Attn: @voiceofoc.bsky.social, @marisakabas.bsky.social, @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social

Absolutely. And in the case of our campus, there is also a huge push to replace unionized graduate worker labor with AI so we can continue increasing enrollments without spending more on grad workers and faculty, which is itself driven by the big cuts to federal grants that R1s depend on.

Important to hear more examples like this of how AI is helping intensify the very worst tendencies in education, rather than seeing it as an innovation demanding ever more institutional investment

NEW: Six people detained in California’s newest + largest ICE facility speak out, saying they are confined in filthy cells, struggling to access basic medications, going hungry due to insufficient food, drinking dirty water, and faced with “military-like” staff. “This place is built to break us”

My generally apolitical* hiking and camping moms WhatsApp group has been discussing politics for 48 hours and it's going ... surprisingly well?

Every single paragraph of this makes me want to scream, though I appreciate the reporting.

OpenAI's rapid rush into education has been achieved by habituating users through training programs, institutional lock-ins, strategic marketing partnerships, and third party integrations that together are helping it become infrastructural to teaching and learning. It's going to be hard to get out.

OpenAI's VP for education recently said the company wanted to become "core infrastructure" for schools and universities. Any infrastructure, though, always depends on habituating users to its technical affordances - so I've been trying to track how it's doing that 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

This is putting it very, very nicely. www.wired.com/story/memeco...

#OTD 19 September 1991, walkers in the high Ötztal alps on the Italian border, found a body melting out of the ice. It turned out to be the remains of a c.5200 year old man preserved with all his kit. Of course, it was essential to replicate him in Playmobil. 1🧵 #PlaymobilÖtzi #PlaymobilInfestation

A lot is being said about #crypto in Washington right now. The Senate has markup planned soon on the second bill in a planned trilogy. What’s it about and why should you care? I’ve broken down why we all need to be paying attention via @rooseveltinstitute.org's blog. Let me dive in. 🧵

My friend witnessed this violence while biking her five-year-old son to kindergarten yesterday. She texted me in horror: how was she supposed to explain to her kid what he saw? There is no possible explanation that does not invoke depths of cruelty no kindergartner should be acquainted with.

I wrote about observing immigration court arrests this summer and the bland, bureaucratized violence of the immigration system before ICE even shows up in the hallway. voiceofoc.org/2025/09/lock...

I was back at 26 Federal Plaza today, where an ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids. She had not touched him. She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital. (🎥: Elias Eliahu)

Logged off for a few days of camping in the beautiful San Bernardino National Forest this weekend, 10/10

I wrote about observing immigration court arrests this summer and the bland, bureaucratized violence of the immigration system before ICE even shows up in the hallway. voiceofoc.org/2025/09/lock...

"schools must return ... to strong families" This is, of course, nonsensical on its face as policy, but certainly not as ideology.

I'm mostly over the very specific trauma of having a baby in early covid but hearing that now-5-year-old casually ask, "was that during covid when I was born?" in reference to an overheard remark about not being able to visit someone is an experience I was not entirely prepared for.

Federal agents clashed with protesters and threw a congressional candidate to the ground Friday morning during a protest outside a Chicago-area ICE detention facility.

THE TOP 1% OF U.S. EARNERS NOW CONTROL MORE WEALTH THAN THE ENTIRE MIDDLE CLASS

This is so, so bleak and I don't understand how more of my colleagues aren't outraged at the systematic devaluation of our labor that this represents.

At a moment when @ucirvine.bsky.social is cutting dozens of faculty positions in the Humanities, it is investing $1m in providing a "personalized learning ecosystem" with generative AI chatbots to students in large lecture courses. dtei.uci.edu/opportunitie...

It's no surprise the right has gone all-in on demonizing empathy, since both making and laughing at this "joke" require the inability and/or unwillingness to imagine, for even a second, that people who work on fishing boats in the Caribbean live lives equally full, rich, and valuable as one's own.

This is blasphemous and just like @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social keeps insisting that we should penalize blatant lying from public figures, Christians should also socially sanction those who invoke the name of God in vain.

Oof, this Brightline Watch survey ...

When I first heard of Bluesky from people posting about it on X, I thought it was pronounced blue-skee (like Bluey, but with sk in the middle, I guess? or like russkiy?). I think that's roughly the level of seriousness with which everyone should take a niche vaguely left microblogging site.

When your mother is a social scientist and your godmother is an Episcopal priest, you get a section of your bookshelf that looks like this 🤓

i have said this before but when “getting rid of race in admissions” for the administration means “you can’t even try to reach out to underrepresented communities and encourage them to apply and if you do it is illegal discrimination against white people” then the actual goal here is segregation

This is known as "chain refoulment" and yes, it's a violation of international law.

Universities certainly are guilty of political violence, like when they called in hundreds of armed law enforcement agents last spring to forcibly shut down nonviolent student protests over Gaza, resulting in injured and traumatized stu- ... oh, is that not what she's talking about?

#APSA2025 PSA: although this was nearly impossible to anticipate, I, a person who gets queasy on both buses and boats, also got queasy on the SeaBus. If you are in a similar boat (as it were), be sure to sit facing forward. But also: SeaBus!

APSA 2025 sign of the times: "US and other dem- ... not fully consolidated authoritarian regimes"

The Trump admin plans to start discussions at the UN on revising 1951 & 1967 global refugee conventions that govern how asylum seekers and refugees are treated. Proposed changes include making migrants seek protection in the 1st safe country they enter, and making asylum only temporary.

'You Could Just Use an LLM to Analyze Those Texts' or 'Why Don't You Just Write a ChatGPT Prompt for That?': An Autoethnography of Presenting Interpretive Work at APSA in 2025

This one, and Precarious Life. Their arguments about grievability being a presupposition for a life that matters and the need to interpret our affective responses to some deaths but not others ("why the affect of horror is differentially distributed") are pretty much always near the top of my mind.

APSA 2025 has views!

Some evidence here for #4: trading obsequiousness for access to the king to secure favorable carveouts: bsky.app/profile/dfri...

To put this into context, the judicial warrant for the search at the Hyundai plant named just four people. Relying on that warrant, ICE detained nearly 500 people. DHS admitted that included U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and people lawfully here on visas.

It's not the most important part of the issue but Kavanaugh saying "well they should just sue if they're the victims of excessive force from ICE" when he himself has previously voted to bar lawsuits against federal officers for violations of the 4th Amendment in immigration cases takes chutzpah.

A thought experiment that has exited the realm of speculation is to reflect on how you would prove your own citizenship. Do you carry your passport? Can you be sure ICE agents won't decide it's fake? Oh, you don't carry it? Don't worry: you'll just be held in a detention center indefinitely.

Despite firms and markets’ willingness to gamble on short-term gains over the long-term costs associated with Donald Trump's agenda, we should not be under any illusions. Those long-term costs are coming, Erin Lockwood‬ warns. bit.ly/42iVMcE

I wrote up some thoughts on the curious case of markets' deference to Trump's obviously destructive economic policies. www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/w...

Great piece from @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social with six ways to explain the seemingly inexplicable lack of a market reaction to Trump: 1️⃣ motivated reasoning 2️⃣ ideology 3️⃣short-termism 4️⃣opportunities of personalism 5️⃣collective action problem 6️⃣herd mentality www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/w...

extremely funny

🚨NEW: Reversing *generations* of practice, the Board of Immigration Appeals gives ICE exactly what it demanded, ruling that any undocumented immigrant who entered illegally is categorically ineligible for release from detention on bond — expanding mandatory detention by millions of people.

"Intent" is an important concept in international law, but it can be challenging to prove because decision-makers rarely assert their intent to violate international law because that would be incredibly foolish and risk undermining a set of principles that also protect US civilians and armed forces.

Eleven Venezuelan civilians in a boat, two or three unarmed North Korean shellfish divers, 30 Yemeni villagers, hundreds of civilian deaths from US drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq ... www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/u...

More than 300k Black women being pushed out of the labor market while white men gained 365k more jobs is what we mean when we refer to racism as systemic.

This is why we ended up with "enhanced interrogation" and "enemy combatants" nearly 25 years ago. That there is not even the thinnest effort to bother ginning up a legal justification for this massacre of civilians puts us well beyond the very, very low bar of the depths of the war on terror.

Two things I underscore for students when I teach about laws of war: 1) States' justifications for the use of force are often pretextual and self-interested. 2) Many actors in the international system care deeply about international law. These can be and have always been true at the same time.