You can now register for the 37th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information, which will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, from August 3rd to August 14th. For more information and to register, please visit: 2026.esslli.eu
you're welcome
I'm packing for NASSLLI 2025. The lineup is terrific! I'm looking forward to enjoying Seattle for the first time and climbing again with @shanest.bsky.social, who organized the school (kudos!). nasslli25.shane.st/schedule/
Just to be clear, we reached the arresting-judges-and-deporting-US-citizens-without-due-process stage of the slide into authoritarianism today.
And the citizens in question included a toddler and a child with cancer who needs treatment in the US.
PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081
I might be able to hire a postdoc for this fall in computational linguistics at UT Austin. Topics in the general LLM + cognitive space (particularly reasoning, chain of thought, LLMs + code) and LLM + linguistic space. If this could be of interest, feel free to get in touch!
No
Almost certainly an anti-Semitic hate crime. And the President who is trying to tear up the American university system on the pretext of fighting anti-Semitism hasn't said a word.
I had been doubtful that we were going to have a "this is the crisis moment" with Trump, as opposed to "everything about this is a destructive catastrophe."
But the Abrego Garcia case is the crisis moment.
1/
In a formal press event, in the Oval Office, Trump replies to a reporter's question saying that, yes, he would send U.S. citizens to the Salvadoran prison.
Evil
When the head of ICE starts talking about how great it would be to have Amazon Prime for shipping human beings to a concentration camp in El Salvador that no one ever leaves, you’ve gone way past “it could never happen here.”
You can tell who the Good Guys are because they're the ones smashing a car window to drag a mother away from her child while wearing ski masks.
The lesson for universities is you may as well fight back. You'll lose the money either way. The only question is whether you keep your dignity.
EVERY time EVERYONE stand up to Trump, he caves
Paging university presidents/chancellors
A basic red line for defending academic freedom would be not turning over faculty data because they signed an open letter.
It was a pleasure talking to the great @carlzimmer.com about a really exciting new paper from Mélissa Berthet and colleagues about possible non-trivial compositionality in Bonobos. Story in the quote below; paper here: doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Every single university president should be asked, in public, why they are not speaking out this way to support all the students currently detained without due process, and all those terrified that they will be next, on every campus in this country. Yes, including Columbia's acting president.
A lot of people like to dismiss racism as insubstantial to material realities but we’re watching a nation burn trillions of dollars in wealth to entrench a racial system of domination.
We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now
Yes, and they need to do it this week. And the week after. And the week after that. Loudly, collectively, publicly. The silence is deafening. And it's not working. Which everyone could have predicted, because it didn't work before when the attacks were coming from the state level.
What would you say if you saw it in another country? Happening right now
ICE is a terrorist organization.
"I don't care what the judges think" should be grounds for impeachment for any public official, but especially for key actors in the national security system.
This is going to be a bloodbath.
This isn't going to get the attention of Columbia, but it's at least as bad: the University of Maine is having its funding cut off because the governor of Maine dared to challenge Trump.
a democratic senator and members of the board at the university aided and abetted mahmoud khalil's arrest
Excited to announce that the (stellar!) program for NASSLLI is out now: nasslli25.shane.st
Further details on registration and whatnot to follow in the coming weeks. Please do circulate to anyone you know who may be interested in attending!
if you went to college
1. what was your career goal when you started?
2. your initial major?
3. if you changed majors, what did you change to?
4. what do you do now, professionally?
1. No firm plan
2. No clue! Wanted to try it all
3. Phil, Math double (CS minor)
4. computational linguistics prof