Claus Offe, the great German Marxist sociologist died yesterday. His essays collection Disorganized Capitalism is so good! I'm obsessed with "2 Logics of Collective Action", a rejoinder to Mancur Olson's neo-classical treatment of unions. "The Political Economy of the Labor Market" is also a banger!

The Ezra Klein conversation with Ta
-Nahisi Coates is like listening to an evolved human (Coates) trying to reason, with great moral clarity and nuance, with a hollow shell of a person.

Happy Stanislav Petrov Day! On this day one man prevented the apocalypse.

"Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Wednesday he will join Italy in sending a military warship to protect an international flotilla seeking to deliver aid to Gaza after it was attacked by drones off Greece."

www.reuters.com/world/middle...

sorry i know we already did this, but just remembered that the sorta-tacit-sorta-explicit thing in that amicus brief is 'we are goldbugs for gender' and had to stare at the wall for five minutes

It gives me no pleasure to report that he does indeed have that shit on

A new Chotiner dropped

Claus Offe talks about this in "The Political Economy of the Labor Markey". I was reading it today.

Unions in Italy have launched a one-day strike to protest Israel's war on Gaza. Thousands of workers are demonstrating in the general strike that's brought schools, transit and ports to a halt.

So so sad to learn about the death of Jonathan Lear. His work on Aristotle and Freud was formative for me. He was a model of philosophical intelligence and curiosity. More importantly he was a human human, with rare integrity and sharp judgment. It's hard to imagine the world without him in it.

All of us at the university budget town hall heard the same thing when the president said that donors liked the “sharpening” we’ve done and will reward future “sharpening,” right?

We haven’t seen the text of this yet, but to be clear, the president has literally zero legal authority to impose a $100,000 fee on visas. None. Zip. Zilch.

The only authority Congress has ever given the executive branch here is to charge fees to recover the cost of processing the application.

Seems like ending H1-B visas may result in offshoring some high skilled jobs. Not in higher ed obvs but in tech

We’d be in a much stronger position right now if mainstream Democrats had taken a common sense stand for First Amendment principles instead of piling on undergraduate standing up for Palestine.

The free speech activist who built a list of professors he worked to get fired for their speech must be celebrated for his support of free speech, and anyone who quotes his speech accurately in context will be fired and/or face state punishment by the champions of free speech, do I have that right?

I see we're at the "put Jewish people on a special surveillance list" stage of "combating antisemitism"

this is, hands down, the best video I've seen on men's influencer content and it's not close either

I'm losing my mind. It's too good youtu.be/x__Cu2MLxEU?...

The RNs of Magee's Women's Hospital just won their election and succeded in forming a union. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is the biggest employer in PA. David just beat goliath. I can't believe it. It wasn't even close. Solidarity forever.

Oh good. We've reached the "I don't have to be faster than the bear, I only have to be less woke than you" stage of faculty solidarity. archive.is/wGNDr

AI filmmaking is peeing. It’s pooping. It’s throwing up. It’s a new kind of liquid coming out. It’s hated by the establishment. It’s what goes in the toilet. It’s wet. It’s what’s in the bathroom.

This is why Israel refuses to allow the international press access to Gaza.
Because images like this make it impossible to deny that this is genocide.

Hirsch, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, is now thinking of leaving the classroom:
“A university that treats criticism of Israel as antisemitic & threatens sanctions for those who disobey is no longer a place of open inquiry … I just don’t see how I can teach about genocide in that environment.”