Mathias

As the author of a history of concentration camps, I would like to emphasize that this is a very bad idea, and we should definitely not do it.

Faculty Letter Calls for Interuniversity Defense of Higher Education BY FACULTY LETTER ORGANIZERS The open letter discussed below originated after a group of faculty began to share notes about how their universities were handling the challenges presented by the Trum…

Faculty Letter Calls for Interuniversity Defense of Higher Education academeblog.org/2025/04/01/f...

How to Think (and Act) Like a Dissident Movement AOC, solidarity, and people power.

This piece from @jvl.bsky.social is one of the most important insightful I have read since January 20th 2025.

New Trump demand to colleges: Name protesters — and their nationalities The demand for student information came after the administration promised to deport non-citizens who participated in what it called “pro-jihadist protests”

“My first thought was, ‘This is a witch hunt’” Federal civil rights attorneys ordered by the Education Department to document the nationalities of protesters

Stamp fanatic professor stole 3,000 items from Scotland’s national archive Academic who died in 1987 is thought to be responsible for documents that vanished over a 30-year period

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

I discovered my alternate timeline today! Apparently after stepping down from leading Creative Commons in Sweden, I retired to live in Borås… se.creativecommons.net/om-cc/

Goodbye Surveillance Capitalism, Hello Surveillance Fascism First they stole your data. Now, they’re stealing your future

Light friday reading… maxmurphy.xyz/p/goodbye-su...

Your Boss Wants You Back in the Office. This Surveillance Tech Could Be Waiting for You Warehouse-style employee tracking tech has expanded into job after job. Now, as millions are called back to the workplace, it’s finally coming for the American office worker.

Scan the online brochures of companies who sell workplace monitoring tech and you’d think the average American worker was a renegade poised to take their employer down at the next opportunity www.wired.com/story/your-b...

Greenland plans to ban foreign political funding over Trump-led election fears Bill to rule out interference from abroad expected to pass this week as country prepares for polls before 6 April

Greenland considers new law stating "parties, including local and youth sections, are not allowed to receive contributions from foreign or anonymous donors".

This law is considered out of necessity now, but the principle is good and should apply widely (also 🇺🇸)

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...

Incredible to see a president tanking the world’s economy simply because he doesn’t understand it and is too dedicated to belligerent posturing to learn

No they don’t. Canada and Mexico want none of this. They want the president of the United States to respect and abide by the trade treaty he negotiated with them - and not make up bogus pretexts for plunging us all into a gratuitous no win economic debacle.

Elon Musk May Have Your Social Security Number The billionaire and his DOGE agents were reportedly granted full access to the Treasury’s federal payments system, and nobody knows to what end.

"Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup."
nymag.com/intelligence...

Europeans on democracy’s frontlines offer advice to Americans: never give up With the new Trump era likely to pose unprecedented challenges the message from Europe’s fragile democracies is: stay united and safeguard your institutions

Europeans on democracy’s frontlines offer advice to Americans: never give up, stay united, and safeguard your institutions

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/f...

These Robots Are Recovering Dumped Explosives From the Baltic Sea In the face of seabeds becoming valuable real estate and corroding bombs polluting the oceans, teams are turning to technology to clean up this dangerous and expensive problem.

Robots Are Recovering Dumped Explosives From the Baltic Sea - www.wired.com/story/these-... "In the face of seabeds becoming valuable real estate and corroding bombs polluting the oceans, teams are turning to technology to clean up this dangerous and expensive problem." good to clean up, bad to mine

Fighting for justice doesn’t have to be a big dramatic act. It can be small | Rebecca Solnit But it’s important to not limit our sense of what resistance looks like

“Something that should be said more often is that the reason authoritarians are authoritarians is that they’re unpopular.”
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

S.T.O.P. Concerned By $400M NY Prison Surveillance Expansion — S.T.O.P. - The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project

BREAKING: S.T.O.P. Concerned By $400M NY Prison Surveillance Expansion
​
www.stopspying.org/latest-news/...

It will never not be insane to me that a *GOP* president can happily *repeat* that he "likes" the world's worst, most totalitarian, most crazy & anti-American dictator, without any domestic political consequences for him from his own party, the opposition, or the media.
Never.

Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand? We are far more likely to use our hands to type or swipe than pick up a pen. But in the process we are in danger of losing cognitive skills, sensory experience – and a connection to history

But we lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills, and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another.

Walgreens says locking up products to prevent shoplifting hurts sales Keeping products under lock and key dissuaded customers from purchasing them, Walgreens said in earnings call.

Nobody could have guessed this.... Walgreens says locking up products to prevent shoplifting hurts sales www.cbsnews.com/news/walgree...

I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers | Rebecca Shaw Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s desperation to be cool as they suck up to Donald Trump is so cringe it makes my skin crawl

What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

The Tyranny of Algorithms We live today increasingly under the tyranny of algorithms. They rule over us. They shape what we say and how we interact with each other. They shape

@daniel-solove.bsky.social's blog: 'The Tyranny of Algorithms' discusses problems of predictive algorithms in (health) insurance, social media, credit, sentencing, education, and employment, impressing the need for an Algorithmic Accountability Act. 🧪 #AcademicSky
teachprivacy.com/the-tyranny-...

The Poverty of Homeownership On both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom—even as real estate has repeatedly been proven a relentless driver of inequality.

The history of race and real estate in the United States is proof that homeownership is neither a reliable source of wealth nor a vehicle for Black liberation www.publicbooks.org/the-poverty-...

New aca-hero! John Hodgson Wrote a 166 Page Footnote. It has its own chapters, footnotes, diagrams, full-page plates, tables, and index. diplograph.net/notes/typogr...

Text of Allowables By: Nikki Giovanni I killed a spider Not a murderous brown recluse Nor even a black widow And if the truth were told this Was only a small Sort of papery spider Who should have run When I picked up the book But she didn’t And she scared me And I smashed her I don’t think I’m allowed To kill something Because I am Frightened

Nikki Giovanni's "Allowables" is one that has always stuck with me. RIP to one of the greatest.

Today's #MondayQuote will feature Ludwig Wittgenstein and one of his most memorable dictums. It's something that many scientists and philosophers know intuitively, although very rarely acknowledge explicitly.

#philosophy #edusky #academicsky #philsci

Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave’ Data does not support claims that the United States is experiencing a surge in crime caused by immigrants.

Some politicians and pundits are pushing the idea that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes. Not only is that claim false, the opposite is true.