Zahid R Chaudhary

As a reminder, when Jack Posobiec was in the US Navy, they assessed his full capabilities and concluded that he was best suited to collecting samples for urinalysis

repealing the right to culture

Fascinating piece—worth reading

How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.

Bertrand Russell once received letters from Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, inviting him to a debate. Russell not only declined but replied quite generally that “nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.” @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social

Paranoid Publics - Zahid R. Chaudhary Exploring the psychosocial realities of the assault on truth.

currently reading @zahidrc.bsky.social fascinating new book, which this resonates with strongly fordhampress.com/paranoid-pub...

The richest man on earth owns X.

The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok.

The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post.

See the problem here?

'Political emotions on the far right' tank.tv/magazine/iss...

Yes—“politics of exposure” in the journal ELH, and “paranoid publics” in the journal History of the Present

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlie Kirk.

Kafka-land at UC Berkeley The 160 members of the university notified that their names were forwarded to the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights were not informed of any specific allegations against them.

A smart Judith Butler response to @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
www.thenation.com/article/soci...

A General Air of Anxiety - Boston Review The Red Scare targeted my father. He taught me the meaning of resistance.

A beautiful, moving essay on resistance from Joan Scott

www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?"

A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons.

Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

Historian in Washington, DC for Human Rights Violator Law Division, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Exciting opportunity in Washington, DC for Human Rights Violator Law Division, U.S. Immigration a...

I’m not a member of the AHA,
but maybe those that are could ask leadership some questions about why the organization is posting job ads for a historian in ICE’s “Human Rights Violator Law Division”?

careers.historians.org/jobs/2164421...

Court staff cover up Banksy image of judge beating a protester Artist’s latest work at Royal Courts of Justice in London is thought to refer to pro-Palestine demonstrations

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Published @fordhampress.bsky.social

And this is a big fat reason to join the AAUP. Faculty, postdocs, graduate students, join - and support academic freedom everywhere! www.aaup.org/join

I'm on this search committee too-- happy to answer questions etc.

An intrinsically hallucinatory technology carried along by an intrinsically hallucinatory financial-media complex

Fascinating resource for educators who are thinking about ways to have viable assignments without AI.

Run by @annakornbluh.bsky.social and @ehayot.bsky.social

against-a-i.com

Screenshot from x.com The account «Governor Newsom Press Office» retweeting an AI image of the Newsom with absurdly swelled muscles and an American flag, in the Style of a propaganda painting. The original post says «IN GAVIN WE TRUST», and the Press Office comments: «AN HONOR! THANK YOU!)

Gavin Newsom's strategy of centrist liberal «populism» seems to involve wholeheartedly embracing AI slop. However, rather than demonstrating a possible «progressive» use of generative AI, this example shows how quickly such a use can lead to the uncritical adoption of fascist aesthetics
1/

What's behind the Trump administration's immigration memes? White supremacist tropes and ironic viral jokes illustrate the administration's project of redefining who belongs in the United States.

White supremacist tropes and ironic viral jokes illustrate the administration's project of redefining who belongs in the United States.

Pre-order here: bookshop.org/p/books/para...

Fabian Muniesa (2025) 'Finance, paranoia and the radicalisation of value' -- a piece about the political implication of 'Paranoid Finance' (Polity Press, 2024).

'Finance, paranoia and the radicalisation of value' tank.tv/magazine/iss...

"The assumptions and conclusions of the Great Barrington Declaration were wrong in 2020 and are still wrong in 2025. When Macedo and Lee were challenged on the substance of their critiques by actual epidemiologists and clinicians in a prominent literary journal, the Boston Review, they dug in."

Thanks @annakornbluh.bsky.social

Publication date: Nov 4, 2025 🎉

Lots of people I know that were furious about kids having to wear masks are real quiet about a two year old citizen being wrongfully deported

U.S. Texts Barnard Employees and Asks if They Are Jewish A questionnaire from a federal commission also inquired about whether professors and other college staff members had been harassed.

Ah yes, the government asking Jews to register as Jewish, in the name of protecting the Jews. No way that could go wrong www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/n...