Rachel E. Davis

Follow me at
fable.co/fabler/rache...

Book covers and ratings out of 5. Awake by Jen Hatmaker (4) The Dilemmas of Working Women by Fumio Yamamoto (4) The Trees by Percival Everett (5) Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante (4) Vigil by George Saunders (4) Sam by Allegra Goodman (4)

February reading wrap-up 📚📖

Photo of (from left to right) Vaun, Rachel, Cassie, and Venice

Yesterday, Vaun Baltimore's Social Problems students enjoyed a panel discussion about gender and sexualities featuring Dr. Rachel Davis and graduate student Cassie Sistoso from Sociology and Venice from @mtlambda.bsky.social!

US military used laser to take down Border Protection drone, lawmakers say The U.S. military used a laser to shoot down a Customs and Border Protection drone, members of Congress said Thursday, and the Federal Aviation Administration responded by closing more airspace near E...

Now the military accidentally shot down a CBP drone with the laser, which uses AI, of course. 🫩 www.npr.org/2026/02/27/g...

Screenshot of my Facebook feed. Thumbnail for a reel depicting what appears to be an AI-generated, humanoid vulva clipping her (?) toenails in a spa, happy as can be.

⚠️ WARNING: Weirdly disturbing image. ⚠️

In case you’re wondering how things are going on Facebook, this just popped up on my feed against my will. For algorithmic context, I refuse to click on any reels, but it keeps showing me increasingly unhinged thumbnails in the hopes that I’ll cave.

🍀🤞

"its push alert systems recognized a euphemism for the slur used in stories and incorrectly inserted the full word"

Some systems are defined by their failure modes: what is possible when things go wrong?

"Adds slurs" is a very bad failure mode

Justice Department withheld and removed some Epstein files related to Trump An NPR investigation finds the public database of Epstein files is missing dozens of pages related to sexual abuse accusations against President Trump.

An NPR investigation finds the public database of Epstein files is missing dozens of pages related to sexual abuse accusations against President Trump. n.pr/4qTItsU

The “technology” they’re referring to is some sort of anti-drone LASER that they shot into the sky, btw.

Screenshot of a NY Times headline “Closing of El Paso Airspace Adds to Tension Between F.A.A. and Pentagon.” Description underneath reads: The Federal Aviation Administration is charged with flight safety, and the Defense Department with national security. Those missions keep colliding.

Screenshot of a paragraph from the article reading: But the episode turned bizarre when C.B.P. officials used the technology on what they thought was a cartel drone earlier this week but appeared to have been a party balloon, according to two officials. Defense Department officials were present at the incident.

This is CRAZY. Very “99 Luftballons” coded. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/u...

Reject medical neo-futurism. Refuse compliance.

I Will Not Grow The Third Set.

These are all from the "Yokai Parade" traveling exhibition that's currently on display at the MTSU Todd Art Gallery, btw. It looks like it's going to Atlanta next. www.jpf.go.jp/e/project/cu...

Replica of a set of menko (OG pogs) depicting various yokai, or Japanese monsters, entitled “New Playful Monster Collection” by Haseg Konobu, from the Edo period or later.

Replica of a set of menko (OG pogs) depicting various yokai, or Japanese monsters, entitled “Great New Monster Collection” by an unknown artist, from the Meiji period.

Replica of a set of menko (OG pogs) depicting various yokai, or Japanese monsters, entitled “New Monster Collection” by Utagawa Kunitoshi (1888).

Replica of a set of menko (OG pogs) depicting various yokai, or Japanese monsters, entitled “New Edition Monster Collection” by Tsuyamaru, from the Edo period.

Tag yourself, I’m all of them 👹

Mostly not. Intense brain fog like I’ve never experienced before. Plus severe, semi-regular panic attacks!

www.dukeupress.edu/p-fkn-r

😟😠

what in the world

Newspaper clipping of an old ad featuring a photo of my sister (left) and me (right) as children holding a wine glass full of milk and sporting barely visible milk mustaches. Text reads “Bank on Dairy. Dairy month June 1999. From the farm to the refrigerator, the dairy industry continues the tradition of building a strong and healthy America. Meigs County Bank joins with our community in saying thank you, not only during Dairy Month, but throughout the entire year. MCB, a Regions Bank”

Just got this incredible newspaper clipping from my dad of me and my sister 😂☠️🥛📰

Covers of books I read in January along with my rating out of 5. The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp (5) Paper Girl by Beth Macy (4) Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (3) Discontent by Beatriz Serrano (3) A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi (3) After Purity by Sara Moslener (5)

January reading wrap-up 📚 fable.co/fabler/rache...

The Dept. of Appearing to Take Things Rather Seriously While Wearing a Navy Sport Coat and No Tie is actively searching for a Dean of Comfortably Ordering Wine in a DC Steakhouse Where Denny Hastert Used to Sit Right Over There. The position will pay $580,000. The history department is abolished

I argue that the ways so-called sugar babies, blessees, and compensated daters are framed as criminals, victims, or rational subjects differ according to their race, class, and nationality in ways that reproduce controlling images. 👀

Debt, sex, and money: Imperialist discourses of transactional sex across three geographic and cultural contexts - Rachel E Davis, 2026 Discourses surrounding similar forms of transactional sex in the United States and Europe, Africa, and East Asia exemplify the ways that sexual transactions ser...

My article on the need for intersectionality in research on transactional sex is in the current issue of Criminology & Criminal Justice! Read it here or DM me for a free copy: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #sociology #criminology #socsky #crimsky #academicsky

Excerpt from the article: For years a certain kind of liberal has either minimized such culture-war rhetoric coming from the other side or urged political actors of all stripes to ignore it in favor of "material" or "kitchen table" issues—as though the state regarding one's life as "garbage" has no tangible consequence, as if the terms of a fight can be determined by the person getting punched. But Trump has clarified an inconvenient fact—the culture war is an actual war. ICE, full of myrmidons of The Homeland, enjoys an $85 billion budget, a sum "larger than the annual military budget of every country in the world except the United States and China," as Caitlin Dickerson reported…

“The culture war is an actual war.” www.vanityfair.com/news/story/t...

There's an old saying from Ron Paul - I know it's in Lenin, probably in Ron Paul - that says there are decades where weeks...uh... and there are weeks where, uh...it's happening

Sad!

Arthur is worth the effort 😭

Photo of a golden brown, flaky, multilayered biscuit

Please enjoy this photo of a biscuit I made using my mamaw’s recipe. 👩‍🍳💕

Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence | AAC&U This free student guide to artificial intelligence is available for students and institutions to download, distribute, and adapt.

www.aacu.org/publication/...

Screenshot of an excerpt of the article that reads: "Beginning in the early 2000s, the legal constraints on war began to erode. After Al Qaeda’s devastating attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States began to use force throughout the Middle East against those it deemed to be a terrorist threat. To justify continuing the strikes and extending them to a range of terrorist groups in what some would later call 'the forever war,' the United States claimed a novel legal right under the U.N. Charter: to defend itself against nonstate groups that it said posed a threat. Up to that point, it had been generally accepted among U.N. members that the right of self-defense in the charter extended only to threats posed by other states. By expanding this claim to threats posed by nonstate groups, the United States opened the door for other states to use unilateral force internationally under a legal guise. Over the next decade or so, more and more governments adopted the theory. By 2014, the consequences of this shift started to emerge."

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/o...