In discussion with a computer scientist from the University of Cambridge last night: Me: "you've described some of the things that AI is good at. How would you describe the category of things it's not good at? **pause** Him: "Anything where it has to be right".

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

Can you teach Bostock at Texas Tech?

It is funny for sure. The reason for the difference is that the closer analogy here is between Columbia's board and ABC's executives, who responded similarly. Kimmel is more like Columbia faculty who have resisted their bosses' capitulation. The recurring pattern is: management cowers, labor fights.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority acts like they have infinite power. But their own time is a finite resource, and they have to spend it on explaining themselves whenever they make legal changes. Every interim order is a check drawn against the Court’s future time, and it is deeply in debt.

Frustratingly, a lot of the proposed "kids safety" legislation would actually make most of these problems worse by entrenching Big Tech giants, enabling censorship of lifesaving online resources, and subjecting kids (and everyone else) to more intrusive surveillance. This is not the way.

Finally I'll just say that most of the "solutions" to online harm to kids are offline. If all queer kids were accepted and loved, less of them would get groomed, exploited, and hurt online. If all kids had access to a safe place to sleep at night and a mental health councilor in their school...

I turned this thread into a full post over at Fixing Bugs In Democracy. To read about torturing evidence until it confesses, check it out: samwang.substack.com/p/tylenol-ca...

A pattern is developing where everyone who fights back against a Trump attack inevitably wins with their reputation much better than before, and everyone who caves to him looks like shit and has Trump coming back for more a month later.

Well don't I feel stupid

If the Supreme Court were right that the President has an essentially unlimited power to disregard Congressional legislation and appropriations, ours would not be a constitution deserving of respect. Fortunately, the Court is wrong, and it is the Court that deserves no respect.

This is like a Bill of Attainder, but even worse, because at least Parliament would VOTE on a bill of attainder

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, HBCUs received terroristic threats. Black students have been expelled or forced to withdraw. Black professors and teachers have been fired and placed on leave. A Black firefighter was placed on leave. A Black journalist was fired thebarbedwire.com/2025/09/26/f...

This is a ridiculously broad understanding of the President's foreign affairs powers -- that the Executive Branch experiences "harms to [its] conduct of foreign affairs" when it is must spend foreign aid money appropriated in a bill signed by the President. Whither Congress's power of the purse?

I am, and it is.

We are so humiliatingly deep into tinpot dictatorship territory. The government has just brokered the coerced sale of a major media platform to an ally of the president, who is openly boasting about converting it into (even more of) a partisan propaganda outlet.

Lavender Scare tactics

Excellent reporting from Heated and Atmos. It looks like some of the biggest investors in the anti-trans movement are fossil fuel billionaires who are trying to use trans issues to ensure that Republicans pass policies favorable to their industry. heated.world/p/fossil-fue...

What a time to be writing a book about speech act theory

Not the most important thing about this video, but the white cop's gun discipline would be hilarious if it weren't so dangerous. Takes it out, tucks it in his waistband while wrestling with a guy, drops it, recovers it, and then points it at bystanders.

for years when academics warned about the problems with letting media consolidate at the hands of one of two companies people yawned, now every day there's another vivid example of why they were right

Christine Haight Farley's excellent article about TM in a world of AI didn't cover this, which goes to show that people are not only stranger than we imagine, they are stranger than we can imagine papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Counterpoint: it’s not a “legal enterprise” when you are reversing district courts, abandoning precedent, and altering the structure of the federal government without reasoned explanation.

If they had a right-wing, “tough-on-crime” coded mayor there would be endless national profiles about him and how he finally brought sanity back to Chicago.

i really wish our law enforcement and media werent telegraphing to mass shooters that messages written on bullets will be breathlessly and uncritically publicized with no further examination

Indeed. At basically any point between the end of the Adams Administration and now, this would have been widely understood to be an impeachable offense.

Some preliminary thoughts on Trump's new executive order "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence," which declares a law enforcement crackdown on some ill-specified blend of action and speech by his political adversaries, on grounds that they encourage and abet violence. /1

OMG game changer! I just discovered the "citations" section of Westlaw's preferences. No more parallel citations to L.Ed and S.Ct.! You can also specify italics instead of underlining and add quotation marks before and after selected text you want to quote.

Great piece on TPUSA and the Professor Watchlist. "The entire goal is censorship, like fundamentally, the goal is to get you to stop talking" @nbcnews.com @aaup.org www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

But let’s be clear: every day, masked ICE agents are acting violently against our neighbors, illegally abducting them, holding them in cruel and inhumane conditions. Treating them as less-than-human, and not deserving due process.

So a DC-based colleague sent me this -- but apparently to get alerts from the White House you have to agree to *promotional and marketing messages notifications and customer service communications* Are other people seeing this? This seems like an obviously illegal use of public data. 1/n

Thanks to this post I learned that there are all sorts of new ways to chat with the Post's AI. It will give you advice! Mine came as a 5-paragraph essay that reminded me of the time a student said that an AI summary of something could have been written without reading the original sources.

For some reason this story made me think of the classic xkcd: xkcd.com/463/

I want to do a little breakdown of this investigation I published today for @prismreports.org about gender-based violence in the H-2A agricultural visa program.

hmm sure seems like universal masking in healthcare settings might be a good idea, idk

My high school friends and I would have been in so much trouble under this system, and we were really good kids! We also would have felt oppressed, mistrusted, and spied on, which is a crazy thing to add to the challenges of being teenagers

As someone who practiced, and taught, military interrogation: If you start talking, you will keep talking. If your interrogators have a specific agenda, the odds are very good you will fulfill it. Cops, almost always, have a specific agenda. The only way to win is not to play.

Harrowing deep dive by my colleagues on DOGE’s devastation of government agencies, in the words of federal workers: www.wired.com/story/oral-h...

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

can we shut down the shadow docket first? www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Another win for "Fuck you. Make me."

Proud to join this brief written by @marklemley.bsky.social. Congress created a procedure for the USPTO to review patents and the interim director just....decided to disregard it just because she doesn't agree with the policy. If you read the statute, it's quite clear: that's not her call to make.

America must have a secret police is the kind of argument you can only make in America if the implicit promise is to only secretly police "them."

📍 𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋: Civilian men are increasingly posing as ICE agents -- wearing plain clothes, masks, unmarked vehicles, to kidnap, threaten, and sexually assault immigrant women. #AbuseofPowerWatch

Libel and Sebastian

Why can't you copyright an AI-generated image that looks creative? My latest explores the "Skater Beagle" puzzle - how generative AI creates genuinely new works from latent space, not remix, but still lacks the human authorship copyright requires. matthewsag.com/skater-beagl...

Chotiner: and then you didn't send him to jail, and he ran again? USA: I mean yes but we do have pretty robust institutions, you know, the supreme court and so on Chotiner: I see. So they were able to stop the worst of it? USA: Well now it um the thing you have to understand

The ability to criticize and yes, mock, our political leaders is (was?) America's greatest strength. And there's also the mundane matter of first amendment caselaw, under which government may not impose viewpoint-based conditions on permitting for public displays of private art.

They’re destroying our history!