It's mostly not about the technology, itself. They are angry about A.I. because they are anxious about how to be successful. No one in charge will tell them the new path to upward mobility. No seems to want to even figure one out. All anyone will talk to them about is A.I.

This is quite literally an extinction level event for graduate education in several fields in the United States.

Prof Dynarski@dynarski.bsky.social · 4d ago

Now with alt text! 23% drop in student visas to US in 2025 57% drop from India alone catastrophic for research and learning, here and abroad www.insidehighered.com/news/global/...

Tfw you realize reviewer 2 was using AI this whole time….

There’s an aggressively paid for influence op going on right now to defend AI slop as art and protected speech across platforms. AI execs realize they have a problem and don’t wanna get Marie Antoinette’d. The free ChatGPT trip is the tip of the iceberg. First person to nail it down gets a Pulitzer.

Cyclospora is about more than Americans getting sick. It’s about the cost of grift and broken institutions. And it raises questions about why DOJ, which has jurisdiction, doesn’t seem to be doing anything. joycevance.substack.com/p/bad-food?r...

Bad Food

It’s not hard to follow the money

joycevance.substack.com

This basically feels like the executive education grift, which is selling the institutional brand to an audience that wants the prestige at a discount, but also at a price that is just beyond what normies would pay.

James Grimmelmann@jtlg.bsky.social · last wk.

What are we even doing here? www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/b...

Explaining to my kids dessert pizza was a thing and they are looking at me like I just told them phones were once attached to walls and had wires.

Not that TAH will be dislodged from his lucrative lane of rage-baiting boomers (watch for the book-length version coming soon) but it is good to have this on the record by Andrew Baker analyzing the events at Bates with integrity and political perspective. newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/racism-and...

Racism and labor at Bates: the other side of the story

Andrew Baker responds to Tyler Austin Harper

newsletter.thedriftmag.com

Wow, when this guy turns from smoothed path permitting and boosterism, you know something’s changed.

Scott MacFarlane@macfarlanenews.bsky.social · 2w ago

NEW: Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) used the following words to describe data center developers today; "Predators" "Bullies" "Secretive" Shapiro signed a new state exec order tightening restrictions on data centers, requiring they get local approvals & provide their own power

This essay is very good

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...

defector.com

I think this gets to the heart of liberal-left complaints about the press. Political reporters think we're criticizing them for not being on "our" side. We're not. We're criticizing them for not being on journalism's side. Unplug from the DC celebrity access system and do honest independent work.

Joshua Foust 🪖🎮@joshuafoust.com · 2w ago

Contrary to AGS’s insulting straw man, few people are demanding reporters become liberal warriors, we just want the profession to take its own existence and our fundamental rights — and the truth — seriously. No need to shill. Just take the stakes of the job seriously.

I subscribe to the print edition of the Atlantic still (I know), and all I will say is that there are at least three more interesting articles in this issue that should be generating DISCOURSE, including one considering, after all this time, if the Taliban actually won.

Colleagues at Journalism History have published an excellent special issue on the Institute for Propaganda Analysis that interrogates midcentury, post-war origins of communication research, & how many of the political blindspots of the era explain problems today: www.tandfonline.com/toc/ujhi20/c...

Journalism History

Media Literacy, Mis/Disinformation Research, and the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. Volume 52, Issue 3 of Journalism History

tandfonline.com

Regardless of the merits of this piece, it's a symbol of a creeping trend at real news orgs like The Atlantic or lesser ones like the Free Press: A first-person account, written to stoke outrage, with no evidence offered to the reader that the events have been independently corroborated. 1/

The thing about that “why I quit academia” piece in the Atlantic is that a half-dozen women wrote better, smarter versions of it a decade ago.

Watching everything around data centers this year, I’m starting to think no one in Silicon Valley ever actually watched the Simpson’s as much as they may have claimed.

Hell Gate *subscribe today!*@hellgatenyc.com · 4w ago

This past weekend, former Mayor Eric Adams was in Wisconsin Rapids—population 18,654—trying to convince residents that they should allow a real estate developer to build a data center in the heart of their town. The public hearing did not go well. hellgatenyc.com/eric-adams-i...

Looks like those guys found the plausible deniability they were looking for.

CNN@cnn.com · 4w ago

Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Monday they will advance Donald Trump's nominee after he rescinded the president's "anti-weaponization" fund. https://cnn.it/4bZYuZv

Josh is onto something important here. Big tech cos have been able to dodge much regulation—dodge the structuring of markets and competition and the relationship with society that govts impose. But with data centers, local zoning and local organizing are now in play. It’s a different world.

Josh Marshall@joshtpm.bsky.social · last mo.

Why the Backlash Against Data Centers Is So Potent talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-t...

There is no natural law that says that a news organization like CBS News or the Washington Post cannot lose its audience and fade into irrelevance.

Published at last! the final issue of Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation is now online at www.scienceopen.com/.../cdba69db.... This is a special issue that commemorates the legacy of Vincent Mosco and shows the relevance of his ideas for understanding the new world order

Watch it till the end. This is moral clarity -- TMZ understands the moment, and what that Rand Paul kangaroo court was, better than any coverage I've seen so far. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zaO...

This Is Personal

YouTube video by TMZ

youtube.com

People think "Hollywood" is rich and famous. The reality? Film and TV is a national industry. It's a blue collar industry. And it is an industry free fall. My latest for @newrepublic.com on how the Paramount merger would crush blue collar workers who can not afford it newrepublic.com/article/2136...

There’s a Blue-Collar Hollywood—and the Paramount Merger Will Kill It

Hollywood isn’t all glamour. It’s thousands of line workers. And a Paramount takeover of Warner will make their lives even more precarious.

newrepublic.com

Watching centrist dems like Shapiro struggle to thread the data center needle after touting econ dev. bona fides in landing these centers 18 mos. ago as everyone is now united in opposition, I see why the party permanently struggled after NAFTA. True or not, both things feel like intentional harm.

Turned this rant into a blog post. davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/the-data-c...

The data center backlash Is working. That's why the New York Times is so concerned.

I have a

davekarpf.beehiiv.com

Dave Karpf@davekarpf.bsky.social · last mo.

I'm reading the "environmentalists are wrong about data centers" piece from the NYT and ohmygoditssofuckingbad. Apparently, so long as you're punching left, they'll just let you say any goddamn thing you please... www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/o...

Whew, the editors of @science.org are getting real.

The Assault On Science Funding Continues

science.org

“School is meant to prepare students for the real world, but too many institutions are training kids to be silent,” the student-newspaper editors at Georgetown Day School, Annabelle Garland, Jacob Blane, and Sam Gross, argue:

The New Chilling Effect

Too many institutions are teaching young people to stay quiet.

bit.ly

This is a journalism story. I don't mean how to cover the story, but things deeper than that. It's an attack on the conditions required for journalism to matter, on reality itself, and on the very idea that we can live in the world the way it is. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/c...

INBOX: the last dedicated science reporter at The Wall Street Journal, @aylinwoodward.bsky.social, has left the newsroom. This came after the Murdoch-owned newspaper dissolved its Health and Science Bureau last October. NPR, CBS, and WaPo also gutted their climate desks in the last eight months.

Government-promoted anti-intellectualism is a common feature of fascist states, with “intellectualism” coded as feminine and/or Jewish/leftist.

NPR@npr.org · last mo.

If an undergraduate program's graduates don't earn more than workers who never went to college, that program could be cut off from federal student loans. But is a degree just about making more money?