Bear with me if you can as I attempt to use HPV vaccines to demonstrate why many can’t see the danger of RFK Jr. TLDR: Disease prevention takes time and discipline. Not discipline of an individual, but the ability to invest in public health when the benefits may not be immediately clear.

If you've realized that your AI-generated text is from a process designed to make it look just convincing enough to seem true without any assurance it actually is, the solution to your problem isn't "do another round of processing so it looks more convincing, but not any more true". Hugh Rundle […]

PSA: The Amazon wishlist doxing threat is much greater and more immediate than folks might realize. Attack works like this: Stalker who wants your address opens an Amazon seller account and lists themselves as a third party seller for any item on your public wishlist. Then, they order the item […]

"Transgender people across Kansas are reporting receiving letters... stating that they must surrender their driver's licenses and that their current credentials will be considered invalid upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday. Should any transgender person be caught […]

Wow. "Virginia State terminates six professors without due process. Campus security escorted the professors —five tenured and one tenure-track— to their cars and issued no-trespass warnings. They have received no written explanation for their dismissals." […]

"You were sent here because your contribution triggered our automated and/or manual AI Slop defenses. Specifically, a human maintainer or senior engineer looked at your submission, experienced a profound existential sigh, initiated an immediate socket closure on your contribution, and pasted […]

It does not take much imagination to consider how today's 5-4 SCOTUS ruling (that the Postal Service can't be sued for intentionally failing to deliver mail) could inspire attempts to suppress mail-in ballots: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-351_7648.pdf (There are probably other […]

Per a poll by NORC at the University of Chicago, not only have 43% American #transgender and nonbinary adults considered moving to a different state between the 2024 election and last June due to LGBTQ-related politics or laws, 9% have actually done so. (Numbers for LGBTQ population as a whole […]

America will have its own Gulag Archipelago. Twenty-three concentration camps will soon come online, unless, together, we can find and pull the political handbrake. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-29/us-spends-hundreds-of-millions-on-warehouses-for-ice-detention-centers

Moved a little over 800 anonymous bulk Online Books submissions submitted in the last 24 days to low-priority bulk queue, or to the trash. They were from various IP addresses, but had similar characteristics, and a lot appeared to be redundant, rude, or mindless pattern-matching. Also updated […]

I see the phrase "purity culture" is now getting much the same skeptical treatment online as "virtue signaling" has. Both phrases can identify a real problem, or be used to shut down attempts to live and promote one's values. One way to reduce confusion is to ask: Are you focusing on ensuring […]

The ISSN portal has been updated. The site looks different, and searches return slightly different information from before. They now show ISSN-H IDs (used to cluster successor and predecessor serials) but selecting them on the free public interface just tells you to subscribe to see more […]

Reading Wars by Don Herzog will be published #OpenAccess and will be free to read and download from the LSE Press website and online open access distributors. ➡️ Publishing May 2026 doi.org/10.31389/lse... @lselaw.bsky.social

"Famed mosaic artist and Philadelphia's Magic Gardens founder Isaiah Zagar has passed away at the age of 86." If you've walked much around the South Street area in Philly, you've seen his work, though pieces of his are all over town […]

A federal judge formally dismissed the NEA/ACLU lawsuit against the US Department of Education, after an agreement that the DoE would not attempt to enforce the anti-DEI "Dear Colleague" letter they sent schools last year […]

"Amid occasional applause from passersby, as National Parks workers restored the panels, an unnamed employee said, 'It’s our honor.'" The slavery exhibit is going back up at the President's House at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia […]

No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings. America belongs to the people. No Kings Day is coming March 28 👉 Find or start a peaceful protest near you 👉 Watch the #NoKings training 👉 Help a friend register to vote at Voterizer dot org Show up. Stand up. #Voterizer social.fieldteam6.org/s/wqxVI2z6

It's been a lot harder than I expected to find a definitely out-of-US-copyright edition of Arthur Ransome's _Swallows and Amazons_. The 1930 first edition sold slowly when it first came out, and as with many kids' books, copies were routinely trashed, and not often preserved by collectors. Later […]

As of this morning, there are still some seats available for #code4lib 2026, which is being held in Philadelphia the first week of March. I hope to see you there! Their site now has a full schedule, and links for registration: https://2026.code4lib.org/

RE: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/116087980855640676 Marisa Kabas has more details on how DHS is fast-tracking the process of converting large warehouses into concentration camps (in all but official name). Among the sites mentioned are two in eastern Pennsylvania, one in Tremont (near […]

PSA: If you block the `claude` user on GitHub, you'll get a warning every time you view a repo with that user in its commit history. This allows you to, the moment you look at a repo, immediately adjust your expectations. You may do so here: https://github.com/settings/blocked_users

Compared to the fast requirements for Ramadan (which starts basically the same time this year), current US Roman Catholic obligations for #lent fasting are pretty light: basically 2 days where you eat at least one meal's worth of food less than usual (and I'm aging out of even that requirement […]

Penn comes to a tentative agreement with graduate student worker union, just before today's strike deadline. The Daily Pennsylvanian reports it includes a minimum doctoral stipend of $49K/year or $25/hour, as well as, per the union, "provisions on union security, protections against […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@openfactbook/116081323917910751 The ongoing usefulness of a resource like this will depend on how it's maintained, including how its facts and descriptions get updated as the years go by. It's not yet clear how this project will do that (though it mentions World […]

"An agency, whether the Department of the Interior, NPS, or any other agency, cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it." Federal judge Cynthia Rufe orders restoration of the slavery exhibit at the […]

I've updated submission instructions for the Online Books Page to link to the submission etiquette tips I put on my blog on Friday: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/suggest.html . (The post itself is here […]

Humor often ages not long after it's published, but occasionally there are bits that have aged *less* than a reader might wish they had. Like this bit from _Dave Barry Slept here_, a sort of _1066 and All That_ for US history, published in 1989: "The [Monroe Doctrine], which is still in effect […]

When talking about the energy consumed by LLMs don't be fooled by arguments focusing solely on the direct power consumption of these models, because they are externalizing a lot of it. Browsers are now doing proof-of-work calculations to access many websites, because websites need to protect […]

The Federal Depository Library Program (#fdlp) is calling for public comments on a draft new #preservation policy for US govt public information. https://fdlp.gov/news/request-comments-draft-preservation-policy PS: This is especially important when the #Trump admin is taking down public info […]

I'm greatly indebted to all of the readers who suggest books and serials they care about to The Online Books Page, and help me improve the quality of my listings. I'm also dealing with an increasing volume of bulk, impersonal requests that seem to reflect relatively little care (and sometimes […]

"Florida A&M University says banning the word Black from a law student’s Black History Month flyer was a mistake, the result of an 'overly cautious interpretation' of a Florida law that prohibits DEI initiatives in higher education." According to the story, Florida A&M is "the state’s sole […]

The 4th edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, which US federal judges use to assess scientific and technical issues in court cases, came out at the end of 2025. This was its first update since 2011.It includes briefings on developing areas such as AI and climate science. Under […]

Along with the thread in LB, there's a growing page on "Prominent individuals mentioned in the Epstein files" on Wikipedia. There's some overlap with the thread I boosted, but also people in the thread not on this page […]

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

The subhead neatly demonstrates the aptness of the Pivot to AI blog tagline: "It can’t be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong."

You might not realize how much your relatives regularly watching Fox News or reading certain newspapers are being continually told to fear trans people. Jessica Kant did an analysis of news outlets from 2023 onward, and found that Fox News not only had way more stories mentioning trans folks […]

RE: https://techpolicy.social/@joebeone/116035301351973749 Sad news. Dave Farber was one of a small handful of Internet pioneers who understood early on the inseparable link between technology and policy. Dave recruited me to U. Penn. He has been an influence on almost everything I’ve worked […]

I am heartbroken to see that the journal First Monday is shutting down. I'm all the more grateful I got to check one off the bucket list and publish there last year. But it will be missed. firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

Happy first birthday, #DataRescue Project (@datarescueproject.org#Datarescue! https://www.datarescueproject.org/a-year-in-data-rescue/ "In a single year, we have rescued over 2500 datasets from over 90 government agencies. This work was supported by over 900 volunteers." #censorship #data […]

If you're looking for good free online reading for Black History Month, JSTOR's Open Access books collection has a number of relevant, interesting titles: https://about.jstor.org/products/books/open-access/ I've included them in the extended shelves on The Online Books Page, and will be […]

I have a listing of links to unofficial copies of the CIA World Factbook from various years, so readers can still consult them now that the CIA has discontinued the publication and apparently removed copies from its own website […]

"This is how a cultural narrative changes: By chipping away, bit by bit, at the veneer to show what’s actually happening underneath." Scott Meslow at Filmmaker compares the slick, meme-y videos DHS has been producing to promote ICE and its activities with the amateur videos being taken by […]

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions! This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub […]

As experts here have noted, Trump can't legally "nationalize" elections. But that doesn't mean we should ignore his rhetoric when he calls for it. It reinforces his ongoing attempt to disrupt 2026 elections in his favor, by ramping up intimidation of voters (see MN) and election officials (see […]

irrregular reminder that you can ask google to unlock books that are in the public domain but not openly available via the feedback form. It usually takes them one or two days to review the request. #GoogleBooks

The Data Rescue Project, which includes my Penn Libraries colleague Lynda Kellam on its board, wins RDAP's Work of the Year award. Congratulations! https://rdapassociation.org/news/13593532

RE: https://kind.social/@coral/116007551900439453 Also, if your examples are relying on a series that started coming out nearly 30 years ago (and whose last book in the main series came out nearly 20 years ago), they're probably dated, and could use revision (both technically and culturally) […]

"By simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, the systems known as artificial intelligence not only interfere with information ecosystems, but also encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@JMarkOckerbloom/115958917423705942 If you're going to today's concert of works by immigrants and children of immigrants and Native Americans, plan to head out early (and consider carpooling or transit), as parking is limited due to the snow, and our director is […]

RE: https://piaille.fr/@benjamingeer/115980018762083916 The "sanitized" textbook described in the article is a heavily modified version of this open access textbook: https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-sociology-3e (The original 3rd edition is licensed CC-BY, so anyone can create […]