Timothy Burke

This is not about we go high, they go low. This is pretty basic stuff: represent the world you want to live in. If an alleged reporter is there to clown on you and nothing but, ok, but if they're there and asking questions you don't like, not ok.

This is what a lot of us worried in the last few years have been dreading--the building of specific pathways by which agentic AIs might begin replacing texts and sources which already exist with references that may be creations of generative AIs revising and mimicking existing work.

I see Chuck Schumer is as usual right on it with a polite request to please brief the Senate at some point but completely understands if things are quite busy at the moment and oh well, and certainly Iran is very bad so, you know, anyway, maybe something right? Someday? Hate to be a bother.

Guess what happens when the people running an organization insist that they've got to use generative AI right! now! because it's so amazing and can do so many things? This. This is what happens.

For such a relatively young person, Judge Aileen Cannon has achieved a remarkable degree of distinction in her profound lack of professional dignity and her remarkable inattention to the law, to justice and to democracy. Most people have to work at being a flunky, but she makes it look easy.

Who JD Vance thinks he is and who he actually is.

The NYT has a headline up that the SCOTUS ruling "has the potential to disrupt global trade". This is the BS reframing they've been devoted to. Trump's policies to date--ruled illegal--had the potential and the reality; global trade IS disrupted. Start from there. That's a fact, not an opinion.

Well, here it comes. Trump will either outright defy the Court and dare them to figure out what to do about it, or he'll de facto defy the Court by reimposing the tariffs on some other legal-not-legal basis and try to restart a litigation process.

The take that the people in Epstein's network were not that smart, even the allegedly smart ones, is almost right. Most of them were taking refuge from ideas and thought contrary to what they wanted to think and feel. They weren't people ever wanting to be unsettled or contradicted or challenged.

I think the other thing that a lot of us have in mind is that sometimes "no it won't happen" has preceded "actually, none of this actually happened because you were bullshitting all along about your tech anyway". But maybe this time that's not really the way it is.

Trump and Trumpism are so capaciously cruel that I don't know why anybody supposes that a single revelation of cruelty, unadorned and undisguised, will change hearts among the dedicated Trumpists. The only people I have hope for are those who just had an idea of Trump divorced from the reality.

"I thought Heart of Gold [tm] was an actual contractual promise!"

thats an attack ad

I don't even vaguely understand people who spend their time handicapping electoral races which require a futurity that is profoundly threatened as if that's a non-issue. Sure, the false equivalence is also telling, but let's focus on making sure there IS a 2028 race, please.

So many imagined terrible futures, and so terrible that we are in our brutal reality converging on them. But in another sense, not surprising, as their authors saw the immanent and emergent character of the time in which they wrote.

True enough, it's just behind the two leaders.

In the race for "which unspeakable dystopia or postapocalyptic fiction is actually winning in its predictive power", it's a neck-and-neck right now between Brazil and The Handmaid's Tale.

Only takes one 5-4 SCOTUS ruling to say that naturalized citizens or citizens born of non-citizens are in the same habeas boat as non-citizens. Before that it only takes this lawless administration acting as if that ruling is forthcoming to do what they want and treat the courts as spectators.

The problem is that AI boosters, especially within academia, operate within a zone of teleological confidence that casually extrapolates from now to a magically exponential curve. So they are confident both that digitization and LLM interpretation will encompass everything, inevitably.

You are, at least to me, incomprehensibly treating the judicial status quo as fixed. The Administration has "jammed up the courts" nationwide already, especially in Minnesota, which has had almost zero inhibitory impact on their operations. "Jamming up" is a feature, not a bug.

The incoherence behind Carl's response is telling. This kind of white nationalism is moving beyond mirror-mimicry of identity politics, and Murphy adroitly calls Carl on his defensive shift from "white" to "ethnic"--and the ways in which for Carl "white" is not "one more identity" but the only one.

Meaning that a critique of Ring as inadequate surveillance doesn't necessarily lead to a reconsideration of ubiquitous household surveillance, it leads to a demand for more comprehensive household surveillance to "fix the problem".

My anxiety here is that this isn't going to lead to "flogging Ring as comprehensive surveillance was always bad" but "we need more Ring cameras on all properties, paid for by all property owners".

“La Negrita”: A History of African Girlhood in the Spanish Caribbean Slave Trade - Dr. Elise A. Mitchell - 2nd March — CEMS KCL Blog On 2nd March at 17:00 (GMT)/12:00 (EST) we will discuss a pre-circulated paper titled “La Negrita”: A History of African Girlhood in the Spanish Caribbean Slave Trade” by Dr. Elise Mitchell (Swarthmor...

On 2nd March at 17:00 (GMT)/12:00 (EST) we will discuss a pre-circulated paper titled “La Negrita”: A History of African Girlhood in the Spanish Caribbean Slave Trade” by Dr. Elise Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell will introduce the paper for discussion.

kingsearlymodern.co.uk/race-and-the...

The Science of Racial Slavery in the British Empire An academic panel featuring Dr. Brittany Merritt Nash, Dr. Elise A. Mitchell, and Dr. Kyle Prochnow Thursday, February 26, 2026 5:30-6:30pm The Bear’s Den Ursinus College Learn how European colonialism and racial slavery shaped understandings of disease, medicine, and science across African, Caribbean, and European populations in the British Empire. Generously funded by a Histories and Legacies of Slavery Grant administered by the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and funded by the Mellon Foundation. Co-sponsored by African American and Africana Studies, History, and the Melrose Hub for Global Leadership at Ursinus College.

The Science of Racial Slavery in the British Empire

An academic panel featuring Dr. Brittany Merritt Nash, Dr. Elise A. Mitchell, and Dr. Kyle Prochnow

Thursday, February 26, 2026
5:30-6:30pm
The Bear’s Den
Ursinus College

Gallup Will No Longer Track Presidential Approval Ratings

Unnecessary bending of the knee news marches on: Gallup suddenly decides that "Presidential approval" isn't worth measuring any longer despite having an 88 year database to compare it to. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/u...

Really moved by the point that people need to be loved in order to be happy. But let me index against that all the urgent demands to not eat this, don't drink that, do this exercise, behave this way, in public culture. None of them work to love the people they're calling out to.

There might be other ways to think about the democratization of access to expertise that benefit more people in more ways.

Consider the history of digital culture and commerce to this point since roughly 1990, and consider the role of people with research expertise in that. I think there's a pretty sharp divide between people who have allowed money to suborn their research and people who haven't.

When AI can pass serious tests that are the equivalent of MCAT + med school + residency, let us know. Let us know even if anybody talking about how valuable its expertise is or can be is prepared to subject it to that kind of testing regime who isn't tied to the industry.