For nimbler things, see micro
I wrote this when the conventional wisdom held that NIH cuts’ impact would be limited to those fields. Yes, really — most academics really believed that.
An eight-year-old rant warning academics to organize — “because history will move much more quickly than your CV”
Scientists need to stop reflexively calling what Trump is doing is “an attack on science.” It includes that, yes, but it isn’t limited to it — not even close.
My 🔮 about what Trump & Co. would do to CU were 🎯
Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
What Germans should have done in the 1930s but for US citizens now
“Not a day goes by without Trump or one of his associates explicitly acknowledging that their polices will kill large numbers of people, and that they’re doing it for electoral advantage,”
Exactly what it says on the label
When Trump & Co. attack elites, look down not up
If the fires that were set and continue to be stoked every day by ultraists like Hamas and Netanyahu consume US higher ed, the entire sector — all of it — will burn to the ground.
25-03-05 swasticar flyer A helpful PDF that you can print out and leave on every Tesla you see!
2025-02
I wrote this on Facebook on 7 Nov 2024, barely a day after the election, and it seems a little too prescient.
Maybe a GOP bill raising endowment taxes by 1500% will wake academics up?
Somewhere between amazing and terrifying
Rutherford Chang, RIP
Good question! Bestial acts.
An exegesis of a detail in DeSantis’s proposed budget and a how it relates to “deconstructing the administrative state”
How to read an AI prompt
How Gregory Bateson can help us to figure out who’s to blame for Trump’s election, and what that means for activism
2025-01
Whether “AI” is conscious really doesn’t matter
Some delicately contrarian thoughts on this stuff
The media hasn’t quite figured out how Trump is eviscerating the federal civil service, so let me help you out.
An embroidered dress from the late 1940s, then and now
Musk has a chat with an acolyte, and I have a few thoughts about habitual internet expressions manufacture alienation
A short, deep dive into the culture of English translations of modern lit
The Spanish writer Roy Galàn on Lynch’s work (and a meta-meme)
found meme
A few thoughts about “AI”
You won’t find a more detailed or better-sourced chronology about this anywhere.
On Peter Thiel’s Financial Times opinion piece
What’s Meta up to?
“If you let the rhythm of his rocking enter you, he’ll remind you what it feels like to be ecstatic, what it is to be hysterical, what it means to circle the meaningless void that is the wellspring of all meaning.”
BONUS CONTENT! 2018
Exactly what it says on the label
Is Cinema really that much greater than iPad?
The “cultural discount” is alive and well.
2024
2024-12
A few thoughts on an 18th-C pair of dice.
If you were wondering where all those used copies went, now you know.
A squib about those… X& Y& Z& A …t-shirts
Yet another editorial board resigns, with a few thoughts about what that means
A multi-FOAF just named Marc Campbell posted some album covers designed for the Prestige label by the cartoonist Don Martin.
Amanda Gorman, who shot to fame when she recited her poem “The Hill We Climb” for Biden’s inauguration in 2021, just dropped a new poem that riffs heavily on the movie Wicked, and I think it’s pretty amazing.
BONUS CONTENT! 1988
A short note about working with SRL way back when, to be elaborated into something more interesting at some point soon.
The WP is reporting that the White House is considering “preemptive pardons to figures who might face the hostility of the incoming Trump administration.” I’d have to think hard — very hard — to imagine anything more emblematic of the Biden admin’s abject failure to grasp the threat Trump poses…
One underappreciated aspect of the news about Israel’s ex–MoD and IDF CoS Moshe Ya’alon is his use of ethnic cleansing rather than “genocide.” As we’ve…
If the rumors about DeSantis for Sec Def turns out to be serious, the media flap will focus on his “anti-woke” noise and jokes about his white boots e…
2024-11
(image) Pere Borrell del Caso, “Escaping Criticism” (1874).
My new year’s resolution for 2025 will be to consign George Santayana to the same dustbin as Godwin’s “Law” and “future historians.” Ritually reciting…
(image) Photo: Irish Centre for Poetry Studies.[^1]
(image) Footnote 2, from Gregory Bateson, “The Growth of Paradigms for Psychiatry” (ca. 1976), orig. “Epilogue: The Growth of Paradigms for Psychiatry,” in P…
Not sure I’ve seen anyone say it so bluntly, but it’s becoming clearer that criminality is the new governance. I can think of several reasons that’d h…
(image) FB has decided this is one of those images I need to see again and again and again, via various “unsolicited pix” groups that claim to be about this o…
Apparently there’s a whole series of big moons coming up, and I saw my first claim that so-and-so Native American tribe called this a “[such-and-such…
(image) This sounds like a soundbite, i.e., a short statement extracted from a larger context, but 18YO [i.e., my eighteen-year-old daughter] has tuned me on…