivergent adults prefer? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... "at the heart of it, terminology discussions, particularly in an academic setting, are not about language at all, but the lingering dehumanisation of people considered ‘disordered’ or ‘abnormal’"

the passive voice store was visited by me and you were known by everybody there

I’m offering a lightly used set of regalia in UC Berkeley colors to a junior faculty member, preference for a mom and 1st gen scholar. DM me your details— I’ll ship for free.

An opportunity to get your voice heard! The U.S.'s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee has been rescheduled to Tuesday, 28th April at 9-5 pm, Eastern Time (hybrid): iacc.hhs.gov/meetings/iac... For new comments, public comments are due this Tuesday at 5 pm ET. iacc.hhs.gov/meetings/pub...

Update: she is reading her book *during* overhead press 👀

An older woman at the gym brought a hardcover book to read between sets and I love it so much.

Today in Hell Yes, Research: U.S. Federal autism guidance not only wrongly stigmatizes autistic people themselves, but endangers public health with vaccine misinformation, & endorses worrisome pseudoscience autism "treatments." From @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

New editorial on RFK Jr.’s ableist health policies: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Autism researchers & service providers "often neglect to consider the potential for interventions to cause harm... and they communicate more confidence regarding the possibility of benefits for autistic people than is warranted given the evidence" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... editorial, free

Announcing the inaugural ROLSI Award for Outstanding Early-Career Research Were you awarded your PhD since June 2021? Presenting at ICCA in Edmonton? Go in for the award! For more information, contact the Editors. : [email protected]

why do I find it so wildly offensive and paternalistic when I see folks suggest that LLM use can help 'disadvantaged' people to 'write better' or 'save time'? because it is such a sad underestimation of people's abilities, a surrender to a thoughtless monoglot ideology, a celebration of ignorance

"COIs continue to be pervasive in ABA autism intervention research, and most remain undisclosed. Most alarmingly, the practice of falsely claiming not to hold COIs remains entrenched in this field of research and appears to have worsened over time" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... an update

5 yrs ago @shanclapoint.bsky.social and I found most autism intervention studies published in ABA journals were authored by researchers who were also clinicians/ consultants, but this COI was almost never declared. We have an update! Things are now... worse! 1/6 journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10....

New! Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Why do Anthropic engineers talk to Claude as a witch-doctor to his potions? How is prompt engineering like spider divination? Can one reason without reasons? ft. Lovelace, Adorno, Suchman, Weizenbaum & many more ☺️

I was supposed to finish this March 31 and then the #Claude Code leak happened, handing me the perfect opening example Some of it has been in the works for longer: it's also a version of (part of) my #DHd2025 keynote titled "What makes LLMs so irresistible?" Read it here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Guess what's not cool? Kanye West's existence! Guess what is? The fact that @kattenbarge.bsky.social wanted to talk to me for her incisive piece on the problem of him. Check it out folks!

New: 150 unionized ProPublica workers are on strike TODAY over AI, layoff protections, wages, and more. They're asking readers to not visit ProPublica or engage with content on other platforms. It's the first work stoppage of its kind at the newsroom. www.theverge.com/news/908401/...

You have more in common with the people of Iran than you do with anyone in this administration, any member of the technocracy, anyone who is profiting from this war, or any billionaire. When you see Iranians forming human chains outside key infrastructure sites, you should feel a sense of kinship.

everything we are seeing now is the consequence of having a political environment in which indifference to the deaths and suffering of other people - even by the state whose supposed responsibility is to safeguard their welfare - is a superpower rather than a political liability