Rich people will sooner let tens of millions of people die in poverty than pay their fair share of taxes
PBS News@pbsnews.org · 4d agoAmericans’ Social Security benefits will have to be cut by roughly a quarter in six years due to depleted funds, according to a June report from the Social Security Board of Trustees. That’s months sooner than the group had estimated in 2025. https://to.pbs.org/4f39DL0
What's at stake in seeing self-optimization as a sacred pursuit? Focusing on a group I call "masculine optimization influencers," I dive into the grindset. Come for discussions of shame and disgust, and stay for a chat about cold plunges as a baptismal practice. www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Q5A2T...
Masculine optimization influencers and the sacrality of self-optimization
Self-optimization has become a dominant idiom of contemporary American masculinity, crystallizing in a rising cohort of male influencers centered around reaching ‘maximum potential’ physically and ...
tandfonline.com
It is exhilarating to see Becca Rothfeld, whose Washington Post reviews were little islands of intelligence, open to a broader New Yorker canvas, as in this essay (ostensibly on Leslie Fiedler) www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Why the American Novel Refused to Grow Up
For the critic Leslie Fiedler, the country’s best and worst fiction was shaped by visions of escape from society—and therefore from maturity.
newyorker.com
OLH flips another journal to diamond/fee-free OA, from Taylor & Francis. Another world is possible. www.openlibhums.org/news/970/
OLH welcomes Medieval Sermon Studies
We are pleased to welcome another journal to our portfolio, Medieval Sermon Studies, which is moving from Taylor & Francis to the Open Library of Humanities and will be published …
openlibhums.org
So, the premise is because AI is further burdening peer-review, we should implement it across the publishing process. This uses inevitability rhetoric, and noticing a pattern of those who are developing AI tools, or building their career and status around AI expertise, saying we need to use more AI
The Scholarly Kitchen@scholarlykitchen.bsky.social · last mo.Guest Post — Now is the Time for AI in Peer Review, and Publishing Policies Need to Recognize This scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/06/30/g...
Thomas Frank in @harpers.bsky.social: "When the GOP holds the White House, America is great; when it doesn't, it isn't. Simple. One day, the eagle screams in triumph; the next, we remember our forsaken Old Glory through the noble haze of patriots' tears." harpers.org/archive/2026/07/s...
The Spirit of the Age, by Thomas Frank
harpers.org
"What Wittgenstein—and the many other Romantically inclined intellectuals who got a bad vibe from the twentieth century's thoughtless faith in scientific progress—didn't anticipate is that the threat of annihilation would one day become a selling point for technology" www.commonwealmagazine.org/wi..
Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse | Commonweal Magazine
Ludwig Wittgenstein believed the age of technology would be the beginning of the end for humanity. The increasing ubiquity of AI may prove him right.
commonwealmagazine.org
Inequality in the usa is now the same as during the French Revolution - Downtown Los Angeles June 2026
ESSENTIAL: we need to support open infrastructure more systematically - without it, science crumbles. A great article here issues.org/open-data-re...
Who Will Keep Research Data Infrastructure Open and Running? | Real Numbers
The scientific community must consider the longevity of open research infrastructure—why it might fail and how to prevent it.
issues.org
L to R: Chris Richards: biracial kid from Alabama who speaks about black history and has tattoos of MLK, Ali, and Obama Sergiño Dest: Dutch-Surinamese, emigrated to Brooklyn as a kid, naturalized Fola Balogun: born in Brooklyn to vacationing parents, raised in UK but CHOOSES to play for USA
Zito@zeets.bsky.social · 2mo agoHard for this team to be good vibes when this keeps happening
"Even though open access was motivated partly by the desire to rein in commercial publishers' profiteering, it has in many ways simply reinforced their dominance" — @samuelmoore.org www.researchprofessionalnews....
researchprofessionalnews.com
A Second Sight is officially out today! Please consider buying and sharing with your friends, students, colleagues, neighbors. Publisher’s Weekly said it will help you understand America at 250!
A Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom
How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom
bookshop.org
Now available to read online. Here's my chapter, on Shadow Libraries and Pirate Infrastructures. dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/critica...
Chapter 6 Shadow Libraries and Pirate Infrastructures | Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities
This volume reimagines the digital humanities (DH) through the expanding field of critical infrastructure studies as it explores how DH builds on and extends the field’s theories and technologies. Inc...
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu
Alan Liu@alanyliu.bsky.social · 2mo agoAnnouncing the release of the online, open-access edition of _Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities_ (in Debates in DH series): dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/cri.... Editors: Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, James Smihties @jamessmithies.bsky.social). Print ed. appeared January 2026
Jacques Berlinerblau, our campus jester: "… my prediction [is] that by 2035, drones will be professors. They'll whir and zigzag above the students' heads. The gizmos will dispense AI-generated mash-ups of a million compressed lectures in Kylie Jenner's voice." www.chronicle.com/article/the...
Opinion | The Coming Faculty Class War, and Other Prophecies
Surveillance, billionaires, and drone professors. A scholar looks ahead and doesn’t like what he sees.
chronicle.com
👀ICYMI | "At the core of all these tools is a series of verbs: to surface, to rank, to summarise, and to recommend" #AcademicSky #AIbias #MatthewEffect @jpooley.bsky.social
The Matthew effect in AI summary - LSE Impact
AI research tools are trained on a literature that is structured by an unequal distribution of attention. Does their use simply recreate these biases ?
blogs.lse.ac.uk
The May History of Media Studies newsletter is out, with updates about the journal, new bibliography additions, and CFPs! buttondown.email/hms/archive/...
History of Media Studies Newsletter May 2026
History of Media Studies Newsletter May 2026 Welcome to the 58th edition of the History of Media Studies Newsletter. The monthly email, assembled by Dave...
buttondown.email
Great, disturbing reporting from the Times on private equity profiteering off autistic kids. The lede, though, is buried—these clinics are all using ABA, a dehumanizing therapy that treats kids as Skinnerian robots www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/he...
nytimes.com
The Matthew effect means prominent and well-cited scholars tend to receive still more prominence and citations, whereas less-cited scholars tend to slip into further obscurity over time. How will this manifest in AI summary? @jpooley.bsky.social for @lseimpactblog.bsky.social
The Matthew effect in AI summary - LSE Impact
AI research tools are trained on a literature that is structured by an unequal distribution of attention. Does their use simply recreate these biases ?
blogs.lse.ac.uk
#AcademicSky I think a lot about this. AI will perpetuate all kinds of biases already found in the literature. Not just racism & sexism, but Matthew Effect and others. It's a prediction machine, based on what's in the ether.
Maarten Paulusse@maartenp.bsky.social · 3mo agoGood piece by Jefferson Pooley on how LLM-powered “research” tools like Google’s “Deep Research” and Elsevier’s “AI Discovery” likely strengthen the “Matthew effect”: highly-cited authors are amplified while undercited (often female) authors are increasingly ignored: blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...
Good piece by Jefferson Pooley on how LLM-powered “research” tools like Google’s “Deep Research” and Elsevier’s “AI Discovery” likely strengthen the “Matthew effect”: highly-cited authors are amplified while undercited (often female) authors are increasingly ignored: blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...
The Matthew effect in AI summary - LSE Impact
AI research tools are trained on a literature that is structured by an unequal distribution of attention. Does their use simply recreate these biases ?
blogs.lse.ac.uk
"If we hand off the work to computational probability and the profit motive, we may reproduce, or perhaps worsen, an academic “class structure” with all of its accumulated (and now hidden) injustices." Post from @jpooley.bsky.social on the "Matthew effect in AI summary"
The Matthew effect in AI summary - LSE Impact
AI research tools are trained on a literature that is structured by an unequal distribution of attention. Does their use simply recreate these biases ?
blogs.lse.ac.uk
💥New | The Matthew effect in AI summary ✍️ @jpooley.bsky.social #ScholComm #Libraries #AcademicSky
The Matthew effect in AI summary - LSE Impact
AI research tools are trained on a literature that is structured by an unequal distribution of attention. Does their use simply recreate these biases ?
blogs.lse.ac.uk
“Every successful technology needs to find a problem that people are willing to pay money to solve. In the case of emotion AI, that problem appears largely, so far, to be worker performance and productivity, especially in customer service and blue-collar labor.”
The Rise of Emotional Surveillance
Companies are monitoring workers not just for productivity but for agreeability.
theatlantic.com
After the mass resignation from Journal of Economic Surveys over bad publisher terms, I could not imagine in a couple of years we would have **Reviews of Economic Literature** Non-profit. True OA. With @stanfordpress.bsky.social; 2 articles already up this year rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/rel
The April History of Media Studies newsletter is out, with updates about the journal, new bibliography additions, and CFPs! buttondown.email/hms/archive/...
History of Media Studies Newsletter April 2026
History of Media Studies Newsletter April 2026 Welcome to the 57th edition of the History of Media Studies Newsletter. The monthly email, assembled by Dave...
buttondown.email
The richest man owns X. The second and fourth richest men control Google. The third richest man owns The Washington Post. The fifth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?
"SLACs face so many challenges today that their precarious survival may be more surprising than their escalating demise.... And yet the shuttering of Hampshire... feels different, not so much another liberal arts domino falling as the symbolic end of a whole tradition of progressive education"
A Clearing of the Ground | Christopher Benfey
Small liberal arts colleges face so many challenges today that their precarious survival may be more surprising than their escalating demise. The
nybooks.com
The Entire Archives of Radical Philosophy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972–2022)
The Entire Archives of Radical Philosophy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972–2022)
On a seemingly daily basis, we see attacks against the intellectual culture of the academic humanities, which, since the 1960s, have opened up spaces for leftists to develop critical theories of all k...
openculture.com