For chunkier things, see recent
2025-03-16: I’m probably more familiar with arbitration than most people from spending several years following ICANN, but even so the International Centre for Dispute Resolution’s “Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal,” sounded a bit dystopian.
2025-03-13: MFA Houston’s page for Alexey Titarenko’s photographs
2025-03-11: Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young’s Music and Light Box on display in NYC Mar 27 – Apr 12
2025-03-11: Columbia’s own James Schamus on Trump’s attacks on the university
2025-03-11: every US citizen should read Malcolm Nance on Trump’s plans for Canada
2025-03-11: AFA-CWA’s promo video for its C.H.A.O.S. approach to striking is 🏆 (background here)
2025-03-11: Starship 8 blowing up in the Bahamas is gorgeous — Musk should do it more often
2025-03-10: I didn’t realize the great Onethingwell started up the stopped again
2025-03-10: this still isn’t happiness
2025-03-10: This [U Chicago AAUP statement is good.](https://uchicagoaaup.wordpress.com/***2025-03-10:*** This U Chicago AAUP statement is good. But they had to publish it on Wordpress because faculty can’t speak as the university in the same way that administrators can — which is strange when you think about it.) But they had to publish it on Wordpress because, apparently, faculty can’t speak as the university in the same way that administrators can — which is strange when you think about it.
2025-03-09: FB’s explicitly blocking access to Gil Durán’s Nerd Reich because it “addresses topics like the ‘Network State’ concept and critiques of tech industry figures 2025-03-09: Mike Masnick on “Why Techdirt Is Now a Democracy Blog”
2025-03-09: Nina Burleigh (a/k/a American Freakshow) on [MAGA’s Heart of Darkness](https://www.americanfreakshow.news/p/magas-heart-of-darkness
2025-03-07: “the empathy exploit” is quite a phrase
2025-03-06: Timeline of Technological Buffoonery in the DOGE Era
2025-03-06: “We think it perspicacious to note” that if CRMEP’s philosophy students want to win this fight — and they should — they’ll need to find better copy-writers.
2025-03-06: “life-size chocolate Guernica” should be a mid-’90s punk band, not an actual life-size chocolate Guernica
2025-03-06: “# “Space focused on technology, new media and artistic research”
2025-03-04: Columbia U (my alma mater and neighbor for deacdes) keeps on screwing up its handling of the pro-Palestinian protests
2025-03-04: Dictionary.com doesn’t know how to pronounce the singular word interstice
2025-03-03: not enough people understand that Musk’s goal is to exterminate multitudes — and Trump is cool with that because that’d make him a Great Man
2025-03-03: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Journal of Architectural Education pulls its call for an issue about Palestine (2025-03-10: the board resigned en bloc — good for them!)
2025-03-03: Gregg Gonsalves gets warmer than most — the Trump admin wants to destroy universties — but his analysis still focuses on science, which is a mistake.
2025-02-27: Steve Vladeck notes Big Law partners worry “they could jeopardize their economic future by protecting the rule of law” 🎻 🔬 😭 🌊
2025-02-26: a super obit for a fascinating guy, Chistopher “Sandy” Jencks (🎩 LF)
2025-02-26: an awful squib about N5N1 killing sand hill cranes in southern Indiana
2025-02-26: on Christian support for Trump and liberal denialism (🎩 Mike McG)
2025-02-24
2025-02-24: 40% of the glaciers in Central Europe melted between 2000 and 2023
2025-02-24: Peter Sellers’s 1975 ads for TWA are brilliant (this one especially), but the meta-ad he made is next-next-next-next level
2025-02-24: Wankpanzer vs Pinto according to a hobbyist stats blog that looks great
2025-02-22
2025-02-22: CPAC as gonzo politics
2025-02-22: Paul Prudence has a really sharp aesthetic
2025-02-22: Kagi, the privacy-oriented subscription search engine, is doing some interesting things
2025-02-22: ABC: “US cyber agency puts election security staffers who worked with the states on leave” — I don’t understand why this get so little attention
2025-02-22: I wrote a Bsky thread about Trump’s attacks on higher ed
2025-02-21
2025-02-21: WiReD has a razor-sharp take on the fashion shift among broligarchs: “everyone missed that they were dressing for the job they really wanted”: emperors.
2025-02-21: Ithaca’s Lavender Hill Commune, “home away from home in the 1970s for many displaced members of what is now known as the LGBTQ+ community, has been officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places.”
2025-02-21: Marc Greif on the threat of fascism: “The risk of overreaction is trivial compared to the risks of accommodation.”
2025-02-21: In a time of unprecedented crisis, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries [is promoting his “vividly illustrated book — the perfect holiday gift to inspire the whole family!”](https://bsky.app/profile/unraveledpress.com/post/3linkppo6ls2j
2025-02-20
2025-02-20: this Xitter thread is unusually dense with smart observations (e.g., fascism is “a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place,” and “the only mode of moral argumentation you ever see from a reactionary is whataboutism”)
2025-02-20: A phrase we’ll see more of, I wager: “the shallow state”
2025-02-12
2025-02-12: Lucian Truscott offers a preview of blue-on-blue violence
2025-02-12: Chris Newfield gives a masterclass on why the proposed change in NIH funding would be a systemic catastrophe for US higher ed
2025-02-12: Jeff Sharlet explains why faculty must be open with students about that threat 2025-02-12: Trump wants to cancel 50% of the office space leased by the federal government
2025-02-10
2025-02-10: Feb 10 is the anniversary of the first (reported) collision involving an active and a dead satellite
2025-02-10: Why doomscroll when you can eduscroll? a 🏆 to aizk for their brrrrrilliant TikTok-like interface for Wikipedia
2025-02-10: Microsoft’s copilot “loves the creativity” of my shocktwerps neologism for Musk’s übermunchkins
2025-02-10: 404media, an excellent news outlet, on “AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications”
2025-02-10: “First they came for the cokeheads and I did not speak out because I was not a cokehead…”
2025-02-10: “far center” seems like a useful political category, and this piece on that op-ed pest Pamela Paul is hilarious ~
2025-02-05
2025-02-05: Yessssssss a Facebook skullpaper meme generator!
2025-02-05: Gil Duran’s Nerd Reich on the blueprint for Musk’s coup
2025-02-05: Canada’s tariff list included “Unmanned aircraft…Designed for the carriage of passengers” (8806.10.00), “Fitted cases for church bells” (4202.99.10), Catgut (4206.00.10), Burial shrouds (6307.90.10), “Pointe shoes or block toe shoes, for professional dancers employed by full-time dance companies which meet Canada Council standards of professionalism or for ballet students in full-time attendance at a ballet school which meets Canada Council curriculum standards” (6403.59.10), and sugar tongs (8215.10.10)
2025-02-05: Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West “spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take”, called “Bullshit Machines”
2025-02-05: Newly minted AG Pam Bondi issued a rule that requires spies to be caught doing “more traditional espionage” (tiny cameras and hand-cranked radios?), which is literally like saying that thieves have to be caught wearing a black-and-white striped shirt and carrying a canvas bag ovr their shoulder
2025-02-01
2025-02-01: James Fallows offer the kind of high-level, well-informed context for the DC plane crash we need more of
2025-02-01: Someone named Danyelle Thomas on people who “were counting on a status quo election where [they] could make a morally superior protest vote without serious consequence” and “expected enough voters to do the heavy lifting of a pragmatic choice that would defeat Cheeto Christ Stupid Czar while [they] get to say [they] voted morally”
2025-02-01: Today in Tabs on Krugman on Krugman leaving the NYT
2025-02-01: the PPRuNe (Professional Pilots Rumor Network) thread devoted to the DC crash
2025-01-29
2025-01-29: Really interesting Bsky thread](https://bsky.app/profile/dorsaamir.bsky.social/post/3lglw6iefus2g) on the whether the Müller-Lyer illusion is culturally informed
2025-01-29: “During 1965–66, Mad magazine attempted a French edition and hired [Melvin] Van Peebles as editor-in-chief during its run of only five issues.” (Wikipedia)
2025-01-29: Paul Krugman’s piece of how and why he left the NYT is, in a quite way, a jaw-dropping account of how that paper has degenerated into, basically, Fox News for the NPR set (🎩 Ina B)
2025-01-29: Over at Aaron Rupar’s excellent newsletter Public Notice, David R. Lurie (who describes himself as an “occasional writer about the law and related matters”) shows us what proper journalism looks and sounds like
2025-01-29: “Raging Misogynist” Now Federal Government H.R.’s Top Lawyer” is [quite a headline
2025-01-24
2025-01-24: Why do “AIs” default to the condescending voice middle-school textbook Q&As, like this Anne Franke bot?
2025-01-24: I don’t understand how this is possible, but I also don’t understand how it would be impossible — Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day substack will become more relevant to more people with every day that passes
2025-01-24: a new issue of The Diagram is out!
2025-01-16
2025-01-16: Matt Stoller’s Jan 13 issue of his anti/trust-related newsletter “Big” has a jaw-dropping list of the regulatory issues “Meta” faces (does anyone really believe in that name?), i.e., why Zuck is groveling up a storm at Mar-a-Lago
2025-01-16: Jim Henson’s muppets weren’t always so peace-loving
2025-01-16: Steamed buns (yes, those ones) are helping Chinese weapons engineers “turn the angry king of explosives into a beautiful queen”
2025-01-16: a site with zillions of links to English-language literary magazines, with short excerpts of pieces recently ran (🎩SB)
2025-01-11
2025-01-11: Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber Matthew Livelsberger’s two “minifestoes,” less than a page each, basically advocate exterminating half the US population (guess which half!)
2025-01-11: Dennis Cooper has put together a pretty epic set of images on his blog
2025-01-11: my love of primates doing human stuff transcends all words, but this might just be the greatest monkey video ever
2025-01-11: Paolo Gerbaudo has coined one of the most useful phrases I’ve seen in a long time: “vintage theory”
2025-01-11: Meta’s internal MAGA memo uses a slippery phrase we’ll be seeing more of, I think: “cognitive diversity”
2025-01-11: Robert Luxemburg’s unnverving video “UNTITLED (2025-01-08)…”
2025-01-11: Will Stancil’s Bluesky thread on our “massive information infrastructure which privileges conspiracy theories, demagoguery, bigotry, lies, and hysteria” is well worth reading (as is his whole feed)
2025-01-04
2025-01-04: Via the amazing FIG Projects on Facebook, an intriguing site on Housing Standardization
2025-01-04: “Meet The Blind Birder Reimagining Accessibility In The Outdoors” (Science Friday)
2025-01-04: Trillium Domes geodesic dome kits and plans an unusually great Joy Division t-shirt
2025-01-04: The Map Room blog’s list of notable map books published in 2024
2025-01-04: Melton and Wallace, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception (2mb PDF)
2025-01-04: Simon Meier-Vieracker, “Uncreative Academic Writing,” in Schreiber and Ohly, KI:Text Diskurse über KI-Textgeneratoren / AI:Text: AI Text Generator Discourses (De Gruyter 2024)
2025-01-04: Internet Archive’s “Classic TV Commercials” repo
2025-01-04: Joe Frank on the net “A One-Woman Confessional: Eight Films by Cecilia Mangini”
2025-01-04: OSINT Dojo resources for open-source intelligence An epic list of “Awesome MacOS Software”
2025-01-04: Bellingcat’s auto-archiver for archiving links to vids, images, and social media from Google Sheets
2025-01-04: “A curated directory of 1000+ Mac menu bar apps”
2025-01-04: Internet Archive’s snapshot of my father’s crazy-but-smart solution for funding healthcare
2025-01-04: Achille Mbembe and Milo Rau on “The Paranoia of the Western Mind”
2025-01-04: “The Cagots of France,” persecuted for centuries then utterly forgotten (La Piccioletta Barca)
2025-01-04: MIT Tech review on how to pitch them
2024-12-13
2024-12-13: Nathan Newman](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nathan-Newman-6) on “The Crisis of Elite Indifference to Corporate Mass Murder,” complete with a “modest proposal” (i.e., a parody) to “[l]icense no more than ten CEO murders per year.”
2024-12-13: The Grauniad’s piece on synthesizing “mirror microbes” is moderately terrifying.
2024-12-13: As usual, Astra Taylor is right.
2024-12-13: This new book on diagrams in anthropological discourse is both interesting and ‘‘interesting’’ — the kind of coy, artsy rhetorical style feel verrry late ’80s / early ’90s, and not in a good way.
2024-12-13: NYU declared Andrew Ross, one of its finest faculty members, persona non grata after he was arrested at a pro-Pal demo.