Henry Farrell on the Trump admin’s proposed “compact” for universities, arguing that the rollout signals weakness, and that academics need to band together to reject this authoritarian attack on university independence and academic freedom.

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

Newark, Delaware

Cops used 83,000 cameras to track a single abortion patient — on her abuser’s tip.

The hack novelist writing our terrible, stupid timeline wants to make sure we all understand that the theme of this chapter is Awful AI Tech Corpos are Burning the Planet, Yes Literally, Yes, in Every Way Possible

This is all a bit on the nose.

The death of the semi-shady local campus copyshop (and the official bookstores complete paranoia about copyright) stymied me on that this semester, but I think I need to try again bc it’s ridiculous to try and run a discussion when everyone trying to read a page of Harper’s weekly on their phones

The “startup” referenced here as raising new money for (one of the main) Presidential memecoins is - of course - a Delaware registered entity.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT LLC, DE file no. 10052401, reg. agent CSC

Hey @queermedieval.bsky.social your illustration prints *beautifully*!!

Anti-fascist frogs hot off the press

Putting in more shifts at the archive mines or logging a double at the paragraph factory – that doesn't seem all that meaningful in a context where historical knowledge not just fails to move us forward, individually or in aggregate, but simply makes us aware of how bad things are getting, & worse.

Lorrin Thomas, the author of that review essay – which is itself a valuable exploration of five really innovative new contributions to scholarship – has really put their finger on it.

Americans are repeating their worst history–and doing so both ignorantly & knowledgeably, furiously & joyfully.

"The most obvious goal of historical scholarship, for its authors as well as its readers, is to generate a better understanding of the past—in order, as the saying goes, to avoid repeating it. At the same time, historians must constantly confront the glib aspiration in that aphorism."

"Taken together, the five books I discuss here have come close to predicting a future almost as bleak as the one we now face."

“We didn’t take any federal funding at our sites. You can get philanthropic support. You don’t have to take federal money. And if the federal government is involved and tries to take away the essence of these cultural institutions, I would advise them to tell the government, ‘Keep your money.’”

She has *hand pasted* - like, with a glue stick - a printout of a tweet.

The US has been driven to autocracy by cynical, incapable losers who have underlings print out their emails.

Yeah, the editing and framing of the shots is unmistakable from the jump

17th-century name of the day: Zerubbabel Endicott

Good reporting on the South Shore raid from South Side weekly here.

Confirms one thing I was told but didn't put in my own piece because I didn't have a second source and it seemed too insane: border agents segregated arrested residents by race

southsideweekly.com/federal-agen...

Cocaine was a hell of a drug (in modernist Vienna).

Another way the Trump regime has come to resemble that of Charles I

If the tariffs revenues or the memecoin mines ever dry up sufficiently that they have to call an Estates General again oof I dunno how this is going to go

Gonna be thinking about this lede for a minute.

With farm bailouts back in the news, it's a great time to remind everyone that US Treasury Secretary Bessent owns thousands of acres of of soybean farms.

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/u...

I keep saying this dude is speed running the Stuart dynasty
(particularly, though not uniquely, in his interest in using stakes in corporations as a means of rule, courtier coalition building, and enrichment)

A whole lot of what used to be prestigious fellowships and grants are going to look a lot less so, starting with this year’s winners.