Celebrating Catalan Review volume 40! 🎉 This issue features the special section "After Literature", exploring contemporary uses of the Catalan canon. Available #OpenAccess via #S2O 🔗 bit.ly/CATR-Vol-40 @wviestenz.bsky.social @berlihe.bsky.social @neuspenalba.bsky.social @hispanists-ahgbi.bsky.social

A huge part of being an undergrad is *discovering* ways of thinking and experiencing the world that are outside of all their expectations and understandings. Boiling our offerings down to a homogenous sludge of career-oriented boilerplate is the polar opposite of that.

We’ve been on a 10 year run of colleges shutting down their most unique and valuable departments in favor of bland templated programs that they offer vacuous, mediocre versions of to students who just assume college has always been vacuous and mediocre in this manner.

I am not sure that we appreciate how much hostility there is from the far right to the learning and speaking of languages. 1/2 www.thetimes.com/article/9a33...

Language centre closes after ‘far-right intimidation’

The director of the Language Hub in Glasgow claimed the premises were no longer safe for staff after a ‘surveillance’ campaign by anti-migration activists

thetimes.com

OMG DHS appears to say that it will apply this rule about changing majors to ADDING a major, telling students who need double majors to "plan ahead and enroll in both at the same time." These people are intent on killing America's university system. They are not this stupid.

The most anti-legal immigrant administration ever just made it illegal for international students to transfer schools or change majors or shift any "educational objective" in their 1st year and for graduate students **at any point** ever, at all. There is no legal basis for this

They are clearly planning on trotting out some kind of AI agents to replace teachers entirely, and need teachers to train their products, but everyone has tech FOMO so we're all doomed anyway

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 3w ago

I love it when companies offer free shovels to dig your own grave.

🎉 Catalan Review turns 40! Read Editor William Viestenz's reflections on the journal's history and explore a specially selected collection of archive articles, free to read for a limited time. 🔗 bit.ly/CATR-40 @wviestenz.bsky.social @berlihe.bsky.social @hispanists-ahgbi.bsky.social #Catalan

With this ruling, the birthright issue is not going away. The right hasn't really begun *organizing* around getting rid of the citizenship clause. Like Roe, this will be their fight for a generation. And if the Democrats just say "we won" and ignore it, like Roe, the Republicans will eventually win.

You know how this is going to go at the @nytimes.com, right? Ross Douthat is going to do an "Interesting Times" episode with Appiah and Wilentz; then David French, Ezra Klein, & Bret Stephens will write separate columns telling never-Trumpers, liberals, and neocons to take the report seriously.

What if DOGE but for the Humanities?

“having money on the line enforces clarity” I saw the saddest man I’ve ever seen lose $5000 on a single hand of blackjack at a casino in turtle lake, wisconsin

just from a pure layman’s perspective, the entire concept behind betting markets as an accurate predictor seems stupid as hell. what does the fact that 77% of degenerates were stupid enough to bet on something impossible tell me other than they’re really stupid and/or addicted to gambling

onion person@junlper.beer · 2mo ago

prediction markets doing press and paying people to make society trust they’re accurate, then giving someone the trump admin has hailed as a “journalist” a paid sponsorship post to cast doubt on elections is horrifying. prediction markets need to be made illegal immediately

We quite literally have a whites only refugee program and somehow the media won’t call the Administration white supremacists.

Mother Jones@motherjones.com · 2mo ago

Every single refugee we've let in since December is supposedly fleeing white genocide.

Every time we hear about how genAI has pushed another teenager to suicide, another person into committing a mass shooting, or generated CSAM of school girls used to blackmail their schools, remember we were told that what we'd be hearing about is a cure to every cancer, and global poverty itself

Erin Fogg says Free Link@criminalerin.bsky.social · 2y ago

Really have a hard time getting over all these guyAIs looking at this world simply teeming with problems with well known solutions & deciding the best way they can help is to create whole new global problems that no human alive even remotely understands never mind knows how to actually fix

another way to look at it is that if you are indeed the product of the tech installed around you, you are being fashioned to be as devoid of independent intelligence as practicable AI in the classroom is obviously part of this

NEW: ProPublica identified at least 79 children who’ve been left screaming, unable to breathe, or otherwise hurt by tear gas and pepper spray during Trump’s historic immigration crackdown.

Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Has Harmed Scores of Kids With Tear Gas, Pepper Spray

In several cities, judges have chastised federal officers, saying they used excessive force. One former DHS leader called ProPublica’s findings a “bright red flag.”

propublica.org

Oh no, continued

Via Sportsnet

victoria zeller🫛 (RISEBALL, summer ‘27)@dirtbagqueer.rocks · 3mo ago

really fucking cool to see the arena full of buffalo idiots sing the canadian anthem like that tbh. maybe a little corny but it’s always been really cool to me that we do both

Aquesta setmana / this week!

Many thanks to Núria Silleras-Fernández for including me in this special issue of eHumanista on pleasure and pain in the medieval and early modern Iberian world -- and in such good company! www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/volumes/66

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

The way Altman talks about parenting is really revealing I think. Whether it's sales pitch or deep rooted philosophy, the ordinary tasks of living and working are just too unfathomably hard to imagine trying to do. They want you to conceive of the labor that makes you a person as impossible.

X2Y@x2y.tech · 6mo ago

SAM ALTMAN: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

Concerned about ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers? This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person. www.socialcirclega.gov/home/showpub...

I'm very grateful to Emily C. Francomano, Sol Miguel-Prendes, and @albertlloret.bsky.social for their thoughtful responses to _Alone Together_ in the latest issue of La corónica. It's hard to express the feeling of being read with such sensitivity and critical acumen. I learned a lot about my book!

i’ll end this little brainstorm by just asking what it is, exactly, that the MAGA right likes about the United States, since it explicitly rejects those things that make this nation distinctive — its pluralism, its revolutionary heritage and egalitarian aspirations, and its republican institutions

The stories weren’t played together on A1, but they probably should’ve been. We’ve come a long way as a planet from the Arab spring days when tech bros touted themselves as harbingers of freedom.

Yesterday morning kids were sent running from their bus stop in panic because ICE showed up. This guy at today’s ICE Out of Lindenwold protest is a must watch 😭. @maddow.bsky.social

At this point, we should treat almost all the media coverage about AI consciousness, ethical consequence, personhood etc as downstream from AI corporate marketing and comms efforts. It’s all they have since the gloss wore off the initial excessive claims.