On Trump’s orders, the National Center for Atmospheric Research will be shut down after more than 50 years as a leader in global research on climate science and monitoring. This is what authoritarian science looks like. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

“Nativity, not nativism” has a good feel

@dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social thanks for the follow; it’s an honor!

You want to talk about problematic pronouns, let's start with "we."

FWIW, some people really disliked the delirium excerpt from BBILY: some, because they don't accept any organic explanation for the phenomenon; others because they thought I should have somehow provided the definitive answers no one else has in millennia of medical attention.

Thread

One of the top 10 most read excerpts on the @mitpress.bsky.social Reader in 2025!

An annual tradition: sharing, in no particular order, our 10 most-read Reader articles of the year. Together, they drew more than half a million reads. Huge congrats to all the authors!

Very proud to say that my authors contributed SEVEN of the top ten articles on the MITP Reader in 2025. Congrats to Richard Cytowic, Michael Erard, Nolen Gertz, Jay Keyser, Tim Lomas, and Mark Rowlands!

Because it'll probably get cut, I wanted to post this footnote here for posterity

Archivists/librarians please share the coolest thing in your collections that will never be digitized.

You‘re underestimating if you think you‘ll be able to celebrate certain deaths online without repercussion. Keep it in the streets, I say.

it really is something that no one affiliated or allied with trump seems to have any sense of how to use power with subtlety and finesse.

an attempt at an inventory of all the objects and activities placed atop megaliths on astronomically significant dates

dug this up for someone else "The evidence suggests that writing is actually more like gunpowder than like nuclear weapons..." aeon.co/essays/the-r...

Another pleasure of War & War: the writer clearly is discovering the narrative as he goes. I love such books. Wild Sheep Chase is another.

how animals name each other these days!

Dec. 21, 1925: French inventor Charles Louvel draws rubberneckers along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice with his aerodynamic motor home. "In appearance it is like a carriage of a huge dirigible," reports a wire service. "It contains eight rooms with a bath and kitchenette."

No document will protect you. All they have to do is take it from you and "lose" it; take it from you and say you never gave it to them; claim it's fake ⬇️; make a new rule that you need ANOTHER document. Citizenship is a made-up status that governments decide the rules for. No one is free until all.

You‘re underestimating if you think you‘ll be able to celebrate certain deaths online without repercussion. Keep it in the streets, I say.

Did you know that the US hasn’t had an ambassador in Moscow in 6 months? Or that our chief envoy to Russia won’t take briefings from the CIA? But wait, there’s more. Much more in this 6-byline WSJ piece on the Witkoff-Putin axis. Free link www.wsj.com/world/putin-...

If you want to hear @annaleen.bsky.social @drkarenlord.bsky.social and me talking with a really great interviewer about our new speculative activism anthology WE WILL RISE AGAIN, this was a terrific conversation: convergencemag.com/podcast/we-w...

This writer in Cook’s IlIustrated uses “to zhuzh up” out of the blue. It means, I think, to enhance? It‘a weird, a sort of outlaw neologism or non-English intrusion that appears as if it’s supposed to be there. I’m not a language peever! But reality sort of glitched the moment I noticed it.

I wish Scott and Pableaux were around to hear about the year I had.

ICE and CBP, among others, have violently retaliated against ICE Watch in part because the agencies correctly understand what many do not: Organized neighbors are mounting an effective defense, and an organized movement is a formidable adversary. My new feature: newrepublic.com/article/2042...

14 two-year postdocs for academics of any nationality who cannot continue their research due to US politics. Do share if you know of such.

Things are so bad in academia that you used to be able to make some good writing gigs out of "discovering" that there are, in fact, no academic jobs for you. Chapter 1: surprise. Chapter 2-8: Blithering. Chapters 9-15: Outrage. If you tried this now, you'd seem irredeemably naive.

It's also not that you didn't get the book deal because you're white. THERE ARE NO READERS.

1/Easy to laugh off renaming of Kennedy Center as one man's insatiable need for attention. But that underestimates its significance. In an emerging neo-royalist order, power is based on status hierarchies and pecking orders. www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

immigrant level unlocked: checking an article about me, written in the local language, in the local language

I had to explain to my kids what a newsroom is 🤣

Does anybody know anything about publishing science/non fiction books for kids?

“There's an inequality. That's where I get frustrated and angry. I get sad … we keep losing Elders every day. And it's almost like everything's against us…” #Indigenous #language #rights #Canada #law #UNDRIP

Thanks, Flanders.

Survey experiments have become a popular methodology among social scientists. Has it been effective? In POQ, Rauf et al. study the efficacy of 100 survey experiments. Their results show that a majority of hypotheses were not supported. Read now: doi.org/10.1093/poq/...

A long read by a Europe-based American writer about American FOBs will win a National Magazine Award in the next five years

I would caution people against fetishing process in their critiques of genAI. Yes, the creative work is its own reward but not the only one. If it were, I'd write and write and never show it to anyone. Yes, only a fraction gets shown. But the basic imperative is Get It Out There.

APPROVED! Just got ethics approval for a pilot study on language at the end of life. I thought I was going to be revising that thing forever....

John Butman was a pal of mine, and though he died in 2020, I recommend his book, Breaking Out, all the time. I was surprised to find that the book's out of print. This profile goes into some basic elements, which hold up.

Nominating these for alt text of the year

One weird thing about this report is that the native language of the hacker group is identified. Why does that matter? Of course language matters but the world typically doesn’t care. Why in this case?

Nominating these for alt text of the year

I also did a thoroughly enjoyable interview with linguist and writer @strr.bsky.social for NEMO Kennislink about first words, last words, language, and language journalism. It feels good to be seen. To be clear, she interviewed me, though I'll be interviewing her at some point, I can feel it 😁

Small-d democrats have little or nothing to learn about how to govern from the audacious lawlessness of the Trump regime, so argues @donmoyn.bsky.social. Demolition isn't building, & action isn't achievement. The goals of the movements are fundamentally at odds, so the methods don't translate.

I was fortunate to get a bit of attention from the magazine of @maastrichtu.bsky.social for my book, and today the piece, by Milou Schreuders, is on the university's main page. Here in English:

@organizer.bsky.social Have we crossed paths before? I recall meeting someone who did critical management studies but I don’t recall a name

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

The Nation’s gotta have its Chomsky

HARD BOILED DETECTIVE: another cruel sunrise over the city of the damned. another corpse. another widow. another cup of black coffee to drag my sorry ass back to life- *sputtering* ME: do you like it? it's an ethiopian washed process single origin DETECTIVE: ME: are you getting apricot notes