Ban Predatory Pricing Now!

Add your voice now to support Marit Stiles' motion to Ban Predatory Pricing in Ontario! share.nwmd.social/s/haVw0mEi

Chance aesthetic moment on my desk

“Educational institutions are like beekeepers,” according to the report. “While their principal aim is to provide education and raise people’s earnings, in the process they create an array of external benefits...society indirectly benefits, just as orchard owners indirectly benefit from beekeepers.”

‘This was forged’: Residents deny sending emails pushing Bay Area air policy change At least 10 people listed as sending letters in favor of an air quality policy change said they have no recollection of doing so and weren’t even aware of the proposal in the Bay Area.

🚨 A new frontier of coordinated disinformation.

Fossil fuel industry front groups are using AI platforms to flood clean air regulators with fake public comments—submitted under real residents' names, without their consent.

@robbonta.bsky.social

www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

With these tools in play, a degree doesn't represent any effort or expertise. It's just a piece of paper.

"Draft version. Do not circulate. Do not input into any AI LLM to summarize, analyze, or for any other purpose. Inputting unpublished work into AI without the author’s consent constitutes intellectual property theft." Is that too harsh?

Recently realized that when I circulate working papers, I have to start asking people not to use AI to read it.

Not sure how to phrase the request to balance force, explanation, and brevity, without sounding like the crazy killjoy I am.

whats wrong with it? havent tried it but I made an account awhile ago

struck the space key by mistake, making a strangely poignant typo

He takes credit for paying lip service to opposing Trump, but he doesn’t really do any substantial opposing.

Now open: call for abstracts for the 2026 Berkeley Graduate Conference on Political Theory

Keynote: John T. Scott (UC Davis)

Submission deadline: January 31
Date: April 11
Submission form: forms.gle/xZUupQbhSfD7...

Please circulate widely!

New in Political Theory, by me:

Does this guy's chain look like a necklace to you? ↓

Scholars have treated it as a necklace. By reading it as a chain instead, I recover Rousseau's paradoxical insight: pride can help us escape corrupt, unequal social conditions

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The whole point of being an academic is that you need to be willing to spend three days creating a 700-word footnote that you will later delete. And you need to LIKE IT.

Now open: call for abstracts for the 2026 Berkeley Graduate Conference on Political Theory

Keynote: John T. Scott (UC Davis)

Submission deadline: January 31
Date: April 11
Submission form: forms.gle/xZUupQbhSfD7...

Please circulate widely!

Im so sleepy

While home sick for a few days, I successfully broke my caffeine addiction! ☕ ❌ 😌

Here's how it's impacting my life & work 👇🧵

I joined my Democratic colleagues in instructing USDA Secretary Rollins to use SNAP’s emergency reserves to keep food assistance flowing for the 42 million Americans who rely on it, including 16 million children, and 4 million people with disabilities. (1/3)

look, I'm no fan of the Bourbons, or of monarchy in general for that matter -- but to invoke them to characterize Trump is I think deeply unfair to Versailles and the French absolutist monarchy

Department floor is having a halloween door decor contest, I think our office wins for scariest @antoniaalksnis.bsky.social

The writing / academic-ish / research meme side-quest continues! And with halloween almost upon us, what could be scarier than Reviewer 2? #highered #academicsky #resdev

facts. #academicsky

Delighted to share the Call for Papers for a special issue of French Historical Studies on the theme "European-Indigenous Relations in the French Americas" (to be co-edited by Scott Berthelette and myself)

CFP and submission guidelines can be found here:
read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo...

it's giving emperor Nero

guys I think I'm finally figuring out the regime types in Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws

💪 $32.24 definitely compensates for lost privacy I can never get back

Intellectual “work” is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him—why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it’s a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair—but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also. And it’s also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship.

Intellectual “work” is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work

-Twain, Conn Yankee

Abba's "take a chance on me" is a mood for academic job market season

The quote below is all true. But let's not forget the one major factor rich kids have in their favor: the ability to pay full tuition, which many colleges/universities seek to balance their books.

scary stuff yeah :/

My cousin was protesting at that & got run down by cops on horseback. Only avoided getting trampled by jumping a fence.