100 years old today.

This. This was the formative event of my generation & our entire politics in 🇺🇸. The structural break after which we were no longer a full democracy, when 5 Wizards In Robes decided they were a super-legislature & counting all the actual votes didn’t matter. The rest has been 25 years of commentary.

This should be the biggest story in the country right now. The sitting US President was extorting state lawmakers from his own party by threatening to withhold public money if they didn’t gerrymander for him. I don’t know how else to say it…

1/ The Carney government has fallen hard for AI hype, and it's endangering us all. This unprecedented invitation of data-hungry tech execs inside our house (where all our confidential data is stored) is a disturbing betrayal of public trust. dub.link/NDYvJU0

It's inconvenient for people interested in Dem factional fights, or Obama 2012 veterans trying to get consulting work. But we have known since several days after the election that Trump gained fewer votes from 2020-2024 in swing states that were exposed to campaign messages than in other states. /1

It also meant learning *about* things: literature, philosophy, history, art, mathematics, astronomy…ye olde pursuit of knowledge. It wasn’t just skills acquisition (though that’s an inseparable part). Learning was itself a value.

just for the record, I would much prefer to live in a time where all it takes to support hundreds of good local jobs is to wake up every day and buy a newspaper for a nickel from a legally employed minor with a cool hat

Church of the Saviour through the Trees (2019) by Andrew Gifford

I started my PhD in 2009 just as the first big waves of austerity were hitting the higher ed sector from the Recession, and at no point in my career have I seen the trend tending in the other direction.

A 2011 poll found that only 28% of Republicans believed Obama was born in the US. This was BEFORE Trump began promoting birtherism . www.politico.com/story/2011/0...

The news is a torrent of horrors. Glee in domination and crimes against humanity. Dystopian tech and financialization. Antihuman futurism. All championed by sociopaths and raw id. We should be calling for humanistic moral revival, whether religious or secular.

This is not true. This is argument that pro-gun people use to discount red flag and waiting period laws. Ease of access and lethality (let alone cheerful instruction in the best method!) is the #1 predictor of attempts leading actual completion. The more barriers, the more people live.

This is why I voted for Warren in the 2020 primary.

I think part of What's Going On with billionaires is that the daily friction of interacting with normal people is part of what anchors people to the real world, and once you have enough money to buy your way out of the friction you can knock down a load-bearing column propping up your sanity.

Christopher Rufo is just a white supremacist, and I think it’s silly that we’re still doing news stories where he’s called a conservative activist or some other harmless sounding term.

The U.S. is the only democracy in the world with: - Lifetime terms for high court judges - An electoral college for choosing an executive - A legislative chamber where legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative majorities - 75% requirements for constitutional amendments

“The more we rely on algorithms, the more we normalize their values: automation, prediction, standardization, and corporate dependency. Eventually these priorities fade from view and come to seem natural—“just the way things are.””

The Enrollment Cliff is a Miff

Eleven years ago, I wrote to Tom Stoppard to ask about this coup de théâtre from 1949. It took me down an unexpected rabbit hole - in memory of Stoppard, here's what I found.

That begs the question: why has everyone lost their damn minds? And the answer I think is Phone x COVID x Neoliberalism = everyone is insane.

Chicago - blizzard of 79

I think back of all of it is credentialism, the idea that the degree and the GPA are the point, the insistence on the shortest path to both for market reasons; at the upper end university is a Student Experience and at the lower end it certifies you for data entry. This corrodes the desire to learn.

I also want people to think about the load bearing institutions of post-WWII culture and what we have done to them over the past 40 years, but especially since the Great Recession.

The reality, of course, is that Miller and a significant portion of Trump’s base are the ones who failed to assimilate to America’s post-WWII culture of multi-racial democracy & religious pluralism…and they are now using their power to destroy that once dominant (and still popular) American culture.

I think in part the higher education funding crisis and the LLM-teaching crisis actually strike at the same problem, which is that education doesn't work without a broad, society-wide sense that the *actual content* of education - not the credential - is valuable.

Thanksgiving has never been my favorite holiday, but living in Canada I do miss the two days off.

Sierra de montaña. Gordon Mortensen. Americano, nacido en 1938

you're telling me a right-wing catholic convert is just a protestant in disguise? shocked

Come for the zingers, stay for the very clarifying feminist reading of Trumpism and MTG's place in it. (And something tells me @tressiemcphd.bsky.social paused to admire some of the zingers in here as she wrote them. I sure did as I read them.)

I really don’t think we can overstate the harm that the tech ethos of move fast and break things (followed by the unsaid “and then just move on”) has done beyond tech. Government, ngos, universities, public schools that have invited the folks who think like this in keep ending up gutted

What if the real “great replacement” was the human obsolescence project behind the AI systems produced by the reactionary tech oligarchs who have used their social media platforms to get the public to buy into the racist and Islamophobic “great replacement theory?”

To simplify: the thing that made American higher-ed unique was the institutional organization around education as a PUBLIC GOOD, rather than as an elite training ground, or job training. This aspect is nearly dead, killed by a thousand budget cuts.

I think some of this elite radicalization in fields like academia might be a reaction to the relative status loss across all non-tech non-finance fields since the Great Recession. Academics, doctors, media, arts/ entertainment, law, fields w diminishing prestige/relative material rewards

"[admin]...who regard the...students of their own universities with such contempt as to be undeserving of the education that in many cases those administrators themselves, or their parents, or their children received...are an enemy of the educational enterprise" 🎁 link www.wsj.com/opinion/mont...

Vaccines based on mRNA can be tailored to target a cancer patient’s unique tumor mutations. But crumbling support for cancer and mRNA vaccine research has endangered this promising therapy

The Danish Social Democrats are currently on course for their worst election result since at least the Second World War, despite their brand of far-right accommodationism being touted as a blueprint for other centre-left parties.

Some inspiring words on cinema in the streaming era from the Pope. Yes, THAT Pope.

To be clear, there is no university administration in America who respects, values, or trusts its faculty expertise.

This is a yikes too. He gets dogwalked by Susan Collins even though Generic Dem has a 9 pt margin. What I find funny is that the median Maine voter sees his tattoo and comments about sexual assault as a non-starter but we had how many people defending that shit here on Bluesky?

Can none of these millionaires sex criminals write in full sentences? Have you heard of paragraphs? Punctuation? No wonder ChatGPT sounds like a genius to these clowns.

This is great news. AAUP's arbitration win and our adjunct union's unfair labor practice victory will hopefully force Portland State's administration to back down from its anti-labor agenda www.opb.org/article/2025...

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

!!!!!!!

No one will ever sum up Bari Weiss's career more succinctly than "what's the point of standards"

Abigail "Nobody elected him to be FDR" Spanberger is now an even more prominent figure in the party. And that is likely bad news for those wanting the Dems to change, as my colleague @alexshephard.bsky.social explains here. newrepublic.com/article/2029...

Reading this after seeing it on @tressiemcphd.bsky.social timeline & it’s hard to miss how moving funding from grants and state support to individual student loans as a huge catalyst for lots of issues & also how they’re doing it to k-12 now with vouchers

The original Dem demands were: 1) Permanent ACA subsidies 2) Medicaid funding restored 3) No more blank checks for the regime (rescission) They dropped Medicaid immediately. Went silent on rescission. Cut back to 1 year of subsidies on Friday. And surrendered today. The Senate Democrats!

i think Senator Lander has a ring to it

correction: they are all retiring, announced or not