Eric Drott

Ohio GOP mayor accused of sniffing underage relative's underwear Butler Mayor Wesley R. Dingus faces two misdemeanor voyeurism charges following a Richland County investigation. The case unfolds as he remains on bond in a separate felony matter.

and republicans still can’t figure out why they’re hemorrhaging young voters tiffinohio.net/posts/ohio-g...

Yesterday, those who teach Intro to Sociology at Florida colleges (as opposed to universities) received a ready-made curriculum from the state and were ordered to teach it.

Yes, you read that correctly. The *state* is enforcing a curriculum on college profs, complete w/ the following restrictions:

"Geo" shared this vid from where he's picking oranges. "Our sacks weigh 60 pounds when full. We start at 11am - after after the dew dries and work to 5. We earn $24 per 900 lb bin. It's hard to pay our bills with this pay and reduced hours because of the morning dew." #WeFeedYou

Ireland’s basic income for the arts scheme becomes permanent When piloted, initiative that provided €325 a week to eligible artists recouped more than its net cost, study shows

Government Shocks Nation With Good Decision

Tenure Will Be Eliminated at Most of Oklahoma’s Public Colleges, Governor Says Gov. J. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, directed the state’s two-dozen regional universities and community colleges to phase out the practice. Existing faculty members will be grandfathered in.

No Tenure for Oklahoma.

Instead, faculty will be on "renewable contracts “tied to teaching effectiveness, student completion, job placement, and economic alignment.”

#academicsky

This desire to decimate the white collar workforce is also driving the billionaire class's efforts to cut, curb, and control higher education. Because academia is the machine that produces the white collar class.

bsky.app/profile/loui...

Now, I say decimate because the goal isn't to destroy white collar work entirely. It's to make those "good jobs" so rare that people will do anything to get and keep them. Including and most especially—working to quell public resistance and bolster billionaires' power.

Underwater Basket Weaving I’d like to apologize up front to all the liberal arts majors reading this, surely flashing back to the most annoying conversations they’ve ever had...

This one was a genuine rabbit hole, very fun to research and write. I did not expect "underwater basket weaving" to connect to basically every social issue of the mid 20th century

part of this is like, conservatives projecting; part of this is conservatives unable to imagine politics without money; and part of this is dudes who are so out of touch with feminized labor that they think children's birthday parties exist as a spontaneous act of parthogenesis

ICE protest songs and chants, Minnesota general strike (January 23) and beyond Transcriptions of singing at ICE protests by faith leaders and protesters. Songs about ICE’s masculinity issues. Other songs about the ICE…

I've written this blogpost on ICE protest chants & songs, w/ a large section of transcriptions of singing at protests by faith leaders and the Singing Resistance. It also includes songs about ICE agents' perceived masculinity issues and new songs protesting ICE. medium.com/@norikomanab...

Hello I’m the ubermensch, my one weakness is whistles

In April 2024, Spotify implemented a new scheme: songs with less than 1k streams per year would no longer receive royalties.

The data for 2025 was just released via Luminate, and 88% of songs have been demonetized.

Read it again: 88% of songs on Spotify have been demonetized.

Time for our annual viewing of the academia-themed Just in Time for Christmas, in which she gets cold called by the “Dean of Yale,” who wants to publish her dissertation because it will be a bestseller and offers a flyout for a job she didn’t apply for, and mystical William Shatner shakes things up.

+1

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Backing up Spotify We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirro...

Somebody scraped & shared every song on Spotify, with metadata — a boon for research into music and algorithms, but also, inevitably, what the training data is going to be for every AI music company in 2026. annas-archive.li/blog/backing...

Someone ought to write about how AI has replaced the labor academic wives used to do (which was really just all of it)

Here’s Milton Friedman thanking his wife for, well, writing Capitalism and Freedom:

#DigitalBlackFace

not that the present economic picture is rosy, but i do think that popular culture — and specifically nostalgia bait television — is a big part of the reason that our public memory of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s seems to miss the real economic pain that marked each of those decades.

Because every time something is labeled “vibes”, I go look and it’s just Marxism.

Someone is going to have the write the thing about how “vibe” has become a substitute for meaningful theory in a world where the theory is so clear — grift and power — but we collectively refuse if because it isn’t sophisticated enough to generate make work for empiricists.

New conspiracy theory just dropped:

What if peer review, committee meetings, strategic plans, promotion & tenure processes, and letter-writing requests are all part of a secret plot to keep smart, creative, active minds from thinking and writing the big ideas that would *really* change the world?

www.texastribune.org/2025/11/12/t...

Spotify's doppelgänger problem After King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard left Spotify in protest earlier this year, something strange took their place

"If you search for Jayilor on Spotify, you’ll find that it has covered all of the King Gizzard songs that are still available to stream on Spotify — and that, in fact, when you stream King Gizzard on Spotify today, you are unwittingly streaming Jayilor."

Spotify's doppelgänger problem:

Here's the full Summers email, btw.

Fantastic stuff Toby. Utterly fantastic

Protecting the Family: A few more notes on “the new Taylorism” On my birthday this year (kind of a big one too!), Taylor Swift swooped in and stole my thunder with yet another album. Adding insult to injury, my university PR team then asked if I might write so…

Is Taylor Swift the new FW Taylor? No. She's the new Jonathan Swift, which is worse. Here's why only Veblen can help us.

I reviewed the latest album in order to get it out of my system.
tgpbennett.wordpress.com/2025/11/12/p...