Life is too short to talk to fives.

my kink is seeing fascists lose

I love watching movie credits and being reminded of what a big, incredible, and very human project making a film is

JUST ASK - if you are in an institution, ask the procurement/finance people for a report based on *supplier names* to get a sense of how deeply you are in with some of these companies. Group all the different names for one company together (eg: RELX/Elsevier/LexisNexis etc). It is enlightening.

In 1938, Evelyn Dunbar was commissioned by Country Life magazine to produce drawings (and later oils) for its Gardener’s Diary and made witty personifications of each month. The month of April sees a figure wearing a striped smock, holding a coldframe with a cuckoo in her hat.

The AI Boom Wasn’t Built for the Polycrisis “There are too many ways for it to fail for it not to fail.”

The AI economy looks...really precarious. So @matteowong.bsky.social & I did a bunch of reporting to try to figure out what happens when a potential bubble collides with a war in Iran and a potential resource shortage. The answer is...arguably the most dire stuff i've heard from smart ppl in a while

reading about Cahokia in @charlescmann.bsky.social's _1491_ blew my mind.

This is exactly how my class discussion started. These are graduate students, btw. A lot of students really take my courses for writing instruction and not content. So the issue of finishing a draft comes up.

Turns out they cannot write (or read a long text) because they have every notification on

Proposed NYC budget cuts library funding despite campaign promise from Mamdani - The Riverdale Press Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s $127 billion preliminary budget proposes reducing New York City library funding, raising concerns about service cuts and the future of seven-day access at branches like the King...

“Honestly, it is surprising to hear that he would make that cut,” he said. “It’s not in line with what I took from the campaign and the narratives I heard from him.” www.riverdalepress.com/stories/prop...

“Progressive taxation is the single most important policy lever for reducing the power of the rich—not because it raises revenue that can be redistributed via public programs or directly to the poor, but because it imposes a de facto statutory maximum on income or wealth.” @econmarshall.bsky.social

I spent a year under investigation by a professional society in part for tweets about my rapist (that another man was certain were about him)

You all have no idea how dangerous things are for survivors of gender discrimination and sexual misconduct, even when we have not named our abuser

Any zines/small press/etc out there really killing it with layout/design/typography lately?

And what I’m calling “opportunity theft” is the theft of someone’s future and their potential by means of robbing them of appreticeship, menteeship, and experience now. Using AI to perform the tasks that students and trainees do in the early phases of training and education is opportunity theft.

Academy Film Archive Lays Off Multiple Staff Members in Restructuring as AMPAS Announces Expansions to Collection The Academy Film Archive has laid off archive and library staff members in a restructuring move, as the Academy Museum announced new acquisitions.

A reminder that the Academy shamelessly and wrongly fired a lot of its archivists

variety.com/2024/film/ne...

The other thing I need to say is that PUBLICATIONS NEED TO COVER CULTURE INCLUDING BOOKS

I keep hearing that publications are declining to do book reviews. Places like @physicstoday.aip.org and WaPo got rid of their book sections entirely 🧪

We want people to learn about science but where?

Are we falling out of love with nonfiction? In the early 2020s, readers flocked to books to explain political turbulence. But is the world now too grim to read about – and are podcasters taking the place of authors?

If we learned nothing else from 2025, it’s that we shouldn’t take for granted that what we love will continue to be funded

If people and libraries don’t buy a certain kind of book, publishers will stop investing in them

That’s also one reason the library book bans are so scary

These are precarious times for nonfiction publishers. Getting the word out is harder than ever now. I highly recommend that people sign up to receive newsletters and other information directly from the publishers who put out stuff you like. You’ll also hear about bonus discounts and other deals.

So that's at least two of the top programs for archivists & librarians being subsumed into a new unit for computing and AI, and I'm guessing many more to follow.

My actual fav food since I was like 4 omg!!! 😂😂

Truly uncanny to see universities all doing the same suicidal things: centralizing decision-making, erecting bafflingly expensive new buildings, stacking the board with money guys, hiding info about the budget, throwing money at consultants. Atriums everywhere! They all got the same memo.

I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland.

And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.

Why do people use chatgpt & other slop when Reddit exists

"Is there a technology the left is excited about?"

Let's see, off the top of my head:

- libraries
- solar power
- community-owned, community-run [noun], for example
• power grids
• communications networks
- e-bikes
- voting by mail
- vaccinations
- affordable health care

Notice any patterns?

I wish more people were aware of just how many things their public libraries “step in” to do, how many gaps they fill silently.

NYC, as budget season commences, we need to end the annual budget dance — a gratuitous, insulting ritual — and ensure consistent, generous funding for our libraries.

👀

$1 billion is an annual $100,000 salary for ten thousand years.

$780 billion is an annual $100 MILLION salary for almost eight thousand years.

No one is worth this. Tax breaks, wage theft, and not paying for what you steal from the planet is where is money came from.

Sometimes I get a little upset when I live in a collapsing dystopia for many years

absolute banger

They are dismissed as hysterical or non-expert or irrationally cautious.

Then you wake up one day and Peter Theil and Elon Musk own your water and your attention and your political process.

Then the men emerge to tell us what women told us a decade before.

I fear that men are about to do what men do. They are about to characterize any sober thinking about power as non-technical and therefore unserious.

We have seen this pattern over and over again in tech criticism. Women and people of color repeatedly lead on understanding tech changes.