Dr Surekha Davies, Historical Monster Consultant (she/her)

Also why writers asked to edit drafts made w/ a slop machine should be paid significantly more than they would be to write it from scratch: more hours & more per hour for soul-crushing work that should garner extra danger money. That's the true cost that tech bozos & grifters pass on.

Brilliant and important thread about why the ad generated by Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin and others is so threatening to the regime.

The President of the United States just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed. "HANG THEM", he posted.

If you're a person of influence in this country and you haven't picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side.

The President of the United States is publicly calling for the political prosecution of his political opponents, urging the death penalty because they urged soldiers to uphold the rule of law.

This should be front page news everywhere. It is not, which tells much about how we got to this point.

For what it’s worth, as a commander and officer it was my duty, moral obligation, and legal requirement to first question and then to not obey any illegal order I was given.

The same is true for everyone who swear their oath.

Hope that clears things up.

We’re Already at Risk of Ceding Our Humanity to AI Machines It’s 2019. I’m in a bar in Providence, Rhode Island, chatting with graduate students and researchers with PhDs. One of them, who holds a PhD in Latin American literature, observed approvin…

What people lose when they use LLM-based genAI for "writing": an excerpt from HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY

lithub.com/were-already...

Also why writers asked to edit drafts made w/ a slop machine should be paid significantly more than they would be to write it from scratch: more hours & more per hour for soul-crushing work that should garner extra danger money. That's the true cost that tech bozos & grifters pass on.

This is a great insight. It explains something else as well: why truth-telling framed as critique may feel truer to the teller but can be less effective in prompting change than speaking to the identity that already wants to do the different thing. Works for self-talk, too.

Trump and Hegesth need people to be mindless zombies, only follow the orders that their given, not think more holistically about them. So literally anything that might cause someone to question: Is this order aligned with my oath? is a huge threat. To them, "treason" (which it's not) /END

It's important to understand what this ad does and why it is so threatening to the Trump admin. It gets to social identity theory, which posits that we have many identities, and the one which is salient in a given context will dictate how we think/behave in a particular situation. 1/

when i say ai is part of the authoritarian project, plain and simple, this is what i mean

These are not the only inconsistencies and incredible representations in the record. While Defendants may argue that the Court identifies only minor inconsistencies, every minor inconsistency adds up, and at some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent. The Court discusses these inconsistencies in greater detail below, highlighting only a few here. For example, Hewson testified that people held shields with nails in them, Doc. 255 at 199:22–23, 200:19, 201:17–18, 202:10–11, but video demonstrates that at least some of these shields were merely pieces of cardboard, none of the shields had nails in them, and nothing warranted the aggression that the agents showed toward the protesters holding these shields,

Judge Ellis says all these errors, no matter how minor, add up. "[A]t some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that [DHS] represent[s]."

E.g., a top officer testified protestors had shields with nails in them; there were no nails and mostly it was carboard.

Remember a few weeks ago when Trump brought in a couple bulldozers and demolished about a third of the White House? That was weird.

Please cancel @aft.org's partnership with OpenAI. The materials I've seen from that partnership are just pushing "A.i." on teachers, not advocating regulation. "A.i." as it currently exists is run by fascist billionaires, spreads lies and bigotry, and has encouraged kids to kill themselves.

I should note they're also almost always ghostwritten. Like any of these people have time to churn out 60,000 words. They submit an outline and a ghostwriter (sometimes credited, often not) "fills in the gaps" so they can pretend they're a real author since they did the REAL work of having the idea.

Comforting context for authors who aren’t politicians.

A wonderful book and a wonderful conversation.

Omar El Akkad : One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Tin House In late October 2023, weeks into Israel’s bombing of northern Gaza, the novelist Omar El Akkad retweeted a video taken by a Gazan man. This video showed a lifeless moonscape with endless empty streets...

Congratulations to Omar El Akkad for winning the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction! ICYMI: Omar's appearance on the show was one of the great all-time conversations so far.
Audio: tinhouse.com/podcast/omar...

The @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social has been on fire lately, and this is oped is no exception. (And worth noting as an aside that no LLM could produce an article of this power and precision).

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

They read like someone pretending they read a book and gushing over it. Slimey.

Had two in quick succession. Both were long and stylish but also totally insincere. One of them was also nasty - trying to frit me into taking them on.

This is a direct result of Pelosi and McConnell not removing Trump from office on January 6th.

There was no downside to having Pence be POTUS for a few weeks.

Unlike being a contributor to the magazine itself, you don’t have to be a contingent historian to be on the board!

Here's that PSA that the President wants to punish by death

For no reason remembering Plato’s argument that our rulers - the Philosopher Kings - should be prohibited from owning private property in order to avoid corruption.

Before the midterms of 1866, President Andrew Johnson called his congressional opponents traitors and said they should be hanged.

Voters were so profoundly moved by his words... that they gave his opponents a supermajority in Congress, and the nation got the Fourteenth Amendment.

This is not the worst book we've ever read but it is the meanest episode we've ever done.

I had the opposite epiphany after reading Guns, Germs, and Steel (after which I wrote a PhD dissertation and a multi-award-winning book), and after reading Sapiens (after which I wrote HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY, out earlier this year).

Humans by Surekha Davies - Hardcover Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.

Oh I'm looking forward to listening to this!!! One might say that I wrote my latest book, HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY, as a book I hope folks will read instead, or at least read afterwards.

www.ucpress.edu/books/humans...

Seen in Boston, Massachusetts in 1854.