It's a small step from here to prohibiting professors from teaching about climate change, slavery, colonialism, racial discrimination, evolution, and the efficacy of vaccines.

*Court rules that Trump's policies are illegal but allows them to stand anyway* is the best summary of America in 2025 I know.

We're approaching the 30th anniversary of the great Chicago heat wave, when 739 people died and the world got a preview of the social and ecological crises that have now become so common.

I spoke with @wbez.org about the significance of the Chicago disaster, and what we've failed to learn.

“Drill baby drill” is a climate policy.

Gutting the EPA and FEMA is a climate policy.

Cutting access to climate and weather data is a climate policy.

Taxing renewables is a climate policy.

Defunding NSF, NOAA, and NASA is climate policy.

Watching families & communities grieve is a consequence.

Arrest a judge on Friday morning. Deport a 2 year-old citizen on Friday afternoon. Attend the pope's funeral on Saturday.

America’s great research universities were not invented in Silicon Valley garages or cooked up by venture capitalists. For centuries, they’ve been built by scholars, bolstered by benefactors, and scaled up by the state.

The government is now trying to destroy them. The damage will be profound.

Chilling report from Brown University.

Administration advises all foreign students, staff, and faculty to postpone or reconsider (ie cancel) international travel, due to federal government's crackdown on universities.

Brown also warns against *domestic travel* -since it's unclear what ICE will do.

What if - and hear me out on this - algorithms are a way of suppressing voices and ideas that oligarchs don't like?

It would be laughable...except that this paranoid fantasy is now the official White House take on higher ed, being weaponized to destroy research universities across the US.

One columnist, a professional pundit, is living in a paranoid delusion. The other, a sociologist, is living in America.

Do you value your library?

Trump just ordered the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the key source of federal support for libraries.

Libraries are vital social infrastructure, the foundations of an open, democratic society. Gutting them means gutting our own communities.

We Were Wrong About What Happened to America in 2020.

Republicans insist the pandemic didn't happen. Democrats insist we move on. But Americans are still stuck in 2020. We're angry, distrustful, divided. Alone and abandoned. Solidarity is scarce.

Five years later, it's time for a reckoning.

Paperbacks! Just in time for the fifth anniversary, and still so much to learn. @penguinrandomhouse.bsky.social @vintagebooks.bsky.social

Disasters speed up and make visible conditions that are always present but difficult to see.

Huge night here at NYU. An undergrad trying to fix their grade accidentally discovered how to email 11,000 instructors on a secret group email list, unifying the faculty like no one before. I have hundreds of email replies in my inbox. And apparently Onions, the puppy, has just been granted tenure.