Laura Clawson
lauraclawson.bsky.social
Laura Clawson
@lauraclawson.bsky.social
Christian, too many to name.

Totally secular, the Kinks, "Father Christmas.

"Time to Remember the Poor" only gets Christian at the end, so I'm counting it as semi-secular. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgVt...
December 1, 2025 at 3:22 AM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
It’s useful to think about things like this in numbers of tenure track professors.

$33M is 358 assistant professors. Or about fourteen percent of the total number of full-time faculty at Michigan State.
SOURCES: Michigan State is firing head coach Jonathan Smith, @theathletic.com has learned.

He went 9-15 in two seasons, including 1-8 in the Big Ten this year. (ESPN first reported).

MSU players meeting called for 2:45. Smith has a $33 million buyout (with offset).
December 1, 2025 at 12:05 AM
Excellent context from @devilstower.bsky.social on Pete Hegseth’s crimes.
What decency requires
There is no circumstance under which Hegseth’s order is legal, and no world where it is remotely moral.
www.unchartedblue.com
November 30, 2025 at 11:32 PM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
They’re simultaneously arguing that soldiers have to follow all orders from the president, legal or not, but they get to ignore orders from a federal judge if they feel they’re not legal.
KARL: Did you know about the judge's order when you issued your order for the planes to continue?

KRISTI NOEM: This is an activist judge. We comply with all federal orders that are lawful and binding.
November 30, 2025 at 5:43 PM
My kid turned four a few weeks in. We had to cancel his party with his friends. But our neighbors, many of them in their 80s, put on costumes & came out in the yard & cheered him while he rode his bike from one end of the complex to the other.
What's a charming memory you have from the worst period of the pandemic?
November 30, 2025 at 6:08 AM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
Good morning to Brazilian reporter Manuela Borges, who’s been waiting eleven years for this petty moment. ❤️ 🇧🇷
November 26, 2025 at 1:04 PM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
“There were no cervical cancer cases diagnosed in women aged <25 years in 2021 – the first time that this has occurred in data going back to 1982. This remarkable achievement is almost certainly due to the impact of HPV vaccination.” From report.cervicalcancercontrol.org.au

#vaccinationsaveslives
November 26, 2025 at 10:53 AM
Here’s the thing: pie crust is bad in desserts. (I’m open to savory pies in crust.) Apple crisp is good. Key lime pie in a crumb crust isn’t really my thing, but fine fine. Pecan pie filling without a crust is excellent. Ditto pumpkin pie filling.
Apple pie is bad. This is not really debatable. So is key lime pie, while we’re on the topic. Pecan pie is the 🐐 tho.
November 25, 2025 at 9:29 PM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
So either Trump spoke to Bolsonaro about plotting to escape to the US right before the latter got caught trying to saw off his ankle monitor, or Trump imagined a conversation he didn’t have. Both scenarios are incredibly dark
An amazing new Trump controversy, Part II of II:

- Saturday afternoon: Trump says he spoke to Bolsonaro the night before and planned to see him “in the very near future”

- Monday afternoon: The Trump White House isn’t sure whether Trump actually had the conversation he referenced two days earlier
White House hedges on Trump’s curious claim about his call with Brazil’s Bolsonaro White House hedges on Trump’s curious claim about his call with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro
Did the Republican president talk to Bolsonaro as the Brazilian plotted to escape? Trump said yes, but the White House isn’t so sure.
www.ms.now
November 25, 2025 at 7:28 PM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
I am super-pro-public transit, and use it way more than the average American, but I live near a light rail station with very, very stable and predictable scheduling, and even then I would not use it for many things I use a car for because the cost of transit is time.
i wonder how much of Americans' views on driving vs. transit would change if they had to pay for gas/insurance/etc every time they turned on the engine

"i'm not paying $5 to take the train to work twice a day when i can just drive" is a genuine opinion held by so many people
November 24, 2025 at 1:55 AM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
America putting most of its eggs in the generative AI basket, China going hard into green tech. When history looks back on this period, someone is going to look awfully stupid.
November 22, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
Further details on the Election Night mis-reporting of results from me in @cambridgeday.com .

Perhaps more questions than answers, though?

bsky.app/profile/camb...
November 22, 2025 at 12:12 AM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
My story on Connecticut’s only immigration court — published this week — features an interview with a judge let go in September: www.ctinsider.com/news/article...
November 21, 2025 at 11:29 PM
It’s sounding like this was prescient?
Trump in a room with a very charismatic person results in like half a day of Trump agreeing with everything that person said, so this has the potential to be very, very funny.
Trump says he’s meeting with “communist” Mamdani at the White House on Friday
November 21, 2025 at 9:29 PM
Ok, there are 87,000 people on this island? That this plan was evil is self-evident, but that number shows how incredibly fucking stupid it also was.
Gavin and Tanner, planned and trained for nearly a year, legal documents say, in an elaborate attempt to invade a Haitian island, kill its Black men, enslave its Black women and Black children and fulfill their "rape fantasies."

www.fox4news.com/news/haitian...
NTX men planned to murder men, enslave women on foreign island: Indictment
Two North Texas men have been indicted for an alleged scheme to sail to a foreign island, murder all the men, and enslave the women and children.
www.fox4news.com
November 21, 2025 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
I would like men who are now just learning that their women friends and loved ones were harassed by their professors to ask themselves this: why do you think your women friends never told you?
November 21, 2025 at 6:35 AM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick.

Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.
Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq
November 21, 2025 at 12:49 PM
So it took a judge and the head of security for the court to prevent ICE from kidnapping a high school student who was not even the person they were looking for.
www.wpri.com
November 21, 2025 at 12:04 PM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
Another way to look at this is the administration is celebrating a 17% decline in one of our most prestigious and profitable exports
The White House just blasted this out under the headline "Good News You May Have Missed"
November 20, 2025 at 3:58 AM
Learned this morning that insulated mugs are like Tupperware: you might have five mugs and five lids but you will only have one actual matching set.
November 19, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
NARRATOR: Roth quite clearly did not name call & we need our leaders to stop granting <every bad faith premise> of the far right authoritarians' lawless assault on higher education before we push back.
November 18, 2025 at 10:10 PM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
In April 2009, the Washington Post asked 10 writers to make the case for something that deserves to be tossed out as part of "spring cleaning."

I chose Larry Summers.

Better late than never.

Unlocked version of my 16-year-old article below.
naomiklein.org/why-we-shoul...
November 18, 2025 at 6:20 AM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
Olivia Nuzzi was doing journalism the right way.

by Ezra Klein
November 18, 2025 at 3:16 AM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
Charlotte-Mecklebburg Schools, according to reports, saw 15% of its students absent today amid Border Patrol operations in Charlotte. If that percentage of 15% happens Tuesday in Wake County due to the Border Patrol coming to Raleigh, 24.000 students could be absent from school. #nced #ncpol #wcpss
November 18, 2025 at 12:59 AM
Reposted by Laura Clawson
"The wildfire is over my shoulder now, over the hill": Olivia, lady, the wildfire killed people, drove thousands from their homes, and sent a couple of my older kid's classmates fleeing with their families for their lives. Quit making like Temu Joan Didion and shut the f–– up.
November 17, 2025 at 8:29 PM