You are not going to be rich. Fight to tax the rich AND for universal public goods.

TBH, this was me watching the halftime show live on a flight from Toronto to Miami...

Ya está bien cansado Benito

¿… la registración de la conferencia es $375? 😅

I spent too much time down there during my M.Arch. I became obsessed with factory planning manuals from the first half of the 20th c. and just started scanning all the images.

Gerstein Old Class is my fav!

"At its best, government bureaucracy can be an instrument for leveling inequality and extending what Franklin D. Roosevelt called “freedom from want” to millions. The work of making freedom from want into a guarantee for everyone is still unfinished."

Opinion | When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw

"In towns like mine, outsourcing and automation consumed jobs. Then purpose. Then people. Now the same forces are climbing the economic ladder." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/o...

What America Can Learn From the Americas Greg Grandin’s sweeping history of the new world shows how immutably intertwined the United States is with Latin America.

"It may make sense to think of the United States as a wealthy Latin American country, rather than an offshoot of Europe mysteriously governed by cowboys." newrepublic.com/article/1920...

"The future of federal architecture, if we are going by what is actually being built at scale by the US government, appears to be the prison, the wall, the climate refugee camp." nyra.nyc/articles/wre...

A NYTimes article headlined: “Smithsonian Criticized for Delay in Turning Over Records”

A more fitting headline might be: “Smithsonian Resists White-Supremacist Censorship by Fools with Zero Relevant Expertise”

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

Eileen Higgins Wins Miami Runoff Election to Become City’s First Female Mayor Eileen Higgins, a former Miami-Dade County commissioner, will also be the city’s first female mayor and the first non-Hispanic mayor since the 1990s.

Breaking News: Miami voters elected Eileen Higgins as mayor, choosing a Democrat to lead the city for the first time in almost 30 years.

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (permalink) Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was called "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI," and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June:

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."

This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular.

pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

Over a pint in Oxford, we may have stumbled upon the holy grail of agriculture | George Monbiot I knew that a revolution in our understanding of soil could change the world. Then came a eureka moment – and the birth of the Earth Rover Program, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

1. Some good news at last. This week’s column is about the amazing thing a couple of us stumbled into three years ago, which we’ve now developed into a global research programme. It doesn’t change everything, of course, but it could help change quite a lot. + 🧵 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Framing GenAI as a battle between teachers and students is a red herring. Students and educators are on the same side. The real opposition are the data extraction firms and brokerages and their allies among the managerial class.

"Welcome to the brave new world of parasocial machine bonding—sponsored by the campus center for teaching excellence."

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

"In the Chatversity, the roles are just as scripted and cynical. Faculty: 'They pretend to support us, and we pretend to teach.' Students: 'They pretend to educate us, and we pretend to learn.'" www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

Including yours truly and a whole lot of great work by others:

This is how administration acts whenever faculty tries to enforce standards. It's why most people have just given up and just hand out A's.

Exposure Therapy What could bridge the gap between the culture of elite higher education and red America? One possibility involves extending the logic of the Fulbright program.

"It seems strange to me that many of my liberal friends and students have never travelled to the South... They appear to have much more interest in places like China or Japan, and ... know more about these places than they do about, say, MS or AR." www.commonwealmagazine.org/fulbright-sc...

Trump's Big, Beautiful Ballroom (w/ Kate Wagner) [Teaser] | Know Your Enemy Matt and Sam talk to McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner about Trump's White House ballroom.

This episode of Know Your Enemy with Kate Wagner is fantastic! It’s also a stark reminder of the depressed state of architectural culture and architectural criticism, and how much better off we’d be (I think!) if there were more of it. know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/tru...

Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI | The New Journal Amid ChatGPT's rising popularity and a computer science cheating scandal, Yale students, professors, and administrators wrestle privately with the proper role of AI in education. What happens when eve...

This may be the best thing ive read yet on AI in higher ed, and its written by a Yale undergrad. Highly recommend.

Asad🗽🍎 on X: "I think you can tell a very interesting story about approaches to campaign messaging by comparing and contrasting these two differing captions of the same photo. https://t.co/7igutFjj4J" / X I think you can tell a very interesting story about approaches to campaign messaging by comparing and contrasting these two differing captions of the same photo. https://t.co/7igutFjj4J

Made me think of this pair of captioned images... Warren: "Tax the rich. Billionaire tears not pictured." vs. Mamdani: "In the fight for working people, you find good company." x.com/AsadFromNYC/...

¿Por Qué MAGA? - Dissent Magazine Progressives will only make lasting progress with Latino voters if they examine not just why Trump was appealing, but also why the left was not.

"The progressive economic message is often something along the lines of 'there’s enough wealth to go around.' But a more winning message, particularly for Latinos who aspire to social mobility, might be: 'there’s enough work to go around.'" dissentmagazine.org/article/por-...

I usually don’t like linking to the NYT, but I think it’s important to know that they wrote and published an obituary immediately for Alice Wong. (It selectively left out parts of her disability activism that they didn’t like, of course.)

Oh wow @reuters.com got the photo here:

This is a grotesque assault on faculty expertise and self-governance. I was fortunate enough to start my academic career as an assistant professor at Montclair State. Solidarity with MSU humanists being buzzworded into a new School of Human Narratives and Creative Expressions none of them want.

In the US, the only leverage many academics have is threatening to leave. That leverage is growing weaker and weaker as jobs disappear. At this point, beyond a few superstars, it’s effectively nil. There are, of course, other forms of leverage, but they require working in concert.

Commentary: Florida’s education commissioner just fired free thought Anastasios Kamoutsas’ removal of a sociology professor from a statewide committee is only the latest government attempt to limit the scope of education.

"DeSantis boasted that he was acting in the name of free choice: students would no longer be required to take sociology. But students have never been required to take sociology. What he did was constrain the freedom to choose sociology..." So much for the "marketplace of ideas."