Laurel Brehm

5 ways YOU can use the torment nexus to maximize your workflow

Ya know it’s ok to just say ‘i dont like this’ instead of self punishment.

Sesame with olive cream cheese

Parents of 0- to 12-year-olds, come do science with us!

We run short, game-like studies with kids. We offer in-person and online options, flexible scheduling (weekdays & weekends), and sessions that are fun for children and easy for caregivers.

BREAKING: Sens. DURBIN, DUCKWORTH were just denied entrance to the Broadview ICE Facility in Illinois, unable to conduct constitutional role of oversight.

only poets with an umlaut in their name have won the Nobel this century

and thank you for continuing to justify my social media habit with occasional science.

LSA members! I forgot to publicize this week's Write Time Friday, but if anyone wants some work buddies I'm hosting one right now! #linguistics www.lsadc.org/ev_calendar_...

Put plainly: people reading about trans oppression, trans or cis, are under a lot of pressure. They need comfort and hope for a better future, they need to be able to identify with other people going through their same struggles, and they need reliable information in a sea of myth and prejudice. Any public rhetoric approach working for trans liberation needs to address each of these needs centrally. Authoritarianism is a machine that eats people. It does not–will not–can not stop until it runs out of people to eat, and that only ever happens one of two ways: either there are no more marginalized people to eat, or those marginalized people stand up and dismantle it. Make no mistake: unless we accomplish the latter, it will not so much as pause after it’s done consuming trans people, and its ravenous maw will turn to those newly at the furthest margins of society. As technical writers and queer scholars, we have a unique ability to communicate both the existential danger it represents and work directly to dismantle that danger through personal, plain public rhetorics.

"Authoritarianism is a machine that eats people."
@impossiblephd.bsky.social powerful ending to a great post: stainedglasswoman.substack.com/p/stained-gl...

So cool!! and fyi I’ll be assigning this piece in my spring language in the brain class.

The first publication of the #ERC project ‘LaDy’ is a fact and it’s an important one I think:

We show that word processing and meaning prediction is fundamentally different during social interaction compared to using language individually!
👀 short 🧵/1

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
#OpenAccess

Heads up, Minneapolis, the Gestapo are showing up and bringing their own drones. They also happen to think they’re going to be the winners in this fight.

If there’s one thing Minneapolis is good at It’s making it very clear that people in authority do not have the power to control us.

Drum teacher: what are your goals?
Me: uhh!
Me (internally): funnel my bottomless boiling rage into something healthier than this frothing bottle at the center of my soul
Me: idk! Play along to songs I guess! lol!

Total solar eclipse triggers dawn behavior in birds: Insights from acoustic recordings and community science On 8 April 2024, a total solar eclipse disrupted light-dark cycles for North American birds during the lead-up to spring reproduction. Compiling more than 10,000 community observations and artificial ...

I have to fan-girl for a minute here. My friend @rosvall-lab.bsky.social built an app to gather data on bird behavior during the 2024 solar eclipse. 10,000+ citizen scientists contributed (including my kids), and the resulting paper was published in Science today!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

hello to the few academics that follow me. it’s job market time, so here are the materials that got me a tenure-track job in literature at William & Mary.

academic job hunting is like buying a lottery ticket to attend a shit show, but here they are:

www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxln6...

Some personal news: it's time for the Thursday scream!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

We're learning so much more about the experiences of nonverbal autistic people now, too, thanks to increasing awareness and assistive technology, and what really stood out to me was how much their intelligence, experiences, and suffering have been unheard and dismissed in favor of the parents' POV.

I don’t really advise students about their degree courses but, my goodness, when it comes to options, tracks, the choices they make en route to their degrees, I tell them to do what they want to do, rather than what they might think they ought to do.

woah. 🤩

CHICAGO — Outside an elementary school during dismissal… horrifying. What have we become?

Is it Spider-Man themed? Not to brag *too* much but I got an exclusive invite to my kid’s Spider-Man birthday party next week.

Pleased to share that I received an exclusive invitation this morning to the birthday party of my currently four-year-old child

We're hiring! UT Linguistics invites applications for a position in computational linguistics to begin next academic year 2026-27 (rank of tenure-track Assistant Professor or Associate Professor with tenure). apply.interfolio.com/175156

The official website of the Nobel Prize - NobelPrize.org The Nobel Prize rewards science, humanism and peace efforts. This is one of the central concepts in the will of Alfred Nobel, and it also permeates the outreach activities that have been developed for...

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S.
Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world.
www.nobelprize.org

A scatterplot of the number of rejections (y axis) by year (x axis)

Here are my published articles in each year and the number of times each was rejected before publication

Neighbors Warn Neighbors as Fear of ICE Ripples Across Chicago

Parents now need to stand guard at schools to protect against the federal gov. When has this ever happened before? It seems like civil war. So when are our Dem. elected officials going to start organizing constituents, so community members don't have to do it all?

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/u...

What happens now that Republicans shut down the government?

- Federal workers stop getting paid
- Air travel could be delayed
- Food inspection services may be delayed
- Head Start services may be disrupted
- Passport + Visa applications could slow
- National Parks may shut down

HI. It's me.

WE'RE READY TO LAUNCH. 2-4 Sept 2026. LavLang23.

Keynote Speakers
• Dr. Nikki Lane (Duke University)
• Dr. Kevin Guyan (UoE, School of Business)
• Prof. Erez Levon (Universität Bern)
• Dr. Stamatina Katsiveli (American College of Greece)
• Eddie Ungless (UoE, School of Informatics)

Government shutdown threatens food aid program relied on by millions of families Experts say a food aid program that helps 6 million low-income mothers and young children will run out of federal money unless the government shutdown ends within two weeks.

“There is going to be infants skipping feeds. There is going to be pregnant women skipping meals so that they can feed their toddlers."
apnews.com/article/wic-...