you don’t have to have the conversation on their terms and in fact you shouldn’t have the conversation on their terms more democrats should follow this playbook instead of existing in a constant defensive crouch

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3d ago

Abdul El-Sayed: "Weijia, with all due respect, this is the third time you've asked about a Twitch streamer ... their whole game is to make us fight culture wars so that we don't pay attention to the fact the president has made $2.2 billion ... "

Feels like universities might also want to wait to liquidate hundreds of years of educational practice before transforming themselves into single-corporation stewarded data centers.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: "For too long the industry lied" about AI risks

The head of the artificial intelligence company calls the exponential rate of AI developments a "warning sign," with risks for humanity, and says, "We need to slow down." He talks with "Sunday Morning...

cbsnews.com

Community activism has saved the city's oldest public housing units. It was recently named a 2026 Endangered Latinx Landmark by Latinos in Heritage Conservation. Read More👉 ebx.sh/BLdzxl

Once you understand the corporate culture of AI hyperscalers is everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, things snap into focus: pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/a...

It's a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.

This week, @laurenfturek.bsky.social joins us to talk about religion, politics, and good science fiction in Robert Zemeckis's 1997 film "Contact" Here or wherever you get podcasts! (Sorry about the delays and technical snafus yesterday! They should all be cleaned up now!)

#065 - "Contact" (1997) with Lauren Turek by Pod Only Knows

cms.megaphone.fm

If you haven't seen CONTACT (or, like Kelly, it had been 30ish years), go do that! Because tomorrow you can listen to @kellyjbaker.bsky.social, @johnbrooks.bsky.social, and guest @laurenfturek.bsky.social talk about it!

“When you constantly expect lies but refuse to accept lies (a critical distinction), you become better at finding the truth. Surviving an autocracy means not only believing that the unfathomable is possible, but that it’s probably happening, so you better start planning for what comes next.”

Sarah Kendzior@sarahkendzior.bsky.social · 2w ago

The Mitch McConnell shit is really weird, and I say this as the person the NYT assigned to write three separate obits of Uzbekistan's president as the state covered up his death: sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/ghost-senate

Great read: a historian’s deconstruction of the voices ingested by various LLM—and the assumptions baked into these tools about the interests of their intended audience. “AI shunts aside problems of how knowledge is formed and communicated;” the author illustrates why we can’t afford to accept that.

King Algamemnon@adamrothman.bsky.social · 2w ago

Sobering, insightful essay on how chatbots mangle historical primary sources. 🗃 www.hnn.us/article/ai-i...

Timeline cleanse: one of my recently graduated students emailed me today to share a truly delightful historical foreign policy document: A 1959 despatch from the American Embassy in Kathmandu laying out regulations for expeditions in Nepal in search of the Yeti. catalog.archives.gov/id/24194175 🗃️

The online portal to the records held at the National Archives, and information about those records.

catalog.archives.gov

It's hard to square "it's wasn't racist" with the breathtaking and distinct callousness that's everywhere in response to this death.

My only comment about Woke 1 vs Woke 2 is that neither of these things is real &, for the thousandth time, we don’t have to frame <every topic in American politics> on the terms of the far right authoritarian party & right-wing pundits. Other, more serious choices are readily available:

this has been painfully obvious for the past decade and centrist pundits who fixated on these "concerns" revealed how shallow and petty their worldview is

Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · last mo.

Meanwhile, the right never meant any of it. They moaned about "cancellation" for a decade but embarked on mass firings as soon as they took power. They pretended to care about "free speech restrictions" and "educational indoctrination" while embarking on them every chance they got.

humiliating

Shipwreck@shipwreck75.bsky.social · last mo.

No other way to spin this besides a complete failure. Trump lost and sacrificed American lives in a pointless war. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

Insane that democrats keep trying to cave on this issue rather than amplifying the fact that it’s being spearheaded by bigots and freaks

Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · last mo.

An initiative on the ballot in Washington state in November would require all athletes seeking to play girl's sports from kindergarten to high school to undergo "genetic screening, a testosterone-levels test, or an examination of their reproductive anatomy" before they can play

The IRS is imploding. "The collapse of the IRS customer service functions...can literally ruin people’s lives," and "These consequences land heavily on those who can least afford it: the elderly, people whose first language is not English, and of course, poor people of all sorts."

The IRS is imploding

The CEO says the agency is proving it’s possible to have “less people and better results.”

motherjones.com

So I'm visiting my Dad, who recently completed a bit of a genealogy project. In addition to compiling lots of great information and some family photos I've never seen, he also included a few humorous asides...

I look forward to all the reports & coverage about all of the internal problems & mistakes of all of these other institutions, in the same way that universities are constantly blamed (& blaming themselves) for “declining trust.” “Compared to what?” news.gallup.com/poll/712436/...

Mark Copelovitch@mcopelov.bsky.social · 2mo ago

“Compared to what?” is always the essential question when asking about critiques of higher education & universities, whether we’re discussing declining trust, freedom of speech, viewpoint diversity, or any of the other things.

Picked up a very cool item: a commemorative pin for the @vassar.bsky.social 50th anniversary from 1915, with a ribbon for an alumna from the class of 1905 (I'm also an '05 alum, but 2005 of course). There were only about 200 people who graduated in 1905, so I suspect not too many of these were made!

The UNHCR archives in Geneva are at risk; reading room already closed - and there's a much broader 'humanitarian archive emergency' ongoing with aid budget cuts. www.aretenews.com/unhcr-refuge...

As aid funds shrink, archivists warn of risks to the humanitarian record

UNHCR's archives are a test case for humanitarians struggling to preserve institutional memory in an era of retrenchment.

aretenews.com

This is a great student-authored short piece about, in my read, how the allure of innovation/problem solving/bragging rights has led a lot of smart people to ignore the work of archivists and historians when developing historical, archive driven tools.

@dhnow.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Editors’ Choice: The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI

The Oakland University Archives and Special Collections has made available via JSTOR 23 oral history interviews that capture the history of Pontiac’s Black community and map the routes of the Great Migration. The post also includes a classroom activity for interpreting excerpts of the interviews! 🗃️

The Cassette Tapes of the Great Migration - JSTOR Daily

An archive of recorded interviews captures how ordinary people experienced one of the defining chapters of American history.

daily.jstor.org

I am really excited to be co-chairing the conference program committee for #SHAFR2027. I love all things about the SHAFR conference, but I'm especially excited to bring a greater focus on public history to the conference and for our inaugural poster session (including an undergrad poster session!)

SHAFR@shafrhistorians.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Didn't we just leave Columbus? 👀 The CFP for #SHAFR2027 in Arlington, VA is live — and it's a big one: our 60th anniversary! Co-chairs Lauren Turek & Steve Tuffnell want your panels, papers, and roundtables. Details on our website. www.shafr.org/shafr2027

I recently had to explain qualified immunity and the near-impossibility of holding the police accountable in the United States to my dad. "Then we live in a police state," he said.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 2mo ago

once again saying: Nuremburg trials is the moderate position

This morning in Biddeford, Maine, a 26-year-old man said goodbye to his wife and daughter and left for work. Moments later he was dead, shot in the head by ICE agents, the second man ICE has killed in six days. ICE is killing our neighbors. ICE cannot be reformed. Abolish ICE.

NEW from @fiona-murphy.bsky.social at @rns.org: A powerful mini-doc on the Luhmanns, a conservative Christian family that has been pushing back against ICE/DHS in the Chicago area for months. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXsn...

Christian mother of eight tracks ICE activity in Chicago

YouTube video by RNS

youtube.com

An excellent piece on writing, reading, and what we're losing in our "post-literate" society. It covers considerable ground, discussing the move to short form video, the rise of AI, the way reading is taught, and the way that writing shapes our learning.

The End of Reading Is Here

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

theatlantic.com

It's really important to emphasize this: the reason that conservatives are arguing for increased teaching loads is that they want to END mainstream humanities research

Chronicle of Higher Education@chronicle.com · 2mo ago

Conservatives have argued that adopting minimum teaching loads will curb a proliferation of “intellectually unserious” research. https://chroni.cl/4wmW9iZ

In the well-over 100,000 documents written by founders included in the Founders Online database from the National Archives, no one uses the phrase "God's noble experiment." No one.

Current policies that disinvest from education and science and turn away from efforts "to attract the most able from around the world is one that courts long-run decline. No amount of short-run economic news, especially when paired with unsustainable government debt, will stop it."

Opinion | Look Past the Jobs Numbers: Three Ways Trump Is Strangling the Economy

nytimes.com