Nirupama Chandrasekhar

3 weeks to decide, 9 months salary to choose to leave - almost certainly forever - the industry you've dedicated most of your adult life to.

The left tried for decades to pass green energy subsidies, passed them, the subsidies worked, and now literally the entire planet's electricity grid is going to convert to solar+battery. It just doesn't feel like "tech" because it mostly produces kinda boring blue collar jobs instead of billionaires

Rent Board Resignation Clears Path for Mamdani Rent Freeze Promise The new mayor is now able to appoint a majority to the Rent Guidelines Board, giving him the numbers for a signature campaign promise.

looks like Mamdani is gonna get his rent freeze this year after all. big news on the housing beat from @smaldo.bsky.social:

(Going to be rude and irrational, fair warning)
Im very sorry they couldn't socialize and make friends like they expected during COVID, or have graduation ceremonies.
Its very sad.
A great loss.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine lost both parents in 2 weeks.
My mother died in 2025 of COVID complications.

With respect, I would like to know what such students would have had universities do instead, under that very specific set of unprecedented circumstances. Something that abided by the law, protected the vulnerable, and also fulfilled their consumer expectations. I’m listening.

Okay. I'm interested in what a class action lawsuit from the faculty and staff could look like. I:

- rebuilt FOUR entire courses from scratch
- no training in digital pedagogy was provided
- webcams or tech to teach with not provided
- no pay for extra hours provided
- no other options provided

Students begin Covid compensation claim against 36 more universities It comes after University College London settled a claim from students there over lost learning in the pandemic.

This is emblematic of the consumer culture that fees have engendered.

What the hell did the students expect? It was a ONCE IN A CENTURY PANDEMIC. There were LAWS against congregating in public. Staff worked themselves to the bone to get online delivery working.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I personally know at least six people who became disabled doing this. With no help from institutions and just endless burnout as legacies also

I cannot help but feel that the narrative around this is insulting to the thousands of academics who moved mountains - with little notice - to continue providing high quality education under the most unusual and strained of circumstances.

I have sympathy for what students had to go through at such a formative time in their lives (also: Down with the current fees system). But we all went through it. I've never worked so hard in my life when COVID hit. I ended up on anti-depressants, I couldn't visit my paralysed, dying father, etc.

This is, by the way, an absolutely fascinating and horrifying article, especially paired with the Daily Bruin article from Friday. The swiftness with which Agostini was fired is...fascinating and speaks a lot to some sort of deep emnity among upper-level admin, that bodes poorly for daily function.

A pox on Japanese websites that insist on redirecting me to their English pages. I want the original information in Japanese without having to use a VPN, dammit!

nobody posted the clip anywhere so i went and dug the whole episode up

Anyone else struggling to write right now? Like, I know the concepts, I have an image of how the come together, but I sit down to do the work and I just… can’t?

I'd like at add a few things to this. (1) humanists have not been able to convince any political party that curiosity-driven humanities research is a public good that should be funded using tax dollars. Republicans don't believe this, but neither do Democrats.

When they make movies about this in the future they will tone down the cruelty of ICE and border patrol, like Spielberg did with Goeth in Schindler's List, because no one will believe they were actually this monstrous.

Pregnant patients in Minnesota have postponed abortion appointments to avoid ICE Planned Parenthood’s no-show rate has gone up almost 10 percent since the federal government’s Minnesota operation began.

Pregnant immigrants in Minnesota have been postponing their abortions, skipping aftercare, and delaying birth control visits and urgent cancer screening follow-ups to avoid coming in contact with federal immigration agents.

This guy thinks banning trans women from sports and banning youth transition care are not a big deal and he's accusing Hasan Piker of being the one "pretending to care" about trans rights

incredible how white men are given the benefit of the doubt when anything coming from marginalized groups are treated with utmost suspicion and distorted beyond recognition

It would be embarrassing under any circumstances to spend a year on this reactionary horseshit, but to have spent the year in which graduate students were sent to concentration camps for op-eds and the federal govt launched a no hold barred attack on academic freedom is just beyond

Convinced that the prestige reactionary centrists are cranking that "The Illiberal Left!" dial up to 11 in the hopes that their readership will be rage baited into forgetting that their entire foundational claim - that leftist excesses are the "real" fascist threat - has been thoroughly discredited

yep, they're still at it in LA and Portland too

the media is gonna be like "time for a new narrative" and it's so important to keep talking about how none of the cities they invaded have become more safe since the spotlight shifted away from them

there are definitely some people who just don't understand and don't want to understand the technology but i think the predominant anti-AI position on bsky is that all the people who promote it love saying stuff like "have fun staying poor"

It just says to me that the group chats are still very much active.

really interesting to me how many professional political commentators have basically retconned the draconian immigration enforcement policies of Obama and Biden out of existence and have completely swallowed the right wing narrative of immigration enforcement

Reading a bad piece on the humanities and Mellon funding and I find it most funny that the president of a foundation not wanting to talk to a random weirdo at a magazine is, in his words, a sign of the sins of the field instead of an indicator that that president may think you're an unserious hack

A pathetic, idiot-rich attempt to drag Mellon president Elizabeth Alexander as a powerful juggernaut of woke philanthropy. The concluding belief that higher ed has ever been "safe" from the market, culture, politics is far right lite garbage. Reads like a Heritage Foundation white paper.

The Atlantic is Atlanticking extremely hard this morning

interviewed Ramirez about her plans to dismantle DHS, abolish ICE, and put money towards housing and health care for communities ICE is terrorizing. www.publicnotice.co/p/delia-rami...

How do library specialists take boxes of documents and ephemera and turn them into our collections? 📦 At the EAJRS 2025, Toshie Marra spoke about the challenges of archival processing for the David W. Conde Collection at UC Berkeley! www.eajrs.net/david-w-cond...