Dean Chahim

The Biggest Threat to Mamdani’s Agenda Isn’t Hochul or Trump — It’s Wall Street Wall Street destroyed NYC’s social welfare economy in 1975. Can mass movements stop it from defeating Mamdani’s agenda?

important analysis from a dear friend; as usual, movements got us here and they are what will get the goods out of wall street's hands truthout.org/articles/the...

One of the Greatest Wall Street Investors of All Time Announces Retirement Nancy Pelosi’s trades over the years have been so good that a startup was created to allow investors to directly mirror her portfolio.

what a headline www.404media.co/nancy-pelosi...

I can’t stop thinking about the part on using AI-generated images in teaching. An illustration/reconstruction by an artist working w/ a trained historian still reflects something about the past as we currently understand it. An AI image is just based on bullshit and vibes. It’s an image of nothing.

direct link to piece: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

(a special thank you to Rafi Arefin and Rozy Fredericks for the invitation and such useful comments!)

I'm now trying to think about major revisions to the piece for the book, as I try to think about this as a case of a broader tension between urban space, speed, and capital. I'm thus very, very open to comments and critiques!

These circulations come to resemble something like "just in time delivery" - but for wastewater; engineers' goal is to minimize the time water sits, and rather keep it in motion. The result are homes and streets turned into improvised rivers. Residents often have little idea where water came from.

flooded street in working-class mexican neighborhood, with a manholein the center with its concrete cover removed and placed to one side. the water from the street is swirling into the open drain

In the piece, I trace the tension between urbanization and drainage, as urban developments (esp. logistics infrastructures) infringe upon the drainage system the lacustrine city depends on to survive. Engineers square the circle of accumulation through increasingly elaborate circulations of waste.

Antipode: Vol 57, No 5 Click on the title to browse this issue

My piece on the "logistics of waste" has been online for a bit, but I am v. excited that it is now published as part of the special discardian issue of @antipodeonline.bsky.social on "A Global Era of Disposability: The Anthropocene, The Apotheosis of Waste"! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14678330...

Two Days Talking to People Looking for Jobs at ICE | Yanis Varoufuckice This is a disgusting country, I thought, irredeemable visually, psychically, morally, and ethically, and whatever is likable about our people’s warm patter does not in any way forgive what we have don...

"The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust."

www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Documenting ICE Agents’ Brutal Use of Force in LA Immigration Raids Video analysis of reveals how federal agents in Southern California regularly use force against unarmed individuals, many of them U.S. citizens.

Pretty shocking read. Not in the sense of unpredictable, but in the sense that we should not become inured to these horrors
theintercept.com/2025/07/07/i...

What Can Zohran Accomplish? - Dissent Magazine What distinguishes Zohran Mamdani's socialism is not its aims. It’s his willingness to take seriously the problem of how to get there.

I have a new piece in Dissent, thinking through what delivering Zohran's agenda will look like in practice. www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Quadro - Obsidian Plugin for social-scientific Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA). An open alternative to MAXQDA and atlas.ti, using Markdown to store data and research codes. Obsidian Plugin: Quadro - Obsidian Plugin for social-scientific Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA). An open alternative to MAXQDA and atlas.ti, using Markdown to store data and research codes. by Chris G...

btw esto parece una opción open source interestante, especialmente si ya ocupas obsidian para tus apuntes (es un programa maravillosa!) - www.obsidianstats.com/plugins/quadro

Mas bien una persona de atención al cliente me mandó una versión anterior por Dropbox (creo que es 15.3, la más actualizada ahora es 15.5). No pagué más. Pero si, fue muy frustrante graduarme del PhD y luego perder mi acceso gratis (o por lo menos barato) a Nvivo.

Bueno- ya me mandaron una versión anterior de Nvivo y parece que con esa versión mis codes están en orden… but this whole incident does not inspire confidence jaja

Gracias! Estoy experimentando con MaxQDA y me parece más intuitivo… a ver 🤷‍♂️

Es algo muy frustrante: tengo todos mis notas de campo en PDF, y ahora mis codes no corresponden a los párrafos correctos - están todos revueltos. 🤦‍♂️

Nvivo completely corrupted my data in the new version, so I am looking for an alternative, ideally open source to avoid this mess in the future. Any favorite qualitative software recs? I just need simple tagging but more organizational ability than what Taguette seems to offer.

This is a dumb question but are these big data centers they are building left and right then mainly for the ongoing training of models, not to meet customer requests (the api calls id i understand the term) themselves?

one-year lecturer position in environmental studies and the social studies of science and technology:

puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

tech companies prove time and time again they have little to no understanding of how boots on the ground medical practice and hospital administration actually works, but National Nurses United do and they want absolutely no part of this www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/nation...

A historical photo of Ivan Illich being interviewed by a camera crew. Speech bubbles have been added to the image. The speech bubble from the interviewer says "The role of the university is...?" and the speech bubble from Illich says "...to resist AI".

I've posted my seminar on 'The role of the university is to resist AI', which takes as its text Ivan Illich's 'Tools for Conviviality'. danmcquillan.org/cpct_seminar...

the amount of contempt vance has for everyone he's talking to — such that he'll say obvious nonsense as if he's fooling you — is genuinely remarkable

the fact that people were told “today you are going to an elementary school to lie to teachers and kidnap kids” and didn’t immediately tell their bosses to go fuck themselves is all you need to know about why ICE should be dismantled

“Tasted a little tear gas— tasted like fascism”

Only in LA would protesters think to tag the ground so it’s visible in helicopter shots.

Opinion | What I Learned Serving on My University’s AI Committee What I learned serving on a university AI committee.

Best piece I’ve seen on why AI must be kept out of the humanities classroom:
Not only because writing =thinking but also bc language is how we become human. It’s how we become the specific individuals that we are. We can’t be fully human without creating language ourselves

Oh My God aka No Shit But At Least Someone's Admitting It Now

A bad President, for instance, has the power to do what? What can he not do? If he wanted to revolutionize this government, he could easily do it with this ponderous power; it would be an auxiliary power. He could cry “havoc, and let slip the dogs of war,”29 and say to the conspirators: “I am with you. If you succeed, all is well. If you fail, I will interpose the shield of my pardon, and you are safe. If your property is taken away from you by Congress, I will pardon and restore your property. Go on and revolutionize the government; I will stand by you.” The bad man will say or might say this. I am not sure but we have got a man now who comes very near saying it. Let us have done with this pardoning power. We have had enough of this. Pardoning! How inexpressibly base have been the uses made by this power—this beneficent power. It has been that with which a treacherous President has trafficked. He has made it the means of securing adherents to himself instead of securing allegiance to the government.

very fun to read frederick douglass accurately describe the problem with the pardon power in 1867