Two-thirds of humanity have received a mRNA Covid vaccine. There are almost 9 billion of us! 6 billion people have not dropped from basic medical care. data.who.int/dashboards/c...

R1: No we're not hiring on the tenure track because our peers aren't hiring on the tenure track R1: Our peers aren't hiring on the tenure track because we aren't hiring on the tenure track R1: wtf our grad students aren't getting hired on the tenure track R1: No one could know how this happened

The *best version* of the Epstein scandal is that a wide swathe of American elites was palling around with a known child predator and explicit eugenicist for years on end — and is now closing ranks to downplay the severity of his crimes and their own complicity.

Evan Osnos has been good on this, although I’m not sure anyone has quite outlined the effects of this thinking on cultural institutions, in part b/c these folks have been so successful in convincing people that art and culture are decadent luxuries, rather than necessities to human flourishing

The Gilded Age 2.0 robber barons, unlike their Industrial Revolution predecessors, do not have the same motivations to fund libraries, the arts, and other cultural institutions. Certainly they don't give a good goddamn about taste. David Rubenstein is like a billionaire woolly mammoth in that regard

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Pour one out for every professional political pundit, writer, consultant whatever that has spent the last decade trying to pretend that the Trump phenomenon was about trade or opiates and not a big chunk of white america losing its mind over having a black president bsky.app/profile/kyle...

AI with a hard R

Donna Usher painting hanging in Kimmel Center Philly

the sheer arrogance of journalists who think they're so smart and rational that they think being on twitter isn't skewing THEIR perception of reality

This has slowly been happening at all but flagship public universities. This would accelerate the practice, and I expect more states (including some blue states) to follow suit in the coming years.

Between this & the federal budget cuts & AI & what's happening at Texas A&M with thought policing & what's happening at Indiana/Iowa/etc. with closing programs, there won't be public universities in any meaningful sense in 25 years. Just private universities alongside public vocational schools.

Since Emilia Bassano was busy writing the works attributed to the Stratford man, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum must be the work of Edward DeVere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

"rich dipshit owner doesn't understand the industry he's bought into and clumsily destroys what made it good" feels less like a narrative unique to the washington post and more like the music that's been playing in the background of all our lives for at least 40 years

I personally do not think some rich man should be able to buy an institution like this like a toy and then break it when he doesn’t want to play with it anymore. bsky.app/profile/benm...

Leading PhD programs are not admitting students. International applicants are turning to other counties. PhD staff are fleeing federal agencies in droves. Efforts to bring more minority students into the fold are under attack. #HigherEd #AcademicSky www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

I wanted to shout "Yes" and "Amen" at virtually every line of this @volts.wtf and @michaelhobbes.bsky.social discussion. I flagged one particularly important section, but the whole thing is essential. www.volts.wtf/p/all-about-...

Every job may require AI! But also what a nothing statement. This is AI as in “AI” with scare quotes. Ooh! AI! Sounds fancy! High tech! I would love though if google for example once again invested in the AI that made their search engine actually functional and disinvested in shitty AI summaries!

The thing is that it’s not *wrong* to say every job will require AI—it may well! Not because AI improves working conditions for the producer or improves the product but because employers—like UAlbany—may well keep imposing it on their employees and students regardless.

Performance of Literature Joyce Independent Study Kentucky History Ethics Renaissance Prose Fiction

The problem is that blue states are fully committed to “return on investment” analysis and are fully committed to undergrad business degrees and whatever the latest tech trend is. There is no theory of holistic education supported by democratic leadership.

"It's a tool." Tools are not morally neutral. They have design affordances that make them more or less serving of human dignity or, conversely, indignity and dehumanization. A fork affords eating, and it also affords stabbing someone's eye out. On net, forks are tools that have served human /

This is a direct assault on the First Amendment by the Trump administration www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/u...

relatedly in the 90s and 00s it was conventional wisdom that even despite the dot com bubble bursting, Clinton was a great president because he stayed out of the way of the Internet instead of hampering it with rules and regulations and I think in the long run that ended up being pretty Bad actually

The college at which I'm employed, which has signed a contract with the AI firm that stole books from 131 colleagues & me, paid a student to write an op-ed for the student paper promoting AI, guided the writing of it, and did not disclose this to the paper. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...

So, incredibly, the White House has chosen to escalate in blue Minnesota and retreat in Maine to protect a vulnerable GOP Senator. It's confirmation that Trump-Vance-Miller view ICE as a partisan govt-backed militia to attack blue America while propping up their regime. 1/

‘They are no longer strategizing for voluntary adoption by those who come to recognize the technology’s utility by electively applying it to the problems they face. They are planning how to cross the chasm by forced adoption.’ By @mattseybold.bsky.social

I’ve never seen anything like the coordinated push to force this technology on people.

There is money for "education" if and only if that money is being directly funneled to corporations. Anything involving actual learning, however, well there's no magic money tree

This is so obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds that I can’t believe it’s up for debate, especially in K-12 education. The obsession with assessment that gave way to the obsession with instruction modality really marked the end of any concern for learning, huh?

Alex Pretti’s most immediate legacy is galvanizing the country against tyranny. We should do what we can to see to it that his other legacy is reclaiming the public meaning of masculinity from the whiny, sadistic freaks responsible for his murder. www.offmessage.net/p/alex-prett...

Just for a friendly reminder, the deadline to join the #NDP in order to be able to vote for their next leader is TOMORROW! My latest blog post offers a quick rundown of the five official candidates and why I'm supporting @avilewis.ca. #cdnpoli #AllOutForAvi www.twowheeledpolitics.ca/2026/01/why-...

Also a non-abhorrent Greenwald statement.

They're gonna call it Stancilgrad

Pareene's back?! Whew!!!

wait they removed Bovino? maximum respect to the people of Minneapolis: you did this. power to the people forever

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This horrific epistemological practice has both proven almost impossible to dislodge, even as it’s resulted in press being utterly humiliated by liars again and again. It has also arguably led to the collapse of liberal democracy and the rise of fascism. It seems like they should stop doing it!

The political press very clearly understands “truth” as a social agreement, a compromise position between everyone important enough to have an opinion. It did not reflect on how this would allow dedicated liars to go all-in on lies again and again and dramatically shift the position.

Fun fact about Kristi Noem: While governor of South Dakota she launched an anti-meth campaign with the slogan “Meth. We're on It.”

1. Wasn’t at a protest 2. Was disarmed when they shot him while he was face down 3. New gun rights rule: the second amendment is when conservatives can carry guns everywhere, but if anyone else has a gun we can kill him on sight bsky.app/profile/atru...

Last night, I was assaulted by a man at Sundance Festival who told me that Trump was going to deport me before he punched me in the face. He was heard screaming racist remarks as he drunkenly ran off. The individual was arrested and I am okay. variety.com/2026/film/ne...

I can't put into words the feeling of watching our government, a hive of evil antisocial filth, the absolute worst humanity has to offer, colliding with the best. Ordinary people trying to help each other, risking everything to stand up for what's plainly, unambiguously fair and right. It's unreal

It says something that the two people ICE has managed to kill in broad daylight are named 'Good' and 'Pretti'. (And as I say this, I don't mean to take away anything from the many people who have 'died' in ICE custody during the past year.)

All three living Democratic presidents have said nothing about any of this. I don’t mean just today, I mean any of it. Obama’s last two tweets are about basketball and wishing his wife happy birthday. Nothing on Renee Good who was murdered 17 days ago

Another hero every person following, observing, documenting, supporting neighbors in MN and in ICE watches every where is a hero. This is dangerous work that has kept millions safe in the absence of any meaningful protection from state authorities.

If every Democrat voted NO on funding ICE, it would not have passed the House. But, 7 House Democrats voted to fund Trump's lawless, masked goons, so it passed. Hakeem Jeffries refused to whip his members to vote against ICE funding. Genuinely unforgivable.

Godfrey Frankel, 3rd Avenue Elevated Window, 1947