Sumita Pahwa
@sumitapahwa.bsky.social
Social scientist, Bombayite, Californian, ex-Cairene. Mango maven. Cat lady. Teaches at Scripps College. Deeply sourced expert in search of novel gustatory experiences. If you post/snipe, anonymously, expect to be blocked.
The older male doctor doing my chorionic villus sampling in pregnancy (already a v painful procedure) very clumsily, when I screamed in pain - "you do like to 'sing,' don't you"
Heather Hill@rollin-academic.bsky.social · 5h agoA question from Reddit that I'll answer here: "What's the most unhinged thing a doctor has said to you with a straight face?"
I'm ready to be persuaded otherwise & don't think it's inevitable, but the instructors I know who frame what they do in terms of critical pedagogy, ungrading, intrinsic motivation etc, essentially let students do minimal work with guaranteed As, and that is what everyone really likes all round.
Jed Brown@jedbrown.org · 3w agoThe broken pedagogies of the past are still broken. Let us not double down on them like an autoimmune response triggered by "AI". Let's build the mutual trust necessary to embrace friction, to be playful and subversive.
Hipster cafes in hipster California towns serving rooh afza is just wrong.
Shami-style molokhiyya (or would y'all call it mlokhiye, yiiii) with fresh whole leaves. Not bad at all.
Orangina is so fab - I think Duke's Lemonade (RIP) and Schweppe's Bitter Lemon are still superior, but it's close behind. San Pellegrino's Aranciata Amare was good too, but I find all the SP drinks now very overly sweet in the US.
Angus Johnston@angus.bsky.social · yesterdayJust learned TODAY that Orangina no longer has a US distributor, and hasn't for the last several years. Sigh.
And as I've discovered this past year, if you have an automated Dropbox save, but your employer has MS One Drive, it will get confused after a certain number of auto saves and convert your document into a corrupted file.
Heather Burns@heatherburnstech.bsky.social · 2d agoThe most terrifying enshittification I've discovered has been learning that Microsoft Word documents no longer auto-save if you are not saving them to one of their own proprietary cloud services. I'm slapping control-S like it's 1999.
Look, venison is delicious, and Americans should get used to eating it again, enough with the Bambi romanticization. www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...
Kill the Ticks
America needs a bigger plan to control its tick problem.
theatlantic.com
I haven’t felt like posting on this site since my mother died in October, but I feel compelled to raise my periscope given the horrifying crisis at the Morocco/Spain border in Ceuta and the disturbing amount of misinformation that’s circulating around it.
For example did you know when Antonio Banderas was a teen he was arrested by Franco’s goons for being part of a protest theatre troupe
"The watchword of patriarchy is women’s service with a smile. Every woman alive is hence in the service industry to some extent or other, in being subject to the constant expectation of our emotional and intellectual, as well as sexual and domestic, labor." & older/powerful women also buy into this.
Kate Manne@katemanne.bsky.social · yesterdayGenerative AI is catnip to the men who miss female sycophants katemanne.substack.com/p/a-culture-...
This is true of a great deal of method-driven research in polisci as well.
Jonathan Dresner@jondresner.bsky.social · yesterdayAlso about what genAI can do: it has no concept of a 'fact' or 'event' or 'causation' or 'significance' ... only statistical correlations between words, the meaning of which it actually doesn't know.
I mean, the OP's field - law - is also focused on sorting through and organizing legal principles and codes and precedents to see how they apply to current problems. Does this mean she'd let AI do jurisprudence? Fire all the law profs and lawyers?
Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · yesterday"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.
Letting the algorithm do your thinking and analysis for you (as opposed to the grunt work of organizing your data) is rather an abdication of intellectual responsibility.
Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · yesterday"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.
Well it certainly seems to line up with the "animal lover" in the profiles of every single person of a particular political persuasion I come across on social media. But I really don't see how 'the left' is behind on this issue. Weren't cruelty free products & veganism driven by this concern?
Astra Taylor@astra.bsky.social · yesterdayWent on @thenation.com's Fighting Fascism podcast to discuss a phenomenon too few are talking about: How the MAGA right are claiming to be animal welfare champions. The right loves to fill a vacuum and liberals/leftists are leaving a big one by ignoring the issue. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...
I didn't miss this detail the first time round, in fact it leaped out at me - and made me all the more shocked that progressives and people familiar with Iraq, were making excuses for him.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 2d ago"Platner’s first deployment, in early 2005, began at the Abu Ghraib prison complex, part of which the military had rechristened Camp Redemption." missed that detail the first time around!
Thread, on the use of gAI to produce xenophobic videos featuring stereotypes of the dangerous, dirty, sexually predatory, violent foreigner threatening the cleanliness, order and peace of China. Fascinating, and terrifying.
Manya Koetse@manyapan.bsky.social · 2d agoChinese viral AI videos are turning foreigners into villains, flooding Chinese social media. They depict foreigners as threats to China’s social, moral, and national order. Strong, confident Chinese people confront, violently beat, and humiliate them in defense of their country. See more below🧵
Those familiar with pomegranate ripeness, how long till mine are ready?
Frog: I have received a legally binding letter from the scorpion assuring me that stinging is not in his nature
Just your regular reminder that: 1) Almost everyone has an underlying health issue if you look hard enough 2) People with underlying health issues don't deserve to die for eating lettuce 3) We should be strengthening, not weakening our regulatory processes. And properly funding them.
The New York Times@nytimes.com · 2d agoBreaking News: Two deaths in Michigan have been linked to cyclospora. Both people who had the parasite also had underlying health issues.
Where does the currently popular social media-ubiquitous phrase "sounds like a skill issue" come from?
It's not even "unflattering conclusions" (though that's part of it); it's the assumption that the populace REALLY just shares the lefty intellectual's preferences, because surely we are the Voice of the People. (Uh, we're not).
Amanda Mull@amandamull.bsky.social · 2d agothere is a strain of lefty discourse where you can’t come to any unflattering conclusions about the populace—those must be explained away by how they are being acted upon by capital—but I think you’ll understand things better if you understand capital can also exploit weaknesses it didn’t create
I think this is fundamentally wrong but in an interesting way I will need to write about sometime. The key is a) consumers do not choose what is produced, or how, they choose between what is produced. This is a crucial difference
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈@maxdubler.com · 3d agoI think my most genuinely unpopular take is that a widely held and genuine consumer preference for cheaper, lower-quality goods, not private equity, is driving the decline in quality of consumer goods like clothing and housewares.
this is not true. there was no conspiracy. it didn't matter whether the streetcars were publicly owned (seattle, detroit) or private (los angeles, atlanta). a thread (because i wrote a whole-ass book on this): 1/?
David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · 3d agoIs everyone aware of the General Motors streetcar conspiracy? In the mid-20th century, auto and oil interests bought up electric streetcar systems across the US and systematically replaced them with bus routes and paved roads, funneling commuters toward private cars.
how many real people have experienced actual, documented harm at the hands of Trans people playing sports? ok, how many children will be victimized by mandatory genital inspections, because you know the number isn't zero? tell me again, who are you trying to protect here??
This paper shows that immigration enforcement can _increase_ crime. Undocumented immigrants already have the lowest crime rate, but tough-on-immigration policy makes immigrants less likely to report crime. So immigration enforcement worsens the problem it was ostensibly meant to solve
