The cyberattack on The British Library in October 2023 knocked out ebooks and almost ever other computer thing there for years.
Ebooks just came back. They were knocked out everywhere using the BL’s license (legal deposit libraries I think? More libraries?)
Distributed physical copies matter.
Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned today, a week after this:
Totally agree
In response to Georgetown University’s recent decision to give students, faculty, and staff licenses for the Google chatbot, our Executive Director Emily Tucker wrote an open letter urging students to resist the co-optation of their education by the tech industry.
This is a good moment in @donmoyn.bsky.social's dive into the tech broligarchs: They keep talking about the "west" in order to feel like world-historical sages but they're just echoing warmed over white nationalist inanitites at this point:
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/palantir-w...
SCOOP --> Paramount, Meta, and X are refusing to say what happened to their huge contributions to Trump's presidential library after Sen Elizabeth Warren raised questions about its fund getting dissolved. Ds say tens of millions remain unaccounted for.
Details here:
newrepublic.com/article/2092...
Newsletter: As the president’s family’s shady dealings continue to mount, SEC enforcement actions have collapsed to twenty-year lows. The CFTC says it doesn’t need staff when it has AI.
www.citationneeded.news/issue-104/
20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite's intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
This bullet point from Alex Karp/Palantir’s latest diatribe strikes me as the best representation of the whole project.
“The elite’s intolerance of religious beliefs…”
Let me stop you right there, Alex. You just made that up. That isn’t a thing in 2026 America.
Yes, this is well known -- and quite a few people have written about it :)
In 2024 a Rockland Co agency held a “public hearing on a proposed subsidy for the expansion of a JPMorganChase data center. In return for nearly $77M in tax breaks, the project promised to create exactly one permanent job. No one showed up… Two weeks later, the subsidy deal was approved.”
'Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content.' 1/3
In my case it was just pushing back on the library's "we are committed to the ethical use of AI" by asking how they had made the decision that ethical AI use was possible, which of AI's harms they had considered as part of that decision, and which benefits were considered to outweigh those harms.
it always surprises me when people react really viscerally to the idea of destroying systems and institutions that either no longer serve us (and can't be reformed), or never existed to serve humanity in general. putting the destruction of a system on the table shouldn't be a radical position
An instagram post featuring a New Yorker article that addresses Hoboken's exemplary work in flood mitigation. Jersey City comments: "👏👏 great work, friend 👏👏." Hoboken responds: "thanks, bestie neighbor 🫶"
Re: last RT: I love this interaction between Hoboken and Jersey City in the comments :)
As the planet gets hotter, cities around the world are experiencing rain storms with record-smashing intensity.
I spent the last few months visiting places -Copenhagen, Hoboken, & NYC- that have adopted a counterintuitive idea: the safest city is one that can take water in. In @newyorker.com
A screenshot showing three articles I've published -- on border tech, medical tech, and spatial data -- all of which mention Palantir. We also see an article on surveillance by Hillary Mushkin.
Just did a little search on Places (where I've published most frequently for the past decade+), to see if anyone had written about Palantir in relation to urban governance, border tech, other spatial data applications, etc. Well, whaddya know? That's me, from 2016, 2018, and 2018 :)
a concert backdrop that says over 30 universities destroyed in iran against black and white picture of rubble
backdrop that says last standing university in gaza against a black and white image of al-israa university
giant three screen stage backdrop showing footage of the bombing of a university in gaza
The Strokes played Coachella against a backdrop listing all the world leaders that had been assassinated by the CIA, a count of the number of universities bombed in Iran, and footage of the bombing of the last university in Gaza
After the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Shutdown, UMD #Libraries Keeps its History Alive (via #UMDLibraries) www.lib.umd.edu/about/news/2... #CPB #media #broadcasting #archives
Collection Deep Dive: The Weld-Grimké Quilt
Clement Library (Michigan) 📜
clements.umich.edu/weld-grimke-...
Thanks for this, Jessamyn 🙏
Thank you. And yes, when your area suddenly becomes Current Events, lots of people suddenly "discover" the terrain you've long been stewarding :)
Together with Ben Saracco of Rowan University, we helped build out the IDEA Center’s Wi-Fi in Camden! If your organization needs Wi-Fi or other technical support and is interested in our consulting services, reach out to us at info@phillycommunitywireless.org.
"One reason for hope is that bad times, when there’s seemingly nothing left to lose, sometimes give rise to good schools. That’s what happened in the 1930s amid the devastation of the Great Depression."
"Once Hampshire, their unruly lovechild down the road, was on its feet, the [4 other Five Colleges] mostly returned to their hidebound ways. Amherst didn’t admit women until 1976... Since Hampshire had superb offerings in 📸 + 📽️,... the other[s] had an excuse to take those arts less seriously."
"When I taught at Hampshire a cpl of times over my three decades at Mount Holyoke, I noticed that nearly every student was passionate abt something— [and] a professor could build on that. I heard things I’d never expect anywhere else... A student played... a version of Cage’s 4’33” on the bassoon" 🥰
“No class attendance requirements, no credit hours, no intercollegiate athletics, no honorary degrees, no grades.”
In lieu of grades," narratives.
I reviewed a few dozen Hampshire + Evergreen apps every year. You could spot them — with their inch-thick "transcripts" — from a mile away :)
I’ve experienced so many full-circle moments since returning to my home state to teach brilliant students at the University of Florida.
Today, my students learned about the Florida Photo News, which was the local press produced by and for our African American community in Palm Beach County.
Check out my new Media Burn blog post. Media activist and community journalist Michael Zinzun’s legacy is a prime example of public access television’s Black history, which is quite profound and largely under-appreciated.
Stay tuned! Much more of this to come soon.
mediaburn.org/celebrating-...
Cover of Art-Rite Zine, depicting a grid of television screens, some featuring scribbled text, others featuring blurry images
Check out Ana Canepa, ed., Art-Rite 7 (1974) :) www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/luip6...
and Leah Churner, “Un-TV” (2011): www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2ww5h...
"SLACs face so many challenges today that their precarious survival may be more surprising than their escalating demise.... And yet the shuttering of Hampshire... feels different, not so much another liberal arts domino falling as the symbolic end of a whole tradition of progressive education"