Shannon Mattern

It’s not my book! It’s in the Cooper Hewitt library collection:)

quotes on Gov. Hochul's attempted rollback of New York State's 2019 climate law by Laurel Tumarkin, Policy Director at Climate Families NY, and Lisa Marshall, Director of Organizing and Advocacy, New Yorkers for Clean Power - via NYPIRG press release 03-04-26

Gov. Kathy Hochul @governor.ny.gov is attacking the 2019 state climate law that she is under court order to enact. She is trying to pit clean energy against the word affordability, when transitioning to electric power will save *consumers* money and the environment...

www.nypirg.org/pubs/202603/...

A translucent page featuring various reflections on bread, in red type -- laid atop a page featuring photos of various kinds of bread

A photo of a slide of white bread, positioned such that the photo crosses the gutter; text: "Consider bread. Even a cursory survey yields an enormous range meanings. Bread is the staff of life. Fail. ing that, it is at least a starch staple for the western world. It is the minimum daily requirement for which Christians praise the Lord and to which prisoners are reduced for punishment. Bread is the hip term for money and the symbol both of Christ's Body and the Jew's escape from Egypt. Bread is filler, like the lighter part of the seven o'clock news. It is stuffing both for turkeys and for us. Although both the Old Testament and the New are replete with grainy allusions, contemporary bread serves as the universal symbol of spiritual impoverishment. My father liked to take a piece of American white factory-sliced bread, roll it in the palm of his hands and hurl it at the wall. it would bounce listlessly back like a dead tennis ball. Sometimes, instead of throwing it he simply pressed it against the wall, where it would stick like rubber cement. While that seems, out of con-text, like wildly aberrant behavior, my father was really just expressing his amusement and amazement at finding himself in a culture that ate this stuff. Bread itself is a designer of pos- sibilities. Freed of responsibility for nutrition or flavor, it is not only filler but format, lending coherence to sandwiches and dictating the size of bologna, the shape of toasters, the dimensions of picnic boxes. Ralph Caplan"

A fold-out color photo featuring myriad kinds of bread

Looking through some photos from my Cooper Hewitt residency, and I came across this catalog for Hans Hollein's MAN transFORMS, which includes a great section on bread

well of course. every country will think the same.

On the one-year anniversary of his detention by federal authorities, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and First Lady Rama Duwaji welcomed Mahmoud Khalil, his wife Noor, and their baby boy, Deen, to Gracie Mansion to break the fast together.

I wanted to learn more about the collage artist Mary Lum, and was surprised to find her included in Grokepedia, which helpfully informs me that she was born in 1951 in St. Cloud, MN, and died in 1815 at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane.

New paper! "Struggling with Citational Politics as a Pathway to Unlearning and Relearning for Collective Action" on the material challenges of trying to cite ethically.
We did a citation experiment. We found there were specific stages, and they didn't advance linearly.

kula.uvic.ca/index.php/ku...

They're all great :)

New tools for understanding AI and learning outcomes OpenAI introduces the Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite to assess AI’s impact on student learning across diverse educational environments over time.

Under no circumstances should we allow OpenAI to become the self-authorized educational research evidenve source that it is trying to be. Vendors must not be research authorities. openai.com/index/unders...

NEH's budget is tiny—not just compared to NSF/NIH, but compared to humanities funding in every other wealthy nation. What little was there was largely rescinded and several programs were cut in full last year. It decimated not merely individual projects but whole corners of the humanities in the US.

Somehow the use of the LLM makes it all the more enraging, this literally high-powered (CPU-burning, fossil-fuel-burning) technology used to basically do a keyword search, adding no refinement or expertise, just augmenting ignorance in the service of destroying knowledge-making processes

So funny how he has to translate normal words into corporate bombast before he can absorb or respond to them.

“You were supposed to look for savings?”

“We were supposed to…eliminate spend…through optimization.”

This is what at respect for expertise and for audiences looks like.

Art and craft. #FilmSky #BlackSky

When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities

Edgelords doing an AI drive-by to cancel scholarly grants is awful. But what’s most damning is the willing participation of Michael McDonald and Adam Wolfson in destroying the agency they led www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

Fuzzy memories and hard facts: An SC accuser's claims against Epstein, Trump examined An alleged victim of Jeffrey Epstein gave FBI agents true accounts of her time growing up in SC. Claims she made about Donald Trump remain unsubstantiated.

Breaking: SC newspaper verifies portions of Trump accuser's story. Textbook journalism. Local journalism. Support your local news outlets. www.postandcourier.com/news/epstein...

The DOJ released evidence, which the FBI deemed credible, that the President of the United States sexually and physically assaulted a 13 year old girl AND she was afraid to talk about it because Trump would kill her—and it’s somehow not the biggest scandal in American history?

Every time I open a news app or site and this story isn’t being discussed or featured prominently I feel like I’m losing my mind. Do not look away.

OMG they released the deposition videos where they revealed that these two DOGE bros were just feeding grants into ChatGPT and saying "tell me if this is DEI in less than 120 characters."

www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/d...

Seriously - that lawyer. Yawning audibly through multiple recordings. Objecting to everything. Suggesting that questions about DOGE's general mandate are irrelevant to NEH grants. Insisting that she "shall not be silenced!"

This is absolutely hilarious and deserves a Veep-style TV adaptation.

Here is the spreadsheet DOGE had ChatGPT produce, to determine which grants were too DEI www.historians.org/wp-content/u...

Your turn to power map! Your turn to power map! 1 Make a copy of this presentation. (One copy per group.) Shortcut to this slide: bit.ly/djspowermap

Tried power mapping with my big lecture class and was pleased with the way it went. The assignment is here if you're interested in the logistics of it. docs.google.com/presentation...

Picture of a panel in a conference center. There is a dias with a black curtain at the front, and a gray podium. Behind the dias sits Carmen Maria Machado, a fair-skinned femme wearing glasses with dark hair, Umair Kazi, a brown masc with dark hair, Alex Hanna, a brown butch trans woman with short brown hair, and Vauhini Vara, a brown woman with long black hair wearing a red blouse.

There were 250 people in the audience, at the biggest available room for our #awp26 panel, Resisting AI in Writing and Teaching.

It was invigorating; hearing about how writing instructors are pushing back against their institutions was inspiring. Thanks to my co-panelists Carmen and Umair.

we have saved daylight

but at what cost

"The challenge now is not whether brutalism should be admired, but whether its underlying values can be taken seriously again..."

Police body cam footage shows DOGE knew Institute of Peace was private property during raid Footage obtained by The Handbasket’s lawsuit shows a hostile takeover on March 17, 2025.

SCOOP — Body camera footage obtained as a result of my lawsuit against the DC Metropolitan PD confirms DOGE and the Trump administration openly admitted they were entering private property when they raided the building on March 17, 2025. That didn't stop MPD from breaking down the doors.

My report:

MLA, ACLS, and AHA lawsuit reveals use of ChatGPT in illegal termination of grants by DOGE. Motion for summary judgment asserts violations of the First Amendment; violations of the Equal Protection Clause; and violation of the separation of powers. mla.org/NEH-Lawsuit

The MLA, @acls1919.bsky.social, and @historians.org have filed a motion for summary judgment in our lawsuit to restore the NEH. Discovery documents reveal that DOGE rather than the acting chair led grant terminations and targeted grants using ChatGPT. More at mla.org/NEH-Lawsuit

that the Trump administration is trying to shut down a leading AI company because it’s unwilling to develop autonomous murder systems is terrifying, and should be of grave concern to everyone in the world

"Follmann... conveyls] a necessary message: We survive together or not at all." -Patty Krawec, Becoming Kin SCAPEGOAT WHAT THE INVASIVE SPECIES STORY GETS WRONG CLARE FOLLMANN

Exciting new science book alert!! First chapter is an amazing think piece about metaphor and the power of language 📚💙🧪