Can anyone recommend reading about how de-Orbanization is going in Hungary?

Gerrymandering makes nicely named legislative districts harder. Makes me wonder—are there egregious examples of gerrymandering at the city ward level? Or do municipalities always have sane-looking wards?

Mark J. Nelson@mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 4w ago

Buffalo's the most extensive version of this I know of, with 9 named council districts.

As the one responsible for all tech in a state library/archive that's about the size & with the same remit as some national libraries, let me amplify: libraries need more funding. Tell your politicians & administrators. We are getting crushed by the fact that "digital" is more expensive than books.

James Elder@jameselder.bsky.social · 4w ago

Good news, but the fact that this is only happening now, nearly three years after the cyber attack shows 1) what a huge job BL staff have had rebuilding services, 2) that the BL is underfunded, and 3) the impact this has had on academic research, especially in the humanities.

Wow Deutsche bank “apex of civilizational ambition oftentimes expressed in steel and fire” gives pat buchanan’s 1992 convention speech a run for its money as “better in the original German”

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 4w ago

DEUTSCHE lays it on thick: “.. SpaceX represents in our view the apex of civilizational ambition, oftentimes expressed in steel and fire, bending the arc of history to make humans multiplanetary ..” $SPCX

"My favorite founding father is Thomas Paine" is an opinion roughly equivalent to "my favorite ice cream flavor is cocaine."

Bo Thompson@gaudipern.bsky.social · last mo.

Thomas Paine is my favorite founding father. He was famously abolitionist and one of the earliest voices to point out the hypocrisy of fighting for independence while keeping slaves. He also firmly believed that keeping any friendship which required compromising your morals made you a bad person.

arxiv.org is finally graduating from Cornell. TIL it has almost the *exact same* origin story as the web -- a little project on a NeXT workstation in a giant non-university lab (CERN 1990 for the web, Los Alamos 1991 for arxiv). news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...

Time is a flat circle.

Doing the most responsible thing an European AI labs can do after this weekend: shipping a blogpost. Why the EU can't into AI, how it's not about compute, but actual skill issue and failing for years to build an actual training ecosystem. pleias.ai/blog/fable-eu

Saw that report on the supposed politicization of humanities & social science scholarship, ppl would be well served by reading John McCumber's account of what happened to US academic philosophy under McCarthyism, so much chimes w that today: nupress.northwestern.edu/978081014607...

Time in the Ditch - Northwestern University Press

In Time in the Ditch, John McCumber explores the effects of McCarthyism on American philosophy in the 1940s and 1950 and the possibility that the political p...

nupress.northwestern.edu

Carl Sagan's books-as-seed metaphor shows what a milquetoast ninny he was compared to John Milton. "I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men."

Saganism@sagan.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.” — Carl Sagan

i’ve only seen one brief clip of Jonathan Haidt’s NYU commencement speech but it’s him saying purple is his favorite color and then immediately mispronouncing “2026”

Fresh torment nexus unlocked! 1. Job seeker spams a list of AI companies with resume/ llm-written cover letter. 2. The AI companies all have e-mail auto-reply bots that start responding to chain. 3. Classic reply-all e-mail chain with a twist: nobody on it cares that it keeps going!

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

Somehow that got posted without alt text.

More garden of heroes reporting! Since last I indulged my obsession with this story, they've abandoned the idea this would be in North Dakota and moved it to Washington DC. Completely predictably it's over budget and behind schedule... www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/u...

Trump’s Vision for ‘Garden of Heroes’ Keeps Getting Bigger and Higher in Cost

nytimes.com

Ben Schmidt@bschmidt.bsky.social · last yr.

This was reported a while ago, but still insane to see that this is what’s replacing federal humanities funding. Two logistical points. 1. Is $34m is enough for this? WwII memorial was $200m. 2. July 4 2026 is really soon. How have they not even picked a site?

Extremely funny that Bard’s trustees have called for “an orderly transition,” like Botstein has been deposed by a color revolution

Stephanie Kirchgaessner@skirchy.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Botstein is stepping down after WilmerHale completes its review. Among other things it suggests Botstein was warned not to have dealings with Epstein www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

I’m struggling to remember what Richard Dawkins is actually famous for—at first I thought he was the racist guy who stole the double helix, but no, James Watson. The entomologist positivist? Nope EO Wilson. Now struggling with the idea the word “meme” somehow explains why I’m supposed to know him?

Matthew Sheffield@matthew.flux.community · 3mo ago

In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis. Paywall bypass: archive.is/6RdK9

One of those "essays I'll write one day" is that a great many people forget that Du Bois really was a PhD economist in-all-but-title and thought with economist brain sometimes. The much discussed "psychic wage of whiteness" thesis from Black Reconstruction really just is classic economist reasoning.

Here's an important read for today: policymakers are encouraging students to learn trades that are costly to teach, but community colleges and apprenticeships don't have the capacity to meet demand. This sends students to the more expensive for-profit sector, where they take on debt.

They Chose Careers in the Trades and Still Wound Up With Debt

As community colleges and union apprenticeships fill up, more students are turning to pricier training options for blue-collar careers.

wsj.com

Godzilla vs Erin Brockovich

ponder@ponder.ooo · 4mo ago

most people focus on the immediate & obvious dangers, but actually the worst aspect of godzilla romping thru a city tends to be the hazardous particulates that get kicked up into the air. way more people die of godzilla-related mesothelioma than get crushed, radiation-lasered, &c

They tried so hard to make this headline shorter but there just wasn’t a way to do it.

New York Magazine@nymag.com · 4mo ago

Nicole Kidman revealed that she is training to become a death doula, similar to Chloé Zhao, who is also training to be a death doula.

Feeling buyers remorse for booking in the quiet car now that I’ve realized the giant group boarding the loud cars is the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

This is a fun read. I posted in the company Slack and the first response was appropriately yeah, 'scientists.' www.sciencealert.com/scientists-d...

12½ years ago, I made a map of all the buildings in the Netherlands. Unexpectedly, people loved it! Ever since, I have been wanting to make an updated version of the map. Newer data, higher resolution, more interactive! I never got around to it, until last week: bertspaan.nl/buildings

All 11.333.878 buildings in the Netherlands

bertspaan.nl

How many Republicans not named Donald Trump or Ron Johnson have won a statewide election in Wisconsin in the last nine years? Just one: Brian Hagedorn in 2019

really can't be said enough that this case was decided by the same court that decided plessy v. ferguson. if they could have found a plausible rationale to limit birthright citizenship they would have done it. but there is none! the text is as clear as constitutional language can be.

Michael Li (李之樸)@mcpli.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Today is the 128th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision on birthright citizenship in U.S. v. Wong Ark Kim.

When a Schmidt dies, we take all the USB cables they accumulated in life, chain them through older and older ports, back to a splitter on my great-grandfather’s telephone jack… and so back through the generations, across the sea. Each grave flickers with power from a waterwheel in the old country.

If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be pip-installable.