Is a ‘Curse of the Mambino’ Plaguing the Mets? Mamdani, Say It Ain’t So.

They'll do anything to try to change the story on this guy.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/n...

Trump Administration Live Updates: F.B.I. Director Files Defamation Suit Against The Atlantic

It's honestly getting to the point where this is so funny I never want it to end. Make KP perpetual FBI director.

www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04...

I wrote up my response.

sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/04/ther...

It’s becoming increasingly evident that securing our democracies requires ridding ourselves of the incurably reactionary classes through expropriations and confiscations.

What Continental Philosophy Defenders Cannot Explain How we know continental philosophy is largely nonsense

Over on The Other Website this blog post is causing a flutter as analytic and continental philosophers fight each other. I shall try and do a longer reply later, but in essence I think...

benthams.substack.com/p/what-conti...

ED 209.

Just a reminder on this Easter Sunday:

1) Attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime.

2) The head of state threatening to commit a war crime is itself a war crime.

Director John Waters at the No Kings rally in Provincetown holding a sign that reads "*#%&# ruined bad taste"

Legend

The essence of Bernstein’s argument is summarised by Rosa in the first chapter — she adopts the irritatingly polemical style typical of Marxist theorists, and so refers to this as “the opportunist method”. You will never be at any risk of accidentally thinking she might be sympathetic to Bernstein, and to me this style borders on the condescending. It’s as if she must constantly remind the reader who they’re supposed to be cheering for, who they’re supposed to be booing. It is very typical among Marxists so I don’t hold her especially to blame for it, but I will note that it is perhaps extra galling from her given that she begins the text with stirring remarks on how the working class, if they are to govern, must be conversant with and full participants of the leading theoretical discussions about politics and economy. Quite so! But then why she seems to utterly mistrust them and any other readers unless she continually presses home the point is beyond me. (This gets even worse when contemporary Marxists adopt the tone. I think because Marx himself, along with Rosa and Lenin, have been so very influential culturally there is some desire to ape their style. And because Marx and Rosa are genuinely witty at times (note that I do not here repeat Lenin’s name - see, I can patronisingly hold the reader’s hand too!) it can even seem aspirational, as one enjoys the experience of reading them. But if you adopt this writing style while in fact being an incredibly stupid know-nothing educated in the school of Twitter dunks it is insufferable.)

One thing that gets me kicked out of the socialist club is that I fundamentally don't like the ultra aggro polemic style of the classic authors. I even polemicised against it myself here (from: www.liamkofibright.com/uploads/4/8/...)

Update?

Put these students in charge! Resist the corruption of higher education by business idiots.

Real talk

Canvas Unrolls AI Teaching Agent The new AI agent aims to save faculty time on “low-value tasks,” but stops short of fully automating grading. But some experts worry that the rise of agentic AI could lead to a dead classroom, where c...

Strong recommendation to teaching faculty to just say no to this stuff, even if you are AI curious/enthusiastic. This is meant to reduce faculty autonomy and capture human labor with automation. You're selling out your future self and the profession as a whole. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

you're getting shadowbanned

Robbie Avila looks like Jokic* out there!

*covered in scratches and bruises

I guess this post is just for me. Smashing the repost button.

I tell my students that writing — in the classroom, in your journal, in a memo at work — is a way of bringing order to our thinking or of breaking apart that order as we challenge our ideas. We look at the evidence around us. We consider ideas we disagree with. And we try to bring a shape to it all. Sometimes my students see the process differently. They see writing a paper as a hoop they are being asked to jump through, a way for me to evaluate them and pronounce them successful or not. In other words, they see writing solely as a product. If the end point rather than the process were indeed all that mattered, then there might be good reason to turn to GPT-3. But if, as I believe is the case, we write to make sense of the world, then the risks of turning that process over to AI are much greater.

I published this in the Boston Globe in November 2022, right before ChatGPT was released which I didn't know was coming that next week and had no idea this conversation would be where it is three years later.

Keep saying it. There are students who get it.

So did ICE

An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements about "Generative AI" Image source: Bibliothèque nationale de France An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements by the University about “Generative AI” Dear students, As you know, in …

Solidarity with Emily Tucker and her open letter to students. Tucker writes, "But the great thing is, you don’t have to go along with this, and I urge you not to. You can refuse to use the chatbot. You can tell your professors that you don’t want them to use it or to require you to use it."

Awful. A teenager, dead by suicide in an ICE detention center. There is now a crisis of suicide inside the detention system; I have never seen anything like it. Suicide has happened before, but they were very rare. This is the third or fourth this year.

wrote about an 80s safety video tape directed by Stuart Gordon and starring Andrea Martin as a self-destructive adult child woman 1900hotdog.com/2026/03/lear...

where will we meet now?

Dune: Part Three | Official Teaser Trailer YouTube video by Warner Bros.

No guild navigators and too much Momoa. But I'm hopeful. Foresight is a terrible gift. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_9v...

This is Amy Madigan and Ed Harris refusing to applaud Elia Kazan's honorary Oscar in 1999. During the Blacklist Era, Kazan named names.

Good on Amy and Ed.

Every July, We Should Celebrate the St Louis Commune In July 1877, workers in St Louis waged a general strike that saw them briefly take the reins of power. Frightened elites compared it to the Paris Commune — and we should celebrate this extraordinary ...

this 314 day, let us fondly recall the St. Louis Commune, and the general strike of 1877

jacobin.com/2021/07/st-l...

you gotta get on fortnite

When it’s time for a Fortnite study break

lol sammy davis jr.

There’s a story I found about the new branch of optics he invented: perioptrics. Franklin and Lavoisier went to investigate. Did not go well apparently.