Courtney E. Thompson

when its definitely not a hostage situation

With America on My Last Fucking Nerve, I, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Dissent You know me as the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Over the past three years, I’ve tried changing the system from within. I’ve wri...

This @mcsweeneys.net piece is 10/10 no notes www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wit...

Unreasonable , especially in the one-two punch of end-of-semester grading and the holidays.

Fifteen Years

i’m not crying you’re crying

xkcd: Fifteen Years

One of my students told me today that she was just getting over the flu. Did you get your flu shot, I asked. No, she says, I've never had the flu, so I don't need the vaccine.

I gave the Influenza of 1918 lecture a few weeks ago, & I shared info re: campus flu clinic.

This is a premed. Sigh.

My aunt once asked my husband to carve the turkey, so he broke it down, & she saw this and threw a fit, because what she wanted was Norman Rockwell sliced breast, not an expertly broken-down bird.

The family still brings it up to make fun of him 10 years later, and we are still bitter about it.

We always did Christmas Eve at a fancy Italian restaurant, and then homemade Italian on Christmas day. To me, Christmas food is always Italian!

Yes, my husband's family always used to do two Thanksgiving dinners: one Italian, and one Turkey + sides!

Christmas dinner where I'm from is lasagna, manicotti, penne/ziti, meatballs, braciola (and like, one token vegetable). Always fascinated by what "tradional" Christmas dinner looks like for those who did not grow up in the Italian American tri-state bubble (my family issn't even Italian!)

"men"

"Men are in trouble, is the solution making them a problem for women and children too"

I really don't care how you joke with your sane friends. Don't bring bigotry against the mentally ill round me.

In the memo, “Nvidia also responds to claims that the ‘current situation is analogous to historical accounting frauds (Enron, WorldCom, Lucent) that featured vendor financing and SPVs [special purpose vehicles.)’”

@barrons.com $NVDA
@firstadopter.bsky.social
www.barrons.com/articles/nvi...

"Too big to fail," eh?

Between this and the "not wearing makeup" is anti-MAGA take, I'm on a roll! A true radical!

History of Medicine CFPs If you wish to share your CFPs on the SSHM website please contact the Exec Sec, Dr Justine Pick admin@sshm.org Life Histories in Mind: Mental Ill Health and Learning Disability in Context Location:…

Two #histmed CFPs with deadline for abstracts Jan 2026!
Life Histories in Mind: Mental Ill Health and Learning Disability in Context (Manchester) &
Blood is the price of coal: Coal communities, health and welfare in Britain and beyond from the 19th century to the present (Warwick)
For more details 👇

WOW

speaking as a teacher, I hate this and will never do it. Why? because it still centres the tech. Also, students may take the wrong lesson away bc they got a superficially passable paper. I didn't invite ChatGPT into my class. Educators, not degenerate freaks like Sam Altman, decide what we teach

The notion that some people were "born criminals" predates the notion of genes and the practice of eugenics.

(I wrote a book about this.)

If you’re a journalist who’s still on Twitter, from now on in your writing you have to replace “the American people want” with “troll bots in Eastern Europe demand”

Being there makes your judgment suspect. I don’t care how savvy you think you are, you’re marinating in a disinformation campaign.

Elon Musk donated $277 million to Trump so he could steal the federal government’s data, dismantle the nation’s infrastructure, and stop foreign aid from going to nonwhite people. It’s a quid pro quo breathtaking in scope, corruption, and damage, & completely unprecedented in American history.

I would happily read a stack of books about this. This phenomenon is fascinating.

Really important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.

“we need to be nicer to men” bro they didn’t let women have their own credit cards til 50 years ago

Sign for a "Friend" ad defaced with graffiti reading "AI doesn't care if you live or die."

Sign for a "Friend" ad defaced with graffiti reading "talk to humans"

Sign for a "Friend" ad defaced with graffiti reading "Fuck this!"

Sign for a "Friend" ad defaced with graffiti reading "you don't have to accept this future."

Yesterday my partner and I counted all the ads along Chicago's Brown Line for "Friend," a company selling an AI chatbot pendant, and tallied how many of those ads were defaced.

Still working on a longer piece on this, but here's the quick and dirty: we counted 104 "Friend" ads total, 42 defaced.

By and large, however, the allegations against the other social media platforms are less detailed than those against Meta. The internal documents cited by the plaintiffs allege: Meta intentionally designed its youth safety features to be ineffective and rarely used, and blocked testing of safety features that it feared might be harmful to growth. Meta required users to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform, which a document described as “a very, very, very high strike threshold." Meta recognized that optimizing its products to increase teen engagement resulted in serving them more harmful content, but did so anyway. Meta stalled internal efforts to prevent child predators from contacting minors for years due to growth concerns, and pressured safety staff to circulate arguments justifying its decision not to act.

17 strikes and you’re out. 💀

DOGE was created for data theft and infrastructure dismantling and it wildly succeeded on both counts within the first few weeks of its existence. It will take a generation to rebuild what it destroyed and the breach of data is unprecedented.

This is how you get the Matrix!

Today we did our big grocery shop for Thanksgiving, and it came out to $265. Not terrible for five adults and a mostly vegetarian meal, but this doesn't include beverages, hors d'oeuvres, and the things we probably forgot. What does your Thanksgiving grocery bill look like this year?

Amazing!