Professor Amanda Sturgill

a rainbow colored shooting star with the words " you know " in the background ALT: a rainbow colored shooting star with the words " you know " in the background

I low-key wish there was some sanction for super out-of-touch or cringe social media content from political leaders.

There isn't.

BUT, you can remember that if you share something, even to snark at it, you have still increased its reach.

Don't reward stupid things.

3 panel cartoon of shark in the water with the following joke: Q What do you call the soft tissue between a shark's teeth? A: The slowest swimmer

Sunday sillies: Underwater edition

Did you know: ANYONE can place a public records request, under some federal and some state laws. There are several guides online, findable with search terms like Citizen's Guide to Public Records or How to FOIA.

Only applies to public entities, you may have to pay, and wait time can be long.

2/ As I understand it (followers who DID go to law school, PLEASE correct me if inaccurate!), laws that conflict might include those about educational record privacy, health info privacy (campus health clinics, for example) and laws that protect intellectual property. Maybe others...

Public universities are agencies of the government, and in general their operations are open to public inspection. For example, you ought to be able to find the salary information for all employees. I'm not law-trained, but it's my understanding that there are a few sticky places.

Screenshot of partial Linked In post. Embedded text reads: "just received a public records request for my course syllabus, and it looks like the request came from The Oversight Project (an affiliate of the Heritage Foundation). The stated goal for the records request? To assess UNC Chapel Hill's "institutional compliance with current Executive Orders" that ban DEI."

Posted without hot take. But y'all should know this is happening. Seen on an individual UNC professor's LinkedIn.

Ah, yes. Killing the messenger. That usually fixes things /s #Leadership

Being able to produce more is not efficient if the quality is worse.

What's happening in higher education: [insert hot take here]

Sorry, Can’t Come to America – But My Book Can Lesson From Cats For Surviving Fascism

Ugh. If you aren't familiar with Brittlestar, he's a Canadian social media influencer and very funny (and my first guest ever on UnSpun).

I think his choice was prudent, but it also is ... ugh.

www.brittlestar.com/p/sorry-cant...

42 (maybe 43, but it was just a quick pull off the highway for lunch in Indianapolis).

I am 100 percent in favor of investing in quality news. However, when the CEO of a media company can't distinguish a news broadcast from a comedy show that uses news as an opinion topic, we have some big problems as a society.

Just for the record, I do not discuss political issues in class unless they are relevant to the material I am teaching/have expertise in. My concern is that so many things are touching politics right now...kind of an everything, everywhere all at once moment.

Be the journalist: What's wrong with the headline on this story?

"Parents want more warnings after a brain-eating amoeba killed their son on a South Carolina lake"

Because faculty are now being investigated for having thoughts...Please insert hot take here...

Where is the gigalike button when you need it...

Icy-Question-2059's comment on "George Mason Professors Under Investigation by Feds for Supporting University President" Explore this conversation and more from the Professors community

2/ And what, apparently, the university has said about it.

www.reddit.com/r/Professors...

Faculty Support of George Mason’s President Draws Federal Investigation

This is...something. [GIFT LINK]

The investigation is of individual faculty who voted for a resolution.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

This is a useful example for journalists of why you need multiple sources/cross-verification. It's also why journalism students must study a variety of subjects, including science and logic.

Do note that the source is an official gov't account (screenshot is from X).

I'm a professor in a film. My wood-paneled office is huge and has a fireplace. Every class I teach is entirely composed of well-attended lectures, and my students find me inspiring even though I can be a bit scatterbrained.

Confession time: I only watched the first episode of Tiger King, thinking to myself "I have better things to do than watch people being awful"

Embedded text reads: The rest of the world is watching America like America watched Tiger King.

#SundaySillies: Hard truth edition.

If you like food science and a fun Australian accent, you might enjoy this piece testing out AI-generated recipes. (Spoiler: yuck). youtu.be/SVaYJgmPvCg?...

This is very bad. Although entirely predictable. Once more the humanities are being cut back to prop up STEM and, increasingly, AI investment (including at the expense of bench science). In the past, cuts to humanities were promoted on two separate logic streams that do not hold true: /1

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I don't want to give it clicks, but there's this weird substack post about "cool professors" going around that whines about things like Helvetica in the syllabus.

Apparently, we're trying to get students to like us to stave off the horror of aging.

With Helvetica.

This is a really important issue: it's not just the Wall Street Journals and CBS networks facing pressure under authoritarianism. Guevara, who articles say is in the country under legal asylum, reaches language-isolated audiences, which are more susceptible to misinformation.

NC needs to find 100,000 people who risk losing the right to vote. Here's a lookup tool. Pass it on. www.ncsbe.gov/registration...

Computer screen with a drawing of a human, whose fact is degrading into the 1s and 0s indicating AI.

Steve Bannon called it: “flood the zone with 💩.”
Now, AI is the hose.
We’re drowning in fake videos, fake articles, fake humans.

And truthiness is replacing truth.

What the research say about where we are, on this week's #UnSpun.

Here or where you pod.

bit.ly/UnSpunPod

NC needs to find 100,000 people who risk losing the right to vote. Here's a lookup tool. Pass it on. www.ncsbe.gov/registration...

Good morning.

Large news organizations are sometimes slower to report bombshells than are independent folks/commentators. Often, this is because the large organizations have editorial layers that require more verification.