How TikTok 2.0 Became a Weapon for ICE In just one week, the company has gone from being Gen Z’s preferred social media platform to a tool for spying on Americans and the suppression of information.

newrepublic.com/article/2059...

Using teaching evaluations for selection and promotion, despite all the empirical evidence showing how they negatively impact the career prospects of scholars from underrepresented groups in academia, is a political choice.

Dear Blueskies, question: could you recommend a recent-ish, peer reviewed study on implicit/unconscious bias in faculty hiring? I know the classics, but I am wondering what new(ish) research is out there that could be used in a workshop setting. Thank you very much! #AcademicSky #EduSky 🗃️

Irish man detained by ICE in Texas for five months says he fears for his life | CNN An Irish man who has been in US immigration detention for five months has said he fears for his life and is confined in appalling conditions, as international scrutiny grows over the treatment of immi...

www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/u...

saudades.

I have already found someone. Thank you, guys!

Google Handed ICE Student Journalist’s Bank and Credit Card Numbers Amandla Thomas-Johnson didn't know how much information ICE requested in a subpoena now. Google never gave him a chance to fight it.

theintercept.com/2026/02/10/g...

Guidelines for Contributors to The Black Scholar Journal and Blog - The Black Scholar spe. Founded in 1969 by Robert Chrisman and Nathan Hare, the BLACK SCHOLAR (TBS) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the exploration of cultural, political, social, and economic ...

Anyone potentially interested in writing a review of Bad Bunny's halftime show for The Black Scholar (750-1,500 words)?

www.theblackscholar.org/submission/

his routine display of fear isn't cowardice, it's proof that he's powering through fear in the name of a familial bond

y'know. in courage the cowardly dog, courage is regularly protecting muriel and eustace, an act that requires him to be, well, courageous. his name is not ironic, it's earned

Etsy Witches Say Spell Casting Is No Longer Welcome on the Platform For years, you could hire someone on Etsy to curse an evil ex, protect your home, or manifest better luck. Well, until now.

Etsy just kicked witches off their platform.

What could possibly go wrong.

www.vice.com/en/article/e...

A coyote walks through the Streeterville neighborhood Monday evening in Chicago.

Limes #🍋‍🟩 #oilpainting

My colleague points out the equally relevant Luis Figueroa's book Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico uncpress.org/978080785610...

One of the biggest wastes of academic productivity is the variation in page/word limits across journals in the same/related fields.

Immigration Court Drops Case Against Tufts Student Rumeysa Ozturk The Turkish national had been arrested by plainclothes federal officers outside her apartment.

An immigration court dropped its case against Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, a little less than a year after federal agents arrested her on a street near Tufts University

‘He’s not the same’: Father of Liam Conejo Ramos says 5-year-old continues to suffer Some people thought they say the 5-year-old during the Super Bowl halftime show. But Liam is still in hiding with his family, after he and his father were detained and then released from a Texas deten...

Super Bowl viewers Sunday speculated that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos appeared in the halftime show. In fact, he has been in hiding with his family.

“He can’t sleep well at night. He wakes up three or four times a night screaming, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’” Liam's father Adrian Conejo Arias, said.

Deportation Data Project - Resistance Directory The Deportation Data Project publishes U.S. immigration enforcement and deportation statistics using FOIA records, helping researchers, journalists, a

Deportation Data Project - Resistance Directory resistancedirectory.com/links/deport...

'The Durham branch of the University and College Union said on 9 February that 63 per cent of participants in a ballot had backed strike action in a row over working conditions and job security. Turnout in the vote was 54 per cent.' 1/3

‘Absolute hell’: Irishman with valid US work permit held by Ice since September Seamus Culleton has been in a detention facility in Texas for nearly five months despite having no criminal record

www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!

Thank you for reading 🙏🏽

“I Have Been Here Too Long”: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility Hundreds of children are currently being held with their parents at an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas. In letters and drawings, eight kids convey the pain of feeling trapped with no end...

www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

'She Is There' and 'Note of a Native Son' Creative Nonfiction by Eraldo Souza dos Santos

"That is what my mother dreamed:

That when the slave catcher called her, she was far away from the master’s house, in the center of the sugar cane plantation, and that his voice was just a distant noise (...)"

My piece selected for Best Small Fictions 2025:

inkfishmag.com/she-is-there...

Sugarcane fields for Caribbean Latinos are what cotton fields are for African Americans. Sites of enslavement, brutality, and stolen labor, but also where resistance was born. Revolutions, maroon communities, and fights for independence started in those fields soaked in blood and defiance. #Badbunny

Researchers estimate that the life expectancy for people forced to work in cane fields was mid 20s.

They were slaughterhouses. Being sent to one was functionally a death sentence.

How Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent on what was sold as a revolution in transparency and accountability. Instead, police departments routinely refuse to release footage — even whe...

Hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars have been spent on body cameras, sold as a revolution in transparency and accountability.

Instead, police departments routinely refuse to release footage — even when officers kill.

(Published 2023)