The circle of death is: Cut faculty (or non-replace) so you offer fewer classes so fewer people enroll so you cut faculty so you offer fewer classes so fewer people enroll so then the market has spoken.

The best throw pillow ever? @septaphilly.bsky.social

If you paid taxes for 2025, you likely paid: $124 — school lunch & nutrition programs $49 — diplomacy to prevent wars $19 — USPS $19 — Federal Aviation Administration $18 — national parks and $4,049 — weapons and war. These priorities are hurting us all. We need change. #TaxDay

Hell yes

Its not a business! It’s a public good! And it’s not “running out of money,” either. Republicans deliberately created this illusion by requiring USPS to prefund pensions *75 years* into the future. Literally no other agency (or business, lol) requires this.

I quite happily live in a neighborhood where most people do not share my religion, where multiple languages are represented, and where people have come from a lot of different countries. Bigoted assholes always assume everyone else actually shares their bigotries.

My husband has worked on earth science at Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 2008 and all of this is true, demoralizing, and incredibly short sighted.

"Call it the great American nerd exodus, as scientists studying cancer, agriculture and weather prediction suddenly became the targets, or collateral damage, of political attacks." www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/o...

I'm the daughter of an Army paratrooper who refused orders during our illegal invasion of Vietnam back in the day. He went to LBJ military jail. Dad taught his girls this: "Just following orders" is NEVER any excuse for anyone who's complicit in war crimes. You MUST refuse heinous orders.

This. AI claims to do my job. I don’t want that. I love the work of writing, research & teaching. I want someone to take all the additional work that has been added over the years in the name of austerity off my plate. Dismantle the harmful structures that make it hard to do my job, please.

Anyway I spend a lot of time here talking about the immense harms being done by the US government & about why we should have healthcare & basic income & public transit & education. I wish those were things the govt wanted to do. Also, I'm glad when they support some amazing things in science & space

Check out this website I’ve been working on as part of commemorating the 50th anniversary of the July 4th Coalition’s Bicentennial without Colonies protest in Philadelphia: www.july4sincolonias.org

If you are in Philadelphia next weekend, come hear me speak at this event at Taller Puertorriqueno at 1pm on Saturday, April 11

So I've done some posts on the follies and fantasies of trying to reach non-voters at scale, which a lot of leftists believe is the key to the electoral socialist revolution. I'm equal opportunity, so now I'd like to talk about the tunnel-vision that pervades a lot of the Dem political class. 1/x

I don't see this said enough: the widespread use of generative AI is not only making our jobs as educators harder logistically, but also emotionally. It is genuinely sad to be suspicious of students when you have spent so much time building a pedagogy based on trust and not being a cop. It sucks.

History changes. All the time. Because we learn more, ask different questions, consult different sources and communities. “Historical revisionism” is just how history works.

Any engagement with technology that doesn’t acknowledge that all technologies have inherent and inseparable social and political ramifications is completely worthless. We ridicule the idea that “guns don’t kill people” and immediately turn around and say the same thing about GenAI, for example.

Shout this from the rooftops

Respectable turnout for #NoKings in very red Warren, PA

Happy birthday to the Washington Metro, which opened 50 years ago today with service on 4.6 mi of Red Line between Rhode Is. Ave & Farragut N. System now serves 130 mi. The DC Metro shows that, with good planning & enough investment, the public sector can succeed & build something extraordinary.

OH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! 💚

movie about all the world's nations working together to stave off an environmental apocalypse succeeds by completely avoiding politics

"In 1969, [Dr. Rodolfo F. Acuña] became the first professor in CSUN’s Mexican American studies department, now called the #Chicano and #Chicana Studies Department, which became an incubator for Latino activism in L.A. and beyond." www.latimes.com/obituaries/s... RIP Dr. Rodolfo F. Acuña!

"AI cannot coexist with education--it can only degrade it" YES OMG YES

Solidarity with Emily Tucker and her open letter to students. Tucker writes, "But the great thing is, you don’t have to go along with this, and I urge you not to. You can refuse to use the chatbot. You can tell your professors that you don’t want them to use it or to require you to use it."

Support the USPS

Let's talk about the "you should have just obeyed the law" response to police violence. A study several years ago found that police are the sixth leading cause of death for Black men in the United States. But it is, if you can imagine, worse than that.

It's not my impostor syndrome that bothers me. It's the fact that not enough other people feel this way about themselves and go about their work so confidently but so incompetently.

Good mail day

No oil means no electricity. No electricity means no water pumps. No running water means no sanitation. No power for hospitals. No fuel for ambulances. No refrigeration for drugs. Mass death soon follows. This is a crime against humanity.

Brooklyn yellow pages went so hard

They have money to bomb schools overseas. And build data centers that raise our energy bills and pollute our water. And to buy giant warehouses to imprison our neighbors. NEVER take "we can't afford it" as an excuse again. They're choosing profit over taking care of us.

looks like we traded generations of healthcare for 4 days worth of missiles

The language of austerity is simply an expression of power masquerading as powerlessness.

move slow and repair things

Honestly, I am absolutely disgusted by academics suggesting that AI can do the reading and writing for you. At a certain point, what you're bragging about is fraud. And in a broader sense, what you're contributing to is the erosion of knowledge and the destruction of trust in academic publishing.

At ~$1 billion/day, the US has spent as much on the war in Iran in ten days as the entire FY25 budget for the National Science Foundation ($10 billion). Trump's FY26 budget request for the agency declined to $3.9 billion, due to a "realignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment."

Historians are quite capable of explaining the hellscape that is the US at this particular minute, and its kind of telling that you imagine we won't because it means you haven't been listening or reading

If you took $1 billion and gave it to the endowment of a different small college each day, they could each provide a free college education to several hundred students per year in perpetuity. Instead we are using that money to bomb schools and kill students in Iran, for no clearly stated purpose.

i live in small town in the no man's land of pennsylvania between philadelphia and pittsburgh. i am exposed to plenty of right wing thinking. not really worried about making my social media experience less pleasant in order to "get out of my echo chamber."

Congress should authorize postal banking *and* allow USPS to ground lease its land to multifamily homebuilders (provided any project on a lot holding an operating post office includes a new, renovated post office on the ground floor).

Maybe - and I know this is so crazy - but maybe Democrats should just go out and campaign against Trump and his policies bc they are massively unpopular and start worrying more about being seen as insufficiently tough and less about how to be a somewhat Republicany Democrat. Just a thought.

Seven years ago, we published our first piece, a gorgeous essay by @kerileighmerritt.bsky.social. Since then, we've published nearly 400 pieces and paid every single contributor for their work. Thanks to everyone who's donated to, read, and taught with our magazine over the years!

As long as I'm quoting I should also cite this excellent paragraph by the student author:

Previous generations of rich people knew that it was important for them to shut the fuck up and build libraries and parks and hospitals since that was the only way we would tolerate them in society. This generation of rich people have forgotten why this was necessary. We should remind them.

rice is life, and I got a thread to share about rice: Park Chung-hee's obsession to make South Korea rice self-sufficient in the 1970s changed everything about the country, including your favorite Korean foods and the urban environment 🧵

Climate change coverage fell 14% globally in 2025, while the world endured record heat, raging wildfires, and devastating floods. The crisis intensified. The headlines didn’t. Less coverage = less urgency. www.colorado.edu/today/2026/0...

So glad to see Judith Resnik's crucial new book.

American culture of the 1840’s would have been *very fucking surprised* to see the Irish considered as co-founders. Elon’s an ahistorical dipshit, but its always worth saying some stuff out loud: if you‘re a fellow Irish-American and you aren’t 100% pro-immigrant, you’re a fucking embarassment.