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

One thing that Michigan *may* demonstrate (probably less stark after its all counted) is that while Black folks in general are the strongest voting bloc in support of Palestine, older Black folks in particular are the most stalwart Dems and don't like challenges to the party.

Congratulations to everyone who worked their asses off for something that any semi-decent and ultimately self-interested government should have done in penance www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/b...

Education Dept. to Wipe Out Student Loans of 170,000 More Defrauded Borrowers (Gift Article)

The sprawling case, centered on students defrauded by for-profit schools, has now become the largest class-action settlement in American history.

nytimes.com

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...

Excellent essay by Clay Shirky: "The very idea of a coherent university is an oxymoron. We are incoherent because knowledge is incoherent.... This is not a failure of leadership or will. The management and maintenance of incoherence is a service we offer society." www.chronicle.com/article/ai-i...

Opinion | The University Was Made for the Age of AI

Colleges have never been coherent. Their strength lies in managing disagreement and uncertainty.

chronicle.com

The most terrifying enshittification I've discovered has been learning that Microsoft Word documents no longer auto-save if you are not saving them to one of their own proprietary cloud services. I'm slapping control-S like it's 1999.

I understand sentiment here, but I'd prefer we didn't frame these issues as minor or distractions. All part of big debate about whether we want a more equal and just society for all of us or to maintain &reinforce a system of hierarchy & dominance based on gender, race, class, ability.

Kevin M. Kruse@kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 2d ago

If you're a cis person insisting that the prospect of trans children playing youth sports is not only "a problem" but in fact one of the biggest problems we currently face as a nation, I'd be happy to introduce you to literally a million other things that should be worrying you more.

My daughter worked in a hospital, recently. Mostly people tried not to talk about politics, out of respect for people who might not agree. Except when it was about RFK Jr. He and what he is doing to HHS are universally reviled by the hospital staff. 

Ultimate Pullahoko@pullahoko.bsky.social · 2d ago

Actually disgusting that nurses were treated like utter shit, overworked and dying during the pandemic and now RFK is on TV telling everyone that didn't happen. I can't even imagine a more thankless, hostile job right now.

Here’s the key takeaway from our report: Epstein couldn’t have carried out his trafficking and criminal activity without the help of the highest ranking employees and executives at the most powerful banks in the world. Wall Street is complicit in Epstein’s crimes from top to bottom.

Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia It's been a year & people tell me they've changed their mind, feel safer now to sign, etc. So I'm sharing it again for them. We're almost at 2k & anybody from anywhere can add their names. openletter.earth/open-letter-...

This is the tragic yet logical result of a decades-long project—undertaken by rightwing politicians and “business-minded” administrators alike—to distort the meaning of higher education, to deny the intrinsic value of the pursuit of knowledge, to deprive us all of richer, more purposeful lives.

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

Who's the consensus best NBA player of all time? MJ or LeBron? To find out, I compiled all of the journalist player rankings that I could find. I found 54 in total. Here's what the experts think...

Still can’t over the fact that the president of the United States just told an entire state to pound sand after getting cyberattacked by a foreign adversary because they didn’t vote for him and it was treated like a Tuesday lol

This may dramatically slow down the attacks on science. It also provides a template for how to prevent the federal government from becoming a patronage state. It’s a big deal!

Politico@politico.com · 3d ago

Senate finalizes funding patch that would block Trump’s grant overhaul

The Medium Lebowski

Lexi Darling@lexidarlingxoxo.bsky.social · 3d ago

Downplay a book or movie: Night at the Diorama

The overwhelming right wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it's Joe Biden's fault.

this owns www.inverse.com/input/cultur...

The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s 'high five' photos

Nearly 14 years later, the tale of this iconic couple can finally be told.

inverse.com

It Wasn’t a ‘Civil War.’ It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/o... gift link

There is no crushing the right in a two-party system. That boils down to “Dems will win every election forever,” & we need a system in which Dems can lose & it’s not a crisis for democracy because there are other pro-democracy parties.

a million americans died! we didn't have a vaccine ready, this shit was passing the brain blood barrier. it infuriates me so much we abused the hell out of the essential workers who worked like dogs during this, at the expense of their own health, and not a hazard dime spared in compensation.

the lockdowns were such a limited thing in scope, for a limited amount of time, but its the greatest horror on earth for these people that they had to consider another lower class of people and their existence for even a few weeks vs their routine luxurious sociopathy. signed, an essential worker.

Patrick "Inverted Vibe Curve" Blanchfield@patblanchfield.bsky.social · 3d ago

unsurprisingly to yet again expend this level of agita and venom about fauci, early reactions to COVID online, etc, rather than ever mourn or really confront how we live in a society that can and will easily normalize preventable mass death in the name of efficiency and profit

Very important piece by @davidoatkins.bsky.social at Washington Monthly: the DNC is actually doing just fine and raising record money, and the hit pieces are a product of a tier of useless DC consultants who don't want their media buy gravy train to end. washingtonmonthly.com/2026/07/31/t...

The Case for the DNC’s Ken Martin. Really.

Martin is being excoriated, but he’s taking on the consultant class, building a strong grassroots operation, and raising tons of money.

washingtonmonthly.com

this is what Zoltan Hajnal argued in his excellent book Dangerously Divided. The divide is white/non-white. Control for that and most urban/rural political divisions vanish. www.cambridge.org/core/books/d...

Dangerously Divided

Cambridge Core - American Studies - Dangerously Divided

cambridge.org

Sarah Taber@sarahtaber.bsky.social · 6d ago

Also, as we all know, there are lots of rural areas that don't vote GOP. Coincidentally, they're all the rural areas that aren't majority-white. We do ourselves a real disservice pretending the "rural-urban divide" in politics is real. It ain't. Full stop.

A very serious Rural Politico once told me "Dems have to go to farmer meetings! We gotta be where the people are!" I was in fact in a farmer meeting at that very moment! So I live-texted him the meeting. They were complaining that they want indentured workers that they don't have to pay or feed.

Lucas Tieman@lucastieman.bsky.social · 6d ago

There would be more pushback if folks left of center were more serious about outreach. But folks aren't despite the fact that our system does give disproportionate power to rural areas. But instead of taking that as the rules of the game as it exists, and actually organizing, we complain about it.

Most rural areas have a ruling class. And they want cheap unfree workers & to pass their fiefdoms on tax-free forever. It ain't rocket science. The fact that we're scared to talk about THAT, ime, is what's costing us a lot of rural voters!

Direct action is a powerful activist tool because of all the information it provides- you essentially learn to do politics while outside of power.

wishda@wishda.bsky.social · 5d ago

The DSA in Wilmingotn, N.C. has created a "crisis" by putting benches at city bus stops, after literal decades of the city promising and failing to do so.

A GOP Congressman, Griffith Morgan (Virginia), has introduced a bill to strip people in Guam, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and every other US non-state territory of their birthright citizenship. www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c...

I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful

That was fast. Google sent me a statement saying it is now “rolling back“ this AI feature after our demonstration and others from OSINT researchers www.404media.co/google-earth...