On this Labor Day I'm researching Black newspaper responses public worker & Occupy protests of 2011. Black activists & newspapers treated the Wisconsin public worker protests of 2011 as important to Black people & expressed solidarity although Wisconsin public workers were disproportionately White.

I got word that our book about the big 2007 Jena 6 protest can be downloaded free until Sept 14 in honor of the APSA conference. This was a transition between the old Civil Rights model and what became Black Lives Matter. We trace how it developed & was discussed. 1/2

The newest episode of the Apocalyptic Optimist Podcast is OUT! Tune in for my conversation with @alexhanna.bsky.social about what's wrong with AI and how to make it all more democratic. @piqueaction.bsky.social @au-cece.bsky.social @pamelaoliver.bsky.social cece.american.edu/apocalyptic-...

Apocalyptic Optimist: Stop Worrying About AI Doomsday. Worry About This. - Center for Environment, Community, & Equity (CECE)

Big Tech frames generative AI as effortless digital magic, but the reality involves centralized power, hidden and exploited labor, and massive environmental costs. In this episode of the Apocalyptic O...

cece.american.edu

Know I’ve asked this before: Anyone good (or know someone good) with data vis? Want my visible CSV to be made into something palatable for primary care. Will, obviously, pay for work/time. This is health data so no AI and proper security plz, though identifiers will be removed.

Oh. my. god. The biggest scientific publishers are collecting nearly $4 BILLION A YEAR in author fees. This is absurd. We've got to break free of this system. If everyone would just agree to it, we could just post all our new papers on bsky and it wouldn't cost anything. Or something. But not this.

Eric Schares@eschares.bsky.social · last wk.

🚨Update: Our analysis of global APC expenditure has now been expanded to cover more publishers (7 -> 14) and more years (2019-2025). We estimate $15B in APCs paid over seven years, $3.7B in 2025 alone. Elsevier crosses the $1B threshold by itself in 2025. arxiv.org/abs/2608.16322 #ScholComm

Sociologists. Do you know when ASA started enforcing the rule that sections cannot share info about jobs not also posted in the employment service? I remember the change but not how long ago it was. I view it as bad rule and am getting around to complaining about it this year.

A shot in the dark, but are there journals you'd recommend as good targets for a descriptive report on the diversity of issues Black people protested about in the 1990s and 2000s? #contentiousky

Great interface for small restaurant chain reservation system. After selection of desired location and date it displays a large picture of restaurant interior and buttons for times with small print saying "perhaps you would enjoy a nearby location" that is 100 miles away! 1/2

weird question from a friend: where can you get high-quality bookshelves? Strong enough to really do the job for a serious collection of academic books. Wood preferred, could live with metal if necessary. Anybody know? #AcademicSky

I have heard about other expensive private schools banning AI from classes, with high student and parent approval.

Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · 2w ago

cognitive sabotage, you can ban it extra credit to U Chicago for bans on professional AND undergrad programs; smart SLACs are going to market AI free campuses soon chicagomaroon.com/53262/news/s...

Here's a rather important detail about the Arday story: he DID run 30 marathons in 35 days, w multiple contemporary accounts from when he did it, as a relatively nobody, in 2010. So at least some of the accusations that gained traction were demonstrably false and easily falsifiable. Yet they flew.

College lecturer completes marathon challenge

Jason Arday completes 30 marathons in 35 days for Shelter and the Shooting Star Children’s Hospice.

richmondandtwickenhamtimes.co.uk

Andrew Baker was also a “token black professor” at Bates College. But his perspective on the events Tyler Austin Harper recounts in his Atlantic cover story is very different. Read Baker’s side of the story online today. newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p/racism-and...

Racism and labor at Bates: the other side of the story

Andrew Baker responds to Tyler Austin Harper

newsletter.thedriftmag.com

Great. Submitted MS is going backward in the review process from awaiting reviewer scores to awaiting reviewer invitation to awaiting reviewer selection. I have an uneasy feeling that I know what is going on.

Like, a lot of us right now have a prior assumption that "AI is driving water shortages." And no, it absolutely tf is not. It's agriculture. It's always been agriculture. Most of us have spent our whole lives not seeing it. We need to stop that ag water blindness before it screws us all over.

We have data on this. The blue is all the non-ag human use:

FWIW I find I am ready for "certified human written" on new fiction by authors I don't know. I find myself very wary of new works by unknown authors.

Independent scholar speaks up about preprint server gatekeeping. SocArXiv's @pamelaoliver.bsky.social & @philipncohen.com have replies in the comments.

Guest Post — The Guild and the Gap: What One Rejection Revealed About the Cost of Credentialism - The Scholarly Kitchen

Today's guest post asks: Do trust markers and other systematic fraud-prevention practices exclude unaffiliated authors from contributing to the scholarly record?

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

This looks like an important new paper on changing patterns of segregation.

Jacob S. Rugh@jakerugh.bsky.social · 4w ago

NEW in Social Forces @sfjournal.bsky.social coauthored by Jackie Hwang @stanford.edu, Elizabeth Roberto at Rice U., Francine Stephens at Stanford & me "Integrating or Segregating? Gentrification, the Changing City-suburb Divide, and Black Exceptionalism" academic.oup.com/sf/article-a...

Sociologists going to ASA especially CBSM folks. I'll be there Fri eve - Mon midday. Hit me up if you'd like to connect. I'm incoming CBSM chair elect and especially interested in younger folks' ideas about the section. If there's interest I may try to set up an ask me anything session.

We are working on papers about Black protests 1994-2011 about worker and economic issues. Papers still in process but I produced time plots with first-pass categorizations to help us think through the work. Blog post (linked in next skeet) gives more information, graphs, and numerical tables. 1/2

Important new study of shifting behavior of journalists in response to BLM protests.

jon ben-menachem@jbenmenachem.com · last mo.

Autopsies of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests often conclude that movements produced tough-on-crime backlash. My new study in Work and Occupations finds a different kind of movement outcome: BLM changed how local reporters cover cops and jails. 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Since I shared the Scatterplot post, which I found informative, I'm also sharing this critical thread which also told me a bunch of stuff I did not know.

Daniel Lakens@lakens.bsky.social · last mo.

I was not reviewer 2. But I am so annoyed by Americans pretending the whole open science movement is funded by John Arnold. His investments are absolutely dwarfed by what the European Union and European science funders have invested in Open science. Only incredibly biased people would ignore this.

I wrote about science funding, science reform, and anti-science agendas. scatter.wordpress.com/2026/07/31/s...

science funding and the cherry picking problem

Science publishing–like all of science–requires money. There’s no getting around it, even with the open science movement. What appears free to many authors and readers still requires money and infr…

scatter.wordpress.com

Taco Bell are the closest thing to heroes in this story outside the public health workers working in intensely stressful conditions after their coworkers have been laid off and resources snatched away by Trump.

Sarah Taber@sarahtaber.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If the people who run companies see "Taco Bell helps authorities find outbreak > then just gets blamed for starting it" How willing do you think they're gonna be to help pin down the next outbreak?

Seems to me that moral people should be sharing this thread about how cooperating with tracking down a disease outbreak should be publicly rewarded and not punished.

Sarah Taber@sarahtaber.bsky.social · 2mo ago

If the people who run companies see "Taco Bell helps authorities find outbreak > then just gets blamed for starting it" How willing do you think they're gonna be to help pin down the next outbreak?

It's been about 30 years since croning parties celebrating women's 50th birthdays were the rage in feminist circles, so it makes sense that celebration of the transition to older womanhood would be coming back around. I see that Women Who Run With the Wolves is making a comeback, too.

Academics beware! Do not upload blinded (no author) manuscripts to AllAcademics convention site (or really anywhere else except journal submission sites)! They get scooped up and turned into unattributed downloaded manuscripts elsewhere, e.g. in EBSCO Host.

Serious wtf??. EBSCO SocIndex has full text of a paper from 2019 @asanews.bsky.social annual meeting with no author listed. Internet search shows author from still accessible online program item at the convention repository. Author submitted a blinded MS to the conference site. BEWARE! #AcademicSky

Demography/inequality specialists. There's a claim cited by historians about intra-Black vs intra-White inequality that cites back to popular magazine articles without proper citations to evidence, not academic works. Can those who know point me to the correct academic literature on this topic?

“move from preprint to peer-reviewed publication leaves the central claims of most abstracts intact, indicating preprints are a reliable source…papers that were never posted as preprints were retracted at roughly twice the rate of those that were…” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Tracking claim changes from preprint to publication across 72,644 biomedical studies using large language models

Preprints now disseminate a large share of biomedical research before peer review. Because they have not yet passed peer review, some scientists regard preprint claims as unverified or potentially unr...

biorxiv.org