Adam Goldfarb

"because I had no talent and consequently everything to gain" Kierkegaard, page 33

My very specific reading of Either/Or is turning impostor syndrome into a mantra for growth... If I didn't suck, I would have nothing to learn and therefore no reason to pursue the academic life! LFG growth!

Left postmodernists in the 1990s assumed that the "truths" of the marginalised and oppressed would benefit from abandoning an epistemological commitment to objective truth. It should have been obvious that the "truths" of the rich and powerful would prevail.

The conservative approach to uprooting civil rights has long been a 2 step approach. While the 2nd gets the attention, the 1st enables the 2nd.

1) Define equality in ways that ignore past history/injustice and treats attempts of repair as attacks on equality.
2) Eliminate/dilute laws and policies.

Making our imaginations ahistorical is essential to our fascist present.

I actually think it’s a good thing that there are people who devote their working lives to studying something that may only be of interest to a small number of people, who get on here with great excitement and say “I nerded the heck out of this for three years, I’m proud of me, read my article!”

Woman on beach staring at giant wave (tsunami?)

Feeling this hard today. #AcademicSky

Bill Burr Says ‘CNN and Fox News Are a F—ing Disease,’ Fires Back at ‘Horrible’ Conservatives Bashing Him as ‘Woke’: ‘They’re Racists’ and ‘Cowards’ Bill Burr says the conservatives calling him "woke" are "racists" and "cowards."

You don't need a Joe Rogan for the left. What we all need to do is take Bill Burr's lead. Every time a Republican goes after him, he doesn't debate him. He just insults them and tells them to go fuck themselves. We don't need one person to do this. We should all just do this.

Same

Over most of the last 50 years, nearly every Black student who attended Harvard College, myself included, was admitted under the guidance of one Black admissions officer, Dean Evans.

building community requires strong links among caring, responsible people. weak links make us all vulnerable. aspire to be a strong link. a person of integrity.

This really is a sign that American Jewish positions are changing.

Of note: The Union for Reform Judaism is the largest Jewish denomination in the U.S.

Columbia Agrees to $200 Million Fine to Settle Fight With Trump

Can someone smarter than the New York Times explain to me what exactly the $200M fine that Columbia is paying is *for*?

Because in my naiveté and with $400M in grant funding canceled, this is indistinguishable from a protection racket.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/n...

This is genuinely the news every day

This. Please stop telling me that you are “not surprised.”

Public interest journalism isn’t about shock value.

It’s about informing people and holding power to account.

I don’t care if you’re not surprised by the information I report on.

Public Sociology.

Sticker spotted in Sag Harbor, NY

wilhelm dilthey (emphasis on history and empathy), michael polanyi (experiential/phenomenological nature of doing science), foucault (unconscious practices and genealogical method), and thomas kuhn (tedium and flux that are inherent to science praxis) are the GOAT philosophers of (social) science

i was talking to one of my curmudgeonly qualitative friends, and they were making fun of mixed methods folks like myself who say the research question drives the method you ought use. they said, often the folks like me forget that there are better questions to ask than others. i won't forget that.

Disabled Americans Fear What Medicaid Cuts Could Do to Them

this is what eugenicist policy looks like

"That's one hell of an act. What do you call it?"

"The Kakistocrats!"

Concentration camp

Six days later, Castillo said, he was handcuffed and left outdoors in the sun as a punishment for attempting to go on a hunger strike inside the detention center, he said in a phone interview. As mosquitoes swarmed him, Castillo pleaded with guards to bring him inside, he said. He was kept outside for nearly three hours. There are fights between detainees over scarce amounts of food, and COVID-19 cases have spread inside one of the cells, Castillo said.

Concentration camp

www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

rather than a vast multitude abounding in wealth and power, always conquering others by their arms abroad and debauching themselves by foreign luxury at home."

"If I were asked where I thought it most probable that men might enjoy true happiness... a small peaceable society in which men, neither envied nor esteemed by neighbours, were contented to live on the natural product of the spot they inhabit...

www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/...

YouTube video by BenjaminBookerVEVO Benjamin Booker - SAME KIND OF LONELY (Official Music Video)

AOTY www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot1g...

SmothCSV -- the tool I always wanted
smoothcsv.com
Picture this: You need to explore visually some CSV data. So you double-slick the file and... wait for 20 seconds for Excel to boot up... Agggr. Instead, SmoothCSV does the job blazing fast (written in rust). FOSS, quick, sleek, beautiful 😍

physicists hate him

Americans Are Concerned About Climate Change—but They Should Be Afraid Americans still don’t comprehend how imminent, dangerous, and far-reaching the threat is—and journalists are partly to blame.

Great piece by @hertsgaard on climate coverage. It's been driving me nuts how little the press are connecting the dots.
www.thenation.com/article/envi...

The afterlife of a ghost-written paper: How corporate authorship shaped two decades of glyphosate safety discourse Corporate ghost-writing is a form of scientific fraud: a paper is falsely presented as the work of people other than its actual authors. When such pap…

Some people dismiss ghost-writing as inconsequential. In our latest paper, Sasha Kaurov & I show that is NOT the case. Thanks to @sfoucart.bsky.social @stephanehorel.bsky.social who first alerted me to the #Monsanto Papers and also Paul Thacker.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...