We asked people who lived in homeless encampments that were cleared out in city “sweeps” to write about what object was the hardest for them to lose.
“They took my baby pictures and my moms obituaries,” a man in California wrote.
(Published Dec. 2024)
I admit psychologist might be a slightly misleading simplification here
There is nothing drivers like more than telling you, a cyclist just trying to survive, how you are putting yourself at risk being near cars
Herbert Simon appraising Bruno Latour as "soft, to the point of mushiness" and his work as "a sort of generalized Marxism" is quite noteworthy (albeit not that surprising considering the former's computationalist views of knowledge and the social).
It's perhaps especially frustrating that it's one of few online platforms that an older generation of scholars treats as acceptably serious public scholarship, while many venues that do in fact pay and do in fact get readers do not seem to so count
This article is now temporarily open access
See the new issue of History of Social Science, just published! Half the articles are free, including @brad.bolman.com’s account of Bruno Latour’s blocked appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study and Chas Camic’s short bio of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class muse.jhu.edu/issue/56614
“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.
![“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:guthikarwozoldkzhueivkl6/bafkreihklvhtymho7wpemo5mj2f7xaiq6ulvfvcwnzo6hjstg3wixzgesy)
“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”
Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”
this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...
Barrera said her husband said the smell of human feces in the toilet caused a fellow detainee to vomit and, in turn, created a chain of people vomiting. She said her husband is asthmatic and has not received medication to treat his condition. The lack of medicine and the stress of the overcrowded holding cell has left him short of breath and teetering on the edge of an asthma attack, Barrera said. ICE did not immediately respond to questions on April 10 about the conditions of the Mesa or Phoenix facilities. After the publication of this article, Barrera told The Arizona Republic her husband was transferred to the ICE facility at San Luis Regional Detention Center at about midnight. The San Luis Regional Detention Center is in Southwestern Arizona and has the capacity to hold 700 people.
This is horrific. A U.S. citizen describes the facility in Arizona that her husband was brought to while he waited to be put on a deportation flight. Dozens of people were crammed into tiny cells, there was a "chain of people vomiting" from filthy toilets, no medical care, and only one meal per day.
The Drift's senior slop correspondent @mitchtherieau.bsky.social wrote a piece for our new issue on the phantasmic visual output of the Trump administration. In honor of AI-Jesusgate, we're sharing it with you today. www.thedriftmag.com/into-the-rig...
Devastating: Hampshire College is permanently closing following the Fall 2026 Semester. A beautiful institution & community that has done so much for so many. My child is a current Hampshire senior. Hampshire's approach to education is so unique, humane, & exciting—I've seen it first hand. Tragic
Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe.
Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities
www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...
Describing someone as a "lunatic" and "clearly insane" does seem to go beyond "questioning whether he has grown increasingly unbalanced" ...
‘Everything is gone’: Israel destroys entire villages in Lebanon
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...
Making tenure count, for MSNOW I wrote about my employer, The University of Iowa, creating a center for intellectual freedom. It's a reactionary project built on decades of conservative propaganda about higher ed.
The landing Artemis II as it hit water, orange and white parachutes
Pretty unbelievable watching this live
JOB ALERT: Two 4.5 year postdoctoral positions to work on my Wellcome-funded project 'Conserving Global Health: Biodiversity Protection and the Prehistory of Planetary Health'. Please share widely!
CLOSING DATE: 23 April (the date on Jobs.ac.uk is apparently incorrect)
While killing dozens of people in Lebanon (MOPH says 112, civil defense counts 250+, until now), Israel still found time to kill another one of our colleagues in Gaza.
Only a master deal maker could achieve the status quo of 5 weeks ago in exchange for accomplishing nothing of value and turning his country into a global pariah. Thank you sir
The Moon! The Sun's corona! A crewed spacecraft! Oh my!
HOLY SHIT
I called my Republican senators and Democratic rep and it was clear they are working on the Trump threat but not hearing that many calls about it yet…
yeah man i'll circle back to you on that agenda item from yesterday's all hands in just a sec. our pedophile king just threatened to destroy a whole civilization
“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.
This past week I taught about white supremacy + the US conservation movement, and it landed so hard that it has to be two full weeks next year. Appreciative of this take linking to current politics, incl. ecofascism, even though I think there's more at work here.
harpers.org/archive/2026...
Now that we all left KC after a wonderful #ASEH #ASEH2026, continue the scholar conversation by reviewing a book for H-Environment! Check out my list of books below! #envhist #envhum #ecocrit #aghist #energy #animalhist #sustainability #anthropocene #plantstudies
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
theonion.com/no-blood-for...
“They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science…And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees”
