Libraries are a cornerstone of American democracy. Yet President Trump and his extremist allies want to defund our libraries, ban books, and jail librarians. Here’s how we’re fighting back. #NationalLibraryWeek
same!
Listening to Ian Patterson & Ali Smith on theLRB Bookshop podcast re: this book. Strikes me as no accident that the first thing the techbros went after was card catalogs and physical books. www.weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk/titles/ian-p...
"With a free Skynet Edu account, students can gain the career-readiness needed to navigate an exciting future in which they will be hunted by a remorseless, nuclear-armed superintelligence seeking to annihilate the human race—which will later be revealed to be Skynet itself."
Pls read this editorial by @kirstenweld.bsky.social
about how our Provost's plan for "viewpoint diversity" hires further erodes faculty governance at my university. (And never mind "veritas"!)
8 hires--but humanities hiring generally has been frozen since 3/25.
www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...
The 1996 welfare retrenchment actually changed policy (for better or for worse).The 2025 welfare retrenchment-which will hurt more people than the 1996 reform-is administrative in nature. It's all about making it impossible for eligible people to actually navigate the system to receive benefits
… and what that data might tell about Wheatley, *Poems*, and curricular and collections priorities at both Black-centered and historically-white institutions. Congrats on presenting at the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, Caleb!
My undergraduate research fellow Caleb worked all year with me on the @wheatleycensus.bsky.social! He became interested in a tricky and uneven data point: year of last institutional collection (the last time a particular copy of the first edition of *Poems* entered an institutional library)…
in conclusion, i'm calling for intellectual diversity in the coal mining industry.
I will give a registered Republican one (1) chair at a small liberal arts college for each one (1) family-owned mining corporation turned over to Dems, and I’ll give the ENTIRE Harvard Sociology department in exchange for Gov and both Senators from West Virginia.
the basic theory of DOGE was that if powerful people said it was fine it didn’t matter what the law said.
I think proving that theory wrong is worth significant effort
France passed a law requiring solar panels on every parking lot with more than 80 spaces.
Equals 10 nuclear reactors
Reduces heat island, shades cars
The US -- 800 million parking spaces. Most of them are uncovered asphalt sitting in direct sunlight.
Why aren't we doing this?
their closure also means a massive economic hit to the counties that hosted them. if you thought deindustrialization and deskilling were already devastating enough, well,
Re situations like this, I think about the Fleetwood Mac lyric from "Landslide" esp bc I am particularly attached to my kid: "I've been afraid of changing / 'Cause I've built my life around you." But yeah - part of the challenge is figuring out how to grow and change and deal together and apart.
If you paid even a penny in federal income tax last year, you paid more than:
Tesla
Southwest
Disney
Live Nation
HP
United
PayPal
CVS Health
Palantir
Citigroup
PG&E
3M
That's right. They paid $0 in federal income tax.
It's time for big corporations to pay their fair share.
Cutting grants is cutting higher education which depends on these funds. It's all a coordinated attack to make us less healthy and less educated
There's this extraordinary delusion that you can get anything you want in a free epub.
That is so very far from the truth.
Why are libraries, museums, the IMLS, the NEH, etc. so important? Because BOOKS ARE BEING LOST.
What a bunch of soft skinned losers.
lol innovative ideas JUST as Hampshire College which does just this is closed.
I am guilty of writing a kitchen sink introduction out of my sense that intros are all anyone reads.
In the Intimacy of Paper I started trying to think through presence as a way of accounting for what otherwise seems like woo woo vibes in the reading room:
More higher ed discourse like this please
My hypothesis is that there’s a regular sized hail ball at the core that then accumulated a big ring of ice around it as it fell? Anyone know earth science who can explain this?
Someone out there must know meteorology. We had insanely severe tornado/hail in Madison yesterday. Every car in my neighborhood is damaged. Why is all the baseball sized hail in the shape of a donut/saturn peach?
"I think there’s an inability for those people who have wealth in the country to understand and value something like Hampshire. It was dedicated to a transformational education, in an era when higher education has been hijacked by the transactional" - Ken Burns '75 www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/u...
headline related to April 2026 warehouse fire in San Bernadino county accompanied by photo of a night sky lit orange by fire with smoke rising from a burning warehouse
It's not lost on me that 260 years after oppressive taxation of paper & documents necessary to live and & work led to Stamp Act protests that precipitated revolution, a new revolution's earliest expressions might be taking form in the burning of warehouses of life's paper (toilet, kitchen, napkin).
This is really concerning
Huh, why undermine SJSU's iSchool? It's one of the largest MLIS student populations in the US.
Caveat: I will move heaven and earth to ensure each and every student in my classes has the kind of access to course materials they need and deserve. But that is not the issue here. What we are seeing is a Trojan horse for the Ed Tech sector and government overreach.
I am broken-hearted at the terrible news that my alma mater, @hampshirecollege.bsky.social, after 56 yrs, is closing. Its death is a victory for conformism, for corporatism, for higher education's dull love of hierarchy & status. It's a grievous defeat for imagination & experimentation.
