Sherry Turkle has some great interviews about this from the 80s. Men who preferred tinkering with computers over dating because they knew women were humans with their own desires who have autonomy and deserve respect. E.g. they might not agree on a restaurant, and these men had no desire to impose.

Berna Devezer@devezer.bsky.social · 6d ago

no one is promised easy answers, unmistakeable telltales, happy endings. we do not have a right to demand interaction or connection. even utmost kindness, sensitivity, humility, openness, patience, effort, and compromises can't entitle you to a relationship. you don't treat humans like commodities.

I made it a federal crime to share non-consensual nude images or deepfakes online with my bipartisan TAKE IT DOWN Act. Minnesota became the first state in the country to ban the technology used to create them. Elon Musk’s company is now suing to undo that. https://ow.ly/25KN50Zupi4

Elon Musk’s company sues Minnesota over new law to bar manipulated images to fake nudity

Minnesota’s anti-nudification law is supposed to take effect on Saturday. It is being challenged in federal court by a company led by Elon Musk.

ow.ly

ONLY TWO DAYS LEFT! Join us for Finding Your Regional Sociology Community— learn about publishing, networking, conferences, leadership, & professional development in sociology. July 30 | 10–11 a.m. CDT Register here: forms.office.com/r/XQnTZCEenQ #AcademicPublishing #RegionalSociology

Now in print! Through 51 interviews w/ university students, I disentangle how the democratizing potentials of social media & higher ed are complicated through the centrality of image-centric platforms, leading to uneven (in)validation across social position & gender. doi.org/10.1007/s111...

Insta-Famous or Invisible: Social Media Use and Belonging at a Public Flagship University - Qualitative Sociology

Social media and US public universities hold as-yet-unrealized potential for equity. Both institutions, however, also serve as reminders of social inequality while normalizing relatively privileged lifestyles. Past scholarship highlights how symbolic capital, felt stigma, and self-inflicted symbolic violence can maintain inequality, yet their operation across interconnected digital and higher educational contexts remains under-analyzed. Through 51 interviews with students at a US public flagship university, I investigate how social media use impacts perceived inequality in higher education. Social media—particularly image-centric platforms prompting users to share visual representations of their offline lives—more readily aided the accumulation of symbolic capital and digital prestige among students better equipped to emulate culturally dominant lifestyle content through proximity to hegemonic norms. The same platforms more readily amplified exposure to felt stigma and experiences with digital non-recognition among students distanced from these norms. Students experiencing felt stigma could exhibit learned invalidation, considering their lives unworthy of certain forms of digital documentation. Further, women students faced greater pressure to document their lives through image-centric platforms. I highlight a cross-institutional context where digital comparisons intertwine with access to perceived-vital resources for social integration and upward mobility, revealing digital platforms’ potential to intensify unequal experiences in higher education

doi.org

There's an irony in the fact that, to make her argument that Sociology has sacrificed science for activism, Ms. Paul cherry-picks quotes that support her views. 1/

The use of extremely online memetic aesthetics to support far-right political goals is like something out of Walter Benjamin’s nightmares.

Whew, the editors of @science.org are getting real.

The Assault On Science Funding Continues

science.org

racism, if we're being honest.

Nicholas Grossman@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 3w ago

The US built the greatest talent magnet ever, attracting the smart, skilled, and striving. They’d come to study, then stay and build things here, or leave with positive impressions and fruitful connections. Helped make the US wealthy and powerful. Then America chose to throw it away. And for what?

If they don't want us studying gender they need to stop doing so much gender all the time.

Matthew Gault@mjgault.bsky.social · 3w ago

Hegseth announced they're gonna start screening for T and administering testosterone treatment for warriors found wanting

I ran an absolutely 100% human, zero AI-involvement at any stage passage of my writing through an "AI detector," curious if it could really tell human from AI work, and it said my own writing was "84% AI written" then asked I wanted to pay to have it "humanized." So there's that to keep in mind.

There's only one kind of affirmative action program that conservatives love, and it's their own crusade to prop up their unpopular ideas and force them on college students. Massive funding, entire programs devoted to the cause, even mandated courses now. And it's still not working.

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 4w ago

Only one student enrolled in West Virginia University’s new Washington Center after GOP lawmakers mandated the creation of the program Lawmakers allocated around $3 million to the program in the last two years

As much as 40 percent of longform posts on LinkedIn and X that users actually see are fully AI-generated, according to new research Particularly notable because we know these platforms are flooded with slop, but this studied what the algorithm actually shows people www.404media.co/linkedin-and...

Instead of enforcing this worker’s union contract, Tufts has chosen to retaliate: along with withdrawing her, a dean named her in an email to multiple faculty as having “complained” about her workload. This is chilling to *any* worker who might need to blow the whistle in the future. 4/

A professor in Tufts University’s School of Engineering required one of his international graduate students to work an unpaid TA job this past spring semester. After she went to her union and blew the whistle, Tufts withdrew her from her program. A thread of rage. 1/

Female academics have kids later (male academics, not so much), and if they have kids earlier, they face career penalties.

Female Academics Increasingly Delay Motherhood Until Age 35

“Pronounced penalties” for those early-career staff with children may explain why Ph.D.s postpone becoming parents, a recent study finds.

insidehighered.com

I beg of you: please read @uncivilcollective.bsky.social's new report on the "civility industrial complex" that is pushing a right-wing version of the humanities into public higher ed while defunding actual humanistic teaching & research. www.uncivilcollective.org

UNCIVIL Website

uncivilcollective.org

Like extremely well-paid - this is where all that money that is supposed to be used to hire actual humanities scholars at public universities to do actual peer-reviewed research and teach courses that aren't geared toward ideological indoctrination is going careers.historians.org/jobs/rss/223...

There actually are extremely well-paying academic jobs in the humanities . . . provided you are willing to become a conservative hack who promotes "viewpoint diversity" rather than peer-reviewed scholarship.

AHA Career Center@historyjobs.bsky.social · last mo.

New History Job Posted Today: Director, Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization | University of Colorado Boulder

Forthcoming at Qual Soc! I examine students' social media use & find image-centric platforms build symbolic capital among those emulating culturally dominant lifestyles while amplifying felt stigma among those less able to, w/ implications for students navigating higher ed. osf.io/preprints/so...

Katie Furl@katherinefurl.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Final dissertation chapter accepted this morning! Very excited to share with the world once it’s in press

When I assign a research paper, it's not because I want an essay I can use to evaluate the student ex post. It's because I want the student to have the experience of going through the process of all of the above steps, perhaps iteratively, that is necessary to write a good research paper.

No—blue books, in-class exams, locked down browsers, etc. won't fix this. Nothing will replace the research, reading, thinking, organizing, writing, and revising skills that students developed through the good old fashioned research essay that has been the core of higher ed for countless decades.

In a society that actually cares about people, someone who's even believed to be stealing diapers would be met with assistance, resources, and money to make sure they would never again feel like they must steal for their basic needs. In the U.S., we respond by sending government sanctioned killers.

Ashton Pittman@ashtonpittman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Kohen Wiley, a 1-year-old child, is dead after a Mississippi police officer shot into a car and killed him. Family members say his mother was holding him in the passenger seat. The officers were responding to a shoplifting call over a box of diapers at the Senatobia Walmart.

Cyberzombies and the Afterlife of Thought: Dead Labor, AI, and the Necropolis of Capital Craig Van Pelt mavmatrix.uta.edu/fastcapitali...

a little over a year ago elon was dancing around having successfully cut off USAID, which caused ~600,000 people to die including ~400,000 children). now he is our first trillionaire. hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-s....

USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, accord...

hsph.harvard.edu

This is an outrageous story. A farmer donated 87 acres to a small Texas city on the condition it be used as a public park. Years later, the farmer has passed away, the city sold the land to a developer, and now it will be the site of a 135,000 square foot data center www.404media.co/a-farmer-don...

A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Massive Data Center Instead

In 1999, a farmer gave away 87 acres of land to a small Texas town to use as a park. The town sold to a data center developer for $10 million.

404media.co

"When racist incidents happen, colleges sometimes respond with educational programs that ask students of color to fix white ignorance for free. Meanwhile, wealthy students can opt out entirely, using their social and economic capital to shield themselves from consequences."

I’ve been studying racist costume parties for a decade, and colleges are failing at educating the students about why they’re wrong

A series of racist costume parties at Bowdoin shows the contradiction colleges have to navigate – encouraging open, reasoned debate, while creating a safe campus for all students.

theconversation.com

Green, green everywhere. Enduring one of the harshest winters in the US really makes one cherish mild weather and the life that comes with it.

Katie Furl@katherinefurl.bsky.social · 4mo ago

First truly warm day up north this spring

I think this is a good read (which has more to say than the pull quote) which really sums up *some* academics' anxieties and exhaustion. Universities should be communicating their understanding of the tremendous value of academics not just to their students, but to the staff themselves.

Nathan Kalman-Lamb@nkalamb.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A Princeton professor thinks students would be better off learning from Claude than from him. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

impartial scientific research is the enemy of despotism and so naturally vought wants to destroy it

elizabethginexi.bsky.social@elizabethginexi.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...