Henry Snow
@henrys.now
Labor + economic historian at UConn | they/them political economy, shipbuilding, cybernetics published CONTROL SCIENCE with Verso ENEMIES OF ORDER, second book, forthcoming website + contact: http://henrys.now/ newsletter/blog: buttondown.com/anotherway
oh my god you're a libertarian uselessly opposed to an authoritarian regime's pointless war? should we throw a party? should we invite herbert spencer www.politico.com/news/2026/10...
Peter Thiel breaks with Trump over Iran war: ‘We should not have done it’
The remarks from an early tech-world supporter of the president are his most explicit on the war dividing Republicans.
politico.com
insurance companies: if estimates you wish to see, you must solve my riddles three
i keep thinking about how many of the greatest and most beloved small studios are ones that have embraced the truly radical position of "try to keep your employees around, because people get better at their jobs when they do it longer." this is widely considered evil by tech executives
lincoln carpenter, skeleton@lincolnhello.bsky.social · 12h agostill boggled by how bad the people running the games industry are at doing so. I don't know what to call being in the business of selling videogames and failing to sell BioWare titles—shit that basically everyone cherishes at least one of—other than incompetence. people are desperate to pay for it
here's a fun old post about the strangeness of geometry in high dimensions. "The volume of the unit-sphere goes to 0 as d grows! A high dimensional unit sphere encloses almost no volume!"
High Dimensional Space
people.eecs.berkeley.edu
uconn is paying nearly 200k to get an AI analysis as a justification for austerity. adjuncts are paid about 6.6k a course
Sarah Hird, PhD@sarahhird.bsky.social · 18h ago“Instead of taking the lead in assuring safe, responsible use of genAI, UConn’s top administrators are allowing students, faculty and staff to be exploited as customers and products.” Opinion piece by @uconnaaup.bsky.social executive committee (which includes me): dailycampus.com/2026/10/20/w...
student: I need help with this essay for another class me: of course I am happy to help, all writing problems are solvable student: it's about pricing cyber insurance regarding AI risk me, internally: ok almost all writing problems
it is perhaps not a coincidence that a theorem probably developed in order to disprove Hume's argument against miracles has been exalted by people who want to build god and/or fear they're building an evil god today
There were 27 miles of rope used for rigging in Master & Commander. Modern rope naturally coils in the opposite direction of rope made during the Napoleonic wars. So the production paid a shop to make period accurate cordage.
Amy "Thunderjam" Chase@amythunderjam.bsky.social · 2d agoWe all know the "Viggo broke his toe" story but what's another movie fact you're personally compelled to bring up every time without prompting? For me, it's the fact that Robin Tunney is wearing a wig in The Craft because of having just shaved her head to save her job filming Empire Records.
This isn't what I intended my membership dues to be used for . . . The whole story is so incredible, the behavior described so egregiously authoritarian, that it really has to be read in full. 🗃️
Stacy Fahrenthold@sfahrenthold.bsky.social · 2d agoIn this explosive follow up to the story about the American Historical Association's use of DC lobbyists to silence AHA member Palestine advocacy, we have this: AHA is conducting a witchhunt of its Council. Loyalty oaths. Lawyers. Threats. Authoritarian behavior. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
Many people in writer Rachel Handler’s life felt that something was amiss, that commercial chocolate didn’t taste the way it used to. For our Cover Story, Handler spends several months tumbling down a chocolate vortex to find out why. www.grubstreet.com/article/choc...
there's a lot to this even in many FT/TT jobs (now vanishing) your real intellectual community are people you see once a year at a conference; perhaps your employer pays for you to attend and perhaps not your job itself is a constant effort to prove to your "institution" that your job should exist
Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 3d agoThe other thing that is missing here is that the turn to online platforms among millennial humanities academics isn’t all about declining opportunities in the academy; it’s also about the rupturing of the possibilities for intellectual camaraderie within the neoliberal university.
mr. el-sayed do you disavow the universal brotherhood of mankind
Henry Snow@henrys.now · 2mo agoyou need to be settembrinimaxxing. wearing the same outfit at all times. contributing to idealistic co-authored literature. warning young men not to eroticize tuberculosis. going on sweeping rants about republican virtue and the beauty of humanity
historiography now banned from historiography class in Texas
Adam Serwer@adamserwer.bsky.social · 3d agoLast week I wrote about how Texas politicians’ “free speech” campaign has led to a campaign of academic censorship in the state’s universities that exceeds even the McCarthy era (🎁🔗) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...
good interview with terence tao about a.i. i think mathematicians are going to be good guides to dealing with AI because they do, like, the hardest of the hard sciences but think of it in a lot of ways like people in the humanities www.nytimes.com/2026/10/16/u...
Terry Tao Is on the Front Lines of the Debate Over AI and the Future of Math (Gift Article)
The Fields Medalist and celebrated mathematician is on the front lines of a debate about artificial intelligence and the future of his field.
nytimes.com
The NHS is already one of the biggest perpetrators of anti-trans violence in the UK. This new guidance, which refers to trans people using slurs, demands that we be segregated and abused. I’ve said it before: senior NHS managers must be sacked and punished for what they’ve done to us.
Ethel Weapon@lousadzak.bsky.social · 7d agoThis will kill people
brian herbert's dune books are an attempt to destroy the series so badly that they awaken the frank herbert ghola's ancestral memories
compare this to Connecticut's quantum investments which have mostly been a giveaway to an industry that doesn't exist yet while maintaining austerity across the state and its research university
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@mayor.nyc.gov · 6d agogratitude for my beloved wife, who married me despite the prospect of spending the rest of her life having to hear me talk about the most deranged research subjects imaginable
Henry Snow@henrys.now · last wk.yes i'm working on this for the reason some of you might suspect and/or fear
scripted -lessons- can work fine, especially as parts of lessons. scripted -curricula- aren't a pedagogical intervention but a political imposition. this is as true in k-12 as higher ed
Annie Abrams@annieabrams.bsky.social · 7d ago"It’s relatively straightforward for states to require evidence-based foundational reading instruction. It’s much more complicated to legislate how teachers should teach...Can Sold a Story make scripted curricula respectable—even desirable—among teachers, school leaders, and teacher educators?"
it found a false positive rate for pangram of _2%_, which is INSANELY high, like let's say that 10% of prose examples uploaded to pangram are not human generated that means you'd get 18 false positives for every 1000 samples. That's real bad! Again, linked on their own site!
yet another reason why: buttondown.com/anotherway/a...
The Heritage Foundation Must Be Destroyed
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. When we come to The Heritage Foundation,” Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi greeted his audience in Washington on October 5,...
buttondown.com
This skeet will self destruct@pardoguerra.bsky.social · last wk.The Heritage Foundation is effectively planning indentured servitude for everyone, except those who are legacied into the private elites. No more social mobility at all. Make the Taliban look moderate. They need to be dismantled and prosecuted.
The Heritage Foundation is effectively planning indentured servitude for everyone, except those who are legacied into the private elites. No more social mobility at all. Make the Taliban look moderate. They need to be dismantled and prosecuted.
jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem.com · last wk.Heritage is explicitly saying they aim to “stigmatize” sociology academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/sociology-...
rev. thomas bayes is better known for his contributions to math but his theology is so far also quite interesting