Andrew Flachs

As I detailed in WHITE FLIGHT, segregationists in Atlanta absolutely loved public services -- buses and trolleys, parks and pools, golf courses and tennis courts, etc. -- right until they were forced to desegregate and "stolen" from them. They abandoned them and built up private alternatives.

Exciting! Also troubling! Especially as there are so farms and farmers and so many consolidated farm conglomerates shorting the earth as it is

AI integration initiatives are spearheaded by administrations with little input from faculty members and other campus community members, including staff and students. High levels of concern arose around AI and technology procurement, deployment, and use; dehumanized relations; and poor working and learning conditions. Seventy-one percent of respondents said decision-making and AI initiatives are overwhelmingly led by college or university administrations, and many respondents described administrators exerting great effort to introduce AI into research, teaching, policy, and professional development with little meaning­ful input from faculty members, staff, or students. Examples include the development of institutional AI tools, workshops on teaching and detecting plagia­rism, and subscribing to AI tools for students (such as Grammarly, marketed as an “AI writing partner”) without involving faculty members or students in the decision-making process. One respondent noted that “admin doesn’t seem to care about or value faculty input on this or any other topic” and hoped for “more faculty involvement in determining how AI and tech generally are used.”

The @aaup.org report on AI is so hugely important. Among other key takeaways is the fact that most AI programs have been introduced by administrative fiat and by circumventing meaningful faculty, student, & staff consultation.

shorturl.at/InI5Q

The afterlife of a ghost-written paper: How corporate authorship shaped two decades of glyphosate safety discourse Corporate ghost-writing is a form of scientific fraud: a paper is falsely presented as the work of people other than its actual authors. When such pap…

Some people dismiss ghost-writing as inconsequential. In our latest paper, Sasha Kaurov & I show that is NOT the case. Thanks to @sfoucart.bsky.social @stephanehorel.bsky.social who first alerted me to the #Monsanto Papers and also Paul Thacker.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Bizarre foods: Neanderthal edition Scientists propose a maggot-fueled hypothesis for the diets of ancient hunters

“Yet with Neanderthals, I find that almost every win is secretly a loss. That turned out to be the case with hypercarnivory. One thing everyone seemed to agree on: Neanderthals were weird.”

johnhawks.substack.com/p/bizarre-fo...

Stop the bombs. Stop targeting aid drops. Allow aid to enter

Thank you to @monachalabi.bsky.social for this powerful graphic, which starkly pictures the severity of the Israeli government’s policy of mass death through forced starvation.

In New Jersey, Benefits Bloom in Tiny Forests

“In May, analysts at Earth Economics, a nonprofit, studied three of Elizabeth’s microforests and found that for each dollar invested, the public will gain on average $10.90 in benefits like air quality and heat reduction.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/c...

Thanks for writing! Resonates a lot with a book that’s coming out spring 26 focusing on everything besides commodities and capital that small farms can grow

As You Sow No descriptive material is available for this title.

Back in the 50s, Walter Goldschmidt was warning that consolidation would kill the soul of rural America by hollowing out any hope of diversified economies books.google.ca/books/about/...

Titans of Industrial Agriculture Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although agricu...

If we want to know why the food isn’t reaching the people, start with the writing of the authors, along with @jennifer-clapp.bsky.social’s writing on food barons and consolidation mitpress.mit.edu/978026255170...

Malthus’ flawed ideas were heavily criticized by contemporary critics like Marx who derided their “skillful plagiarism” and saw through their ahistorical defense of a ruling class www.jstor.org/stable/26161...

Even at its face value, the argument isn’t right, in that industrial ag is bad at feeding people - food insecurity hasn’t budged in the wealthy USA, for example. No matter how much our yields increase insecurity hovers around 10% barring a recession or pandemic www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-...

The Efficiency Trap One of the key tenets of the environmental movement is the need for greater efficiency in our use of dwindling natural resources, especially coal, natural ga...

Authors do a great job of explaining how efficiency in commodity production doesn’t lead to land sparing but there’s lots more to say on the Jevons paradox www.globepequot.com/978161614725...

To say nothing of non-agricultural landscape changes that increase biodiversity ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss2/a...

Domestication, crop breeding, and genetic modification are fundamentally different processes: implications for seed sovereignty and agrobiodiversity - Agriculture and Human Values Genetic modification (GM) of crop plants is frequently described by its proponents as a continuation of the ancient process of domestication. While domestication, crop breeding, and GM all modify the ...

So many great points here: claiming we’ve been transforming the world through ag for 12000 years so we shouldn’t worry about industrial ag misrepresents ancient, recent, and current ag link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Fabulous work by great food scholars - what would it look like to feed the world as if people, environment, and actual food for human consumption mattered?

The white students who are struggling to make ends meet are not struggling because Black and immigrant students got into our university. They are struggling because of a shitty social safety net & high tuition because people like Andreesen don't pay sufficient taxes/the state doesn't pay its share.

The hate is also materialist

🚨Who holds the power in our #foodsystems?

A handful of corporations control seeds, supermarkets, farm equipment, soft drinks, & ultimately what ends up on our plates. It's bad for prices, choice, livelihoods, & democracy—write @jennifer-clapp.bsky.social et al.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

These cascade through local cuts, including the aftercare program at our own local public elementary school - if we don’t have a system for our kids, how can we go to work in the first place? Siphoning social reproduction is back with a vengeance

Amid SNAP Debate, Are Lawmakers Ending Waste and Abuse—or Dismantling a Safety Net? As lawmakers debate SNAP benefits, experts fear the shifts will squander money and increase hunger for millions of people.

👀 THIS is how BigAg’s fake “food security” narrative fuels #hunger and deprivation while making them rich.

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”:

✂️cuts food aid for millions,

💸 hands $67B to BigAg to plant corn & soy (for feed & biofuels)

ENRICHING BIG AG WILL NEVER FEED THE HUNGRY

At least this is true of Purdue, and it was a shock to me as a liberal arts grad. Alongside the normal issue of choosing majors one’s parents hope will recoup cost, this adds path dependence and a difficulty with changing reqs

Skeptical that these are good faith discussions around the quality of public education given these hiring issues. Unis already place their thumbs on the majors scale by determining admission numbers and having students declare majors before they enroll - not exactly free market or choice

Indigenous people's health tightly tied to speaking their own languages, review finds | CBC News Researchers analyzed 262 academic and community-based studies from Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and determined 78 per cent of them connected Indigenous language vitality with ...

This is quite remarkable. So Canada's efforts to eliminate Indigenous languages may have reinforced generations of terrible health outcomes. Talk about structural determinants of health

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

From the desire to have a meaningful conversation to the students unsure about how to make work meaningful, this essay is achingly lonely. Time to reread Player Piano

If the purpose of learning is to repeat information accurately at high speed, a computer will always win. We are here to struggle through the quirks. If curiosity is inefficiency then what are humans for?

Roundabout way of declaring that originalist law is racist?

Decolonizing Environmentalism We live in a moment rife with mixed emotions-existential anxieties about catastrophic climate change, presumptuous confidence in planet-hacking geoengineering t…

Hi, BlueSky! Delighted to📣 Decolonizing Environmentalism (bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social) is hitting the virtual book-shelf later this month & the bookstores in the new year. We wrote it esp. for the youth environmental & climate activists. Plz help spread the word. www.bloomsbury.com/us/decoloniz...

there is no safe jewish america without a safe muslim america