Cindy L. Cain (@cindylcain) My first post! Just a tinny tiny story about my trajectory and what I hope to do here.

substack.com/@cindylcain/...

Today I need to you to hear about Paul Éluard, a French poet and #Resistance fighter against the Nazis. An important surrealist artist before the war, during the Nazi occupation, he joined the underground resistance network, and used his #poetry as a weapon.

The President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, PPFP, has been a jewel in the crown for faculty development and recruitment at the University of California for years and the results have been an expanded faculty with almost 100% tenure rates — unprecedented success.

Love, love, love @dieworkwear.bsky.social. Doing the work of a public sociology with every post.

A cartoon showing a man between a white construction worker and a black man. He points to the black man and says "Careful mate ... that foreigner wants your cookie" The man in the middle has a plate full of cookies; the construction worker has one cookie; the black man has no cookies.

I'm pro-union because I think workers should organize to balance the power that business owners have in various negotiations. It's true that unions have been weakened, but it's not because of multiculturalism. I would argue, it's because people seek to exploit divisions for their material interests.

"knowledge is humanity's spiritual birthright. Making it, playing with it, revising it, sifting through it, making sense of it -- it is baked into who we are as a species. [...] Every generation is responsible for protecting this legacy for the next generation."

Printing this to hand to my 13yo:

Cover of a book titled Called to Care? White background with plant matter barely visible.

It’s happening…

LinkedIn thinks I might want to be a part time bookseller. What do the AI overlords know that I don’t?

Report for: The Roots of Social Trauma: Collective, Cultural Pain and Its Consequences In the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric

In 2019, after more than half a decade of studying youth suicide, I began writing a bit about disintegration of attachments, pain, and trauma. Real happy stuff. COVID made these ideas more urgent, in my mind. Here is my fave piece, on social trauma:
sage.altmetric.com/details/1569...

We can do this. Nothing is on fire.

In many cases, it’s better to take the L and learn from it than to stress yourself and everyone else out trying to make a deadline. The quality of our work decreases when we’re all pumped full of adrenaline. Not to mention the health consequences.

Furthermore, be precise in language - most of what we label “urgent” is just time-sensitive. 3. Grapple with the fact that there are sometimes consequences to missing deadlines. But most of those consequences are not all that damning.

Academics: can we please collectively agree to turn down the heat on ourselves and each other? Three easy things to do: 1. Say out loud “nothing is on fire” and repeat it until you believe that very little in our jobs is actually on fire. 2. Recognize the distinction between urgent and important.

Today I broke my own cardinal WFH rule: never attempt to do IRB work at home. Leave all those bad feelings at the office.

Anyone know what Jon Meacham is up to these days? I/we could benefit from hearing his voice.

A General Air of Anxiety - Boston Review The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

A powerful essay from Joan Scott as universities become sites of fear.

Not only is it possible to believe that political violence is bad AND Nazis are bad (and not to be mourned as part of public life), it’s… a very consistent worldview

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

Absolutely. And did you catch where the professor mentioned having an observer the prior class period? It sounds like they and their dept head (and probably dean) knew this was coming and did everything they could to mitigate.

Chilling.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

My book, Called to Care? Health Care, Burnout, and the Search for Meaningful Work, has a publication date — June 9, 2026!

It’s only 11:15am and I’ve already listened to this 80 times.

The DoD Rapid Response team on Twitter writes: "The Secretary of Defense has great jeans." The attached photo shows Sec. Pete Hegseth wearing a blue sport coat, white button-up shirt, blue jeans, and a big buckle Western belt.

I disagree. I will tell you what's wrong with his jeans. 🧵

The part I think about all the time is how it was a compliment to be told “you’re not like other girls.” All the girls trying to not be like other girls, just because we all hated women so much.

This is very bad. Although entirely predictable. Once more the humanities are being cut back to prop up STEM and, increasingly, AI investment (including at the expense of bench science). In the past, cuts to humanities were promoted on two separate logic streams that do not hold true: /1

May even the bats mourn with us. www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6-T...

Talk about The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones all you want, but the greatest US television program ever made is Sesame Street. It's not even close. 50+ years of treating kids across class, ethnicity, religion not as mini-consumers...but as citizens with a stake in this world.

Clever.

Butt Stuff Podcast Episode · Radiolab · 11/11/2022 · 35m

I loved this episode when it cane out in 2022. The bits about fashion sizing and data were intriguing. But I listened again today and the fascism and eugenics angles really struck home. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/r...