El-Sayed, Lawrence and McKinney all won progressive campaigns in Michigan last night by talking about climate and clean energy like it was a kitchen-table issue — because skyrocketing energy bills and endless wildfire smoke matter to people.

Forty years ago, in 1986, NYC suffered over 1,600 homicides. Homicides would peak at over 2,200 a few years later. There were 305 in 2025.

Constantine@ajaxsinger.bsky.social · 18h ago

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

">900 people in Washtenaw County, MI, have been sickened with cyclosporiasis since mid-June. Linda Kim, a public health nurse, has called >100 of them. Almost everyone has said the same thing: It’s excruciating, and one of the worst illnesses they’ve experienced." kffhealthnews.org/public-healt...

Nurses Chase Cyclospora, Aided by Interviews, Fast-Food Receipts — And the Messy Details - KFF Health News

Yes, they’ve heard all the poop jokes. Public health staffers are painstakingly tracing the sources of this massive outbreak, combing through fast-food orders and lettuce purchases as they listen to p...

kffhealthnews.org

I wrote about the Trojan horse, and what we can learn from her mouth about different cultural attitudes towards deception and violence. As someone comments below, the phrase GIFT ARTICLE is pretty scary in this context.

Chris Suellentrop@suellentrop.bsky.social · yesterday

Turns out @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social knows a lot about ancient epics www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

They could always sign up to give comment at a public meeting.

The Wall Street Journal@wsj.com · 18h ago

New York City’s business elites are long accustomed to direct access to City Hall, where even Democratic mayors felt the need to court the city’s wealthiest and most influential corporate leaders. That access is getting shredded by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Universities “are increasingly acting like other employers, finding “complicated and sometimes pretextual reasons” to fire employees, even those with tenure. “What we’re seeing at the New School is emblematic of the rising pressures on higher education as a labor market and as an industry”

He Had Tenure. The New School Laid Him Off Anyway.

The professor, a longtime critic of the university, was among 19 educators who lost their positions as the institution navigated financial woes.

nytimes.com

LSE are advertising a tenure track position on IPE with a specialism in global environmental politics - rare to see these positions come up, particularly those in GEP link to application form below

Here is a job @brownhist.bsky.social to which I hope many people will apply...

H-Net Job Guide@h-net-job-guide.bsky.social · yesterday

New job: History of Early Modern East Asia (c. 1400-1850) Brown University jobs.h-net.org/jobs/70189

The Tikvah Fund is committed to a Judeopessimist view of Jewish history that sees all of world history as a series of unchanging hatreds and persecutions, so that someone who hates Jews because Israel killed his family in Lebanon is analogous to a Nazi. Historical context is thus their enemy.

El-Sayed did not “minimize the attack” on a Michigan synagogue. He said it was ethically and legally indefensible and emphasized that we can understand the context without condoning - which is also how I feel about Israeli genocide in Gaza after 10/7/2023.

Smoke has arrived in Seattle, but the other side of the Cascades is absolutely brutal. Wenatchee and other towns (e.g., Plain, Entiat) have been over 1,000 AQI today. Please use air purifiers, N95 masks, and avoid being outdoors if you’re able - there is no safe level of wildfire smoke exposure.

The University of Michigan's Survey Research Center @um-src.bsky.social is seeking motivated New Yorkers to serve as field interviewers on the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey. recruit.isr.umich.edu/jobs/658306-...

Field Interviewer New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey August 2026 - The University of Michigan

If you have not yet done so please read the full description by clicking on the (v). You are encouraged to apply, regardless of your current work assignment.

recruit.isr.umich.edu

Everything is big in Texas. Including the racism, bigotry & law breaking across Texas’ public universities. And the resistance. The lawsuits are here. First one hit Tech. This one hits A&M. UT just matter of time. @texasaaup.bsky.social @aaup.org

Gautam Hans@gshans.bsky.social · yesterday

Another banger from @aclu.org @aaup.org www.aclutx.org/press-releas...

Demographers —The PAA call for papers is now open! There are TWO qualitative sessions this year, including one that I’m organizing. If you do any qualitative demography or demography-adjacent work, please submit an extended abstract! paa_acgi.informz.net/z/cjUucD9taT...

Correct, the point isn’t to make them feel shame. The point is to reinforce the group norms.

Betsy Humphrey@betsyvt.bsky.social · yesterday

They may be shameless, but shunning, booing and not accepting them into public spaces is the correct response.

I read this story long before the pandemic, but it's forever associated with the pandemic for me now because in April 2020, my makeshift home desk was by a window overlooking an elevated train station, and I could see the trains come in, doors open to empty cars, no one get on or off, doors close

Adam Rawnsley@arawnsley.bsky.social · yesterday

Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

this is just objectively crazy but i feel like it dropped and people shrugged because ya of course he did. thinking about what follow up reporting/commentary could be done to keep this on people's radar and coming up short..

Trump overrode his own agencies to deny 4 Democratic disaster requests

President Donald Trump cast aside bipartisan precedent when he rejected eligible disaster requests from four blue states.

politico.com

getting tired of people on the left still launching substack newsletters after all the reporting on that company in recent years

“Weill Cornell Medicine agreed to pay over $1 billion to settle civil claims of patients who were sexually abused by former assistant professor and urologist Dr. Darius Paduch, and established a $10 million yearly fund for three years to support sexual misconduct prevention”

Weill Cornell Settles Sexual Abuse Claims for Over $1 Billion, Announces $30 Million Patient Safety Initiatives

Weill Cornell Medicine will pay over $1 billion to settle civil claims brought by patients sexually abused by former assistant professor and urologist Dr. Darius Paduch. The agreement will also establ...

cornellsun.com

I think today's liberals in the US are used to a social environment where pogroms are rare and don't realize the role armed self defense plays in that state of affairs www.history.com/articles/red...

Red Summer of 1919: How Black WWI Vets Fought Back Against Racist Mobs | HISTORY

When dozens of brutal race riots erupted across the U.S. in the wake of World War I and the Great Migration, black ve...

history.com

And then, for the first time I can remember, a journalist literally reported that I am "a little annoying."

New draft posted: The Collision of State Climate Tort Suits with Federal Deregulation, forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal Forum. This Essay examines the preemption arguments in the Suncor Energy v. Boulder case, which the Supreme Court will review in Oct. term 2026: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Six of the top-10 costliest wildfire disasters in world history have occurred since 2017.

I just replaced the filters in our air purifiers and ordered another set, in what has become a grim annual ritual. Wildfires and smoke are a natural part of life in the Northwest, but the burning of fossil fuels has made these events larger, more frequent and severe.

The Seattle Times@seattletimes.com · 2d ago

Wildfire smoke from a trifecta of catastrophic wildfires will roll in Tuesday and could cause the air quality to be unhealthy and reduce visibility.

We should have a public health system and regulatory body that proactively and aggressively protects the most vulnerable among us.

Just your regular reminder that: 1) Almost everyone has an underlying health issue if you look hard enough 2) People with underlying health issues don't deserve to die for eating lettuce 3) We should be strengthening, not weakening our regulatory processes. And properly funding them.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 2d ago

Breaking News: Two deaths in Michigan have been linked to cyclospora. Both people who had the parasite also had underlying health issues.

Not incidentally, sex ed and social media, two of the big things the Think of the Children crowd want to restrict children's access to, are the first place a lot of kids encounter the concept that a person with nominal authority over you doesn't get to touch you without permission

Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social · 2d ago

Can't think of a thing that will radicalize a generation faster than "you've gotta let that old man in the corner over there see what's inside those pants before you play Kindergarten volleyball."

I do appreciate that learning the history of the role of the AAU during the Red Scares (that's what the link at the top of this thread comes from) prepared me for the day they would offer higher ed up for political repression on a silver platter

Being a strong advocate of institutional neutrality and also advocating for using political ideology as a key criterion for hiring are not logically consistent positions.

Liam Knox@liamknox.bsky.social · 2d ago

Scoop: The Trump administration is sending a letter to college presidents asking them to pledge a series of policy changes by the end of the year. Unlike last year's Compact, this effort was devised with input from higher ed leaders. Free link to my exclusive: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

First came framing loan caps as protecting students by pressuring universities to keep costs down, with the likely outcome of pushing low-income students out of school. Here’s another policy framed as “helping,” but again premised on exclusion-- protecting students from "low-return” jobs

The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 2d ago

President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/aaAEu6v