Brent Cebul
@brentcebul.bsky.social
I teach history and write about US politics, cities, and inequality, most recently in ILLUSIONS OF PROGRESS: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century (Penn Press, 2023).
Terrific piece by @dennismhogan.bsky.social The lack of transparency around AI compute costs seems like a next battlefield. My institution has major new contracts with ChatGPT and Anthropic. What are we spending? And for what? hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-f...
Artificial Negligence
Faculty sense that AI could make old-fashioned teaching and learning much more difficult to achieve, if not obsolete.
hedgehogreview.com
I’m sad that they have to be on Substack, but these reported articles by Claudia Vargas on the Democratic Party machine has been some of the best writing on Philly politics I’ve read in a long time. Actually explains things, no euphemisms!
Reporting on OMB's sweeping politicization of federal grants tends to focus on science / health research. But as I note in this piece for @crisesnotes.bsky.social, the rule is a huge threat to *intergovernmental* grants and state/local fiscal stability. www.crisesnotes.com/russell-voug...
Russell Vought is Using the Plumbing of Fiscal Federalism to Create a New Patronage System
EDITORS NOTE: I (Nathan) have struggled whether to rush to comment on this proposed OMB rule. Being a recent Fiscal Year 2026 OMB memo, and knowing that the OMB will continue to create new forms of bu...
crisesnotes.com
There is leverage to be found in all of your retirement funds!!!
Prem Thakker ツ@premthakker.bsky.social · last mo.The US Presbyterian Church has just voted to divest from Palantir & GE Aerospace; recognize the genocide in Gaza; and call for an arms embargo and boycott of genocide-complicit Israeli companies. Cites Palantir & GE's tech being used by human rights violators like ICE, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
This made me sick. I’m sharing it because it’s great investigative student reporting and I think we should understand how predators use power and root them all out
Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s attempts to recruit women from Penn
The convicted sex offender cultivated a relationship with a woman who would enroll at Penn Carey Law in 2013, telling her the steep tuition would be worth it if she found him girls on campus.
thedp.com
Some very smart observations from the very smart Michael Kinnucan in this week’s New York City primaries. (thread, all quotes from him)
JOB: TT Assistant Professor, Annenberg School for Communication, Penn Media Industry Studies apply.interfolio.com/187239
You could read this whole thing and have no idea the scale of the devastation Israel has unleashed. The word "Palestine" doesn't appear until the 20th paragraph or so. Lebanon and the current war with Iran not at all. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/m...
AIPAC Wants Democrats to Back Israel. Instead, They’re Turning on AIPAC.
nytimes.com
I just learned that the term "carbon footprint" was developed by BP to offload responsibility for climate change onto individuals. Something like that's happening in higher ed with AI. Institutions capitulate or dodge; students are submitting; & they believe it's their individual failing. 7/
At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/
I had the great pleasure of reviewing @dygottlieb.bsky.social’s excellent new book YUPPIES for @newrepublic.com, AND I also had the great pleasure of meeting Dylan at the American Political History Conference last weekend. Congrats again, Dylan! 🗃️ newrepublic.com/article/2112...
The End of the Yuppie Dream
The urban professionals who transformed American cities and tastes and pulled the Democratic Party to the right are a dying breed.
newrepublic.com
Anna Duensing presents a small cohort of Black Americans who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War and World War II in LaborOnline's second essay about the Black anti-fascist tradition. lawcha.org/2026/04/23/a...
A Fighting Anti-Fascist Army | LAWCHA
Like many Black soldiers conscripted in the segregated armed forces during World War II, Burt Jackson did not need did need battlefield instruction to
lawcha.org
My latest, for @flaminghydra.com: I reviewed @quinnslobodian.com and @bentarnoff.com’s new book, Muskism: a Guide for the Perplexed. (It’s a very good book, probably the single best text about this particular, infuriatingly influential sonofabitch.) flaminghydra.com/issue-578/#h...
Terminal velocity
Dave Karpf on soon-to-be trillionaire (?) Elon Musk
flaminghydra.com
I’m flying home through Chicago, because it will be dinner time and I want a torta. I have a 42-minute layover. 😬 Our arrival gate is B7. Frontera is at B10. I can order via Frontera’s app when we land, and snag it as I pass by. Or so goes my theory. 🤞
hey-o! spotted a pre-order for Bryant Simon's For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality @uchicagopress.bsky.social. always read everything Bryant writes! press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...
For Customers Only
Public toilets determine who gets everyday dignity, freedom of movement, and civic belonging—and who doesn’t.Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: b...
press.uchicago.edu
compare and contrast: when IDF soldiers were caught on tape raping a Palestinian captive at Sde Teiman prison and prosecuted, Israeli civilians rioted outside the court and all charges were eventually dropped
ishmael@ishmael.bsky.social · 3mo agoPro-Israel protest outside the New York Times building just now, presumably about the Nick Kristof article.
If you get sued by a government for reporting that its soldiers torture and rape people, that is the discovery opportunity of a lifetime and a pathway to court-ordered revelations or that government being forced to rely on sovereign immunity to shield itself from disclosure and lose the case.
Moving account of Arnold Hirsch's life and work - finished and not - from his son. Take the time. slate.com/life/2026/05... 🗃️
My Father’s Hidden Life Was in a Box in His Office. By the Time I Found It, It Was Almost Too Late.
The papers held the key to his life’s work—and his legacy.
slate.com
🎉 Today is PUB DAY for YUPPIES 🎉 Join me: 5/12: @harvardbookstore.bsky.social w/ @quinnslobodian.com 5/14: Labyrinth Books w/ @kevinmkruse.bsky.social 5/15: Headhouse Books w/ @brentcebul.bsky.social 5/19: @gothamcenter.bsky.social w/ Sharon Zukin 6/9: @bookculture.com w/ Kim Phillips-Fein
One of the pieces of my students' writing I am most proud of: an obituary for Harold Kahen, who helped the NAACP defeat covenants in a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court challenge. He died six years ago at age 101 and had just a one-sentence obituary. www.chicagocovenants.com/blog/z06l44s...
Harold I. Kahen, Civil Rights and Corporate Lawyer, Dies at 101 — Chicago Covenants
Lawyer played key role in fight against racial covenants
chicagocovenants.com
Wondering if the political commentator Kevin Phillips' papers are available somewhere / planned to be? I'm interested in his "American Political Report" newsletters from the 1980s - a sort of proto-Substack of the Reagan 80s @kevinmkruse.bsky.social @larryglickman.bsky.social @rauchway.bsky.social 🗃️
Again, ”ai” (whatever people mean by this) as a tool, an excuse, a set of narratives, to justify codifying class war gains already made and justify taking even more. employers are not bracing for an underclass they are naturalizing the one that already exists and clearing the way for its expansion
Ann Pettifor@annpettifor.bsky.social · 7mo agoGabriel Zucman on the shocking concentration of extreme wealth in the United States…. gzucman.substack.com?r=nle0&utm_c...
Terrific: “The use of NDAs between governments and data center developers is controversial because the agreements swear public officials to secrecy, making them answerable not to the public but rather to private entities within the scope of the contract.” heatmap.news/politics/sha...
Inside Josh Shapiro’s Attempt to Navigate the Data Center Backlash
Emails between the Pennsylvania governor’s office and Amazon illustrate the difficulty of courting big business as anti-AI fervor explodes.
heatmap.news
Some great reporting here
charjaebug@jael.bsky.social · 3mo agoEXCLUSIVE My big behind-the-scenes look into how Gov. Josh Shapiro has courted Amazon amid the mounting backlash to data centers Complete with internal emails, memos, an “exclusive” offer for help with faster permitting and a NDA no one would explain to me. My latest for @heatmap.news 😌
