On this day in 1662, Judge Matthew Hale began presiding over a witchcraft trial in England. He ultimately sentenced 2 "witches" to death. Spoiler: They weren’t really witches.
While overruling Roe, the Sup Ct repeatedly cited Hale as a “great” & “eminent” legal authority. #WeTheMen
wapo.st/47k2a64
"According to data reviewed by Human Rights Watch, at least 1,243 people in Haiti were killed by drone strikes in 141 operations between March 1, 2025, and January 21, 2026, including 17 children."
www.hrw.org/news/2026/03...
I wouldn’t be the artist, the scholar, or the man I am without the guidance, support, encouragement, and intellectual contributions of these women. I am in awe of their brilliance, and forever grateful for having them in my life, and in the world at large.
Finally, and most importantly, my mother Masha Zager ❤️. She raised me and Rachel on her own, and showed us that you could be an author, an artist, a parent, and a political activist all at the same time. She was a technology & society researcher before I was. We copublished one (prescient) article:
Next is my friend Laura DeNardis, the reigning queen of Internet Governance scholarship. I first met Laura when she was at @yaleisp.bsky.social and I was a new prof at NYU. She was another big reason I made the move to DC in 2015. We’ve never copublished, but we wrote books at the same cafe table.
Next is my dear friend Vivien Goldman, the celebrated music critic, educator, and postpunk musician. Dunia & I met Viv while planning Ari-Up’s memorial concert, and became instant family. We’ve gigged together, guest lectured for one another’s classes, traveled together, been there for hard times.
Next is my friend Ariane "Ari-Up” Forster. As a German-born teen in the UK in the 1970s, she co-founded the first major all-women punk band The Slits. Dunia & I met her c. 2000, & supported her on numerous gigs. She was with us when our daughter (her goddaughter) was born, then passed a year later.
Next is the writer & business strategist Marissa Gluck. She and I were dot-com gurus together at Jupiter Research in NYC during the turn of the century, then we both moved to LA for grad school, cofounded Radar Research, & coauthored my (and her) first scholarly pub. www.pbssocal.org/people/maris...
Next is my colleague @paufder.bsky.social. Her pioneering work on #copyright and #fairuse inspired me to focus on that subject in my own scholarship, and she was the one who encouraged and supported my move from Rutgers to American University in 2015. Together, we’ve published 11 journal articles.
Next is my sister @rachelcleves.bsky.social, the celebrated historian of food and sex, and author of multiple award-winning nonfiction books.
Rachel & I spend our childhood inventing games and worlds. As adults, we started writing fiction together. In 2023, we published our first novel as RA Sinn.
First is my wife @duniabest.bsky.social, who hired me in 1995 to play bass in her groundbreaking #NYC #ska #punk band AGENT 99. Together, we formed Brave New Girl, Dubistry, and Dunia & Aram, cowrote 100+ songs, gigged on 3 continents.
Her voice is the soundtrack of my life & she’s still the boss.
For #WomensHistoryMonth, a brief appreciation thread shouting out some of the brilliant women scholars and artists whose coattails I’ve been lucky enough to grasp over the last few decades. Ok, here goes:
The team behind Moltbook, Reddit for AI agents, is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Another transition from the OpenClaw community to big tech.
AI companies are paying screenwriters, lawyers, and other white-collar professionals to produce the training data needed to automate their jobs. I spoke with more than 30 workers about conditions inside this fast-growing and extremely secretive new gig economy.
Super happy to see our paper (w/ @riannawalcott.bsky.social) in Journal of Sociolinguistics: "‘Gen Z Language? Y'all Mean AAVE’: The Appropriation of African American Vernacular English as ‘TikTok Language’ 🧵
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Would legit watch the shit out of teen Marple
A former U.S. Marine and bibliophile who works in a book depository came to Dallas one morning for what could have been a normal day enjoying the cool November weather.
But soon, his life would drastically change when a bullet from a gun he held contributed to the death of former naval officer John
As I discussed at great length in my book The Piracy Crusade, nearly ALL publicly cited figures about piracy rates are total bunk, and if you trace them back far enough, they’re just a number jotted down on a cocktail napkin by a drunk lobbyist once
This is what the first draft of grad student RQs often look like.
We educators must patiently explain that if the question presupposes the answer, it's not actually research, just advocacy.
My colleagues and I @relevantresearch.bsky.social have introduced a tool for analyzing ICE Removals between 2011 and 2023. It is the newest feature added to the Immigration Enforcement Dashboard.
enforcementdashboard.com/ice-removals
It's both a relief and a tragedy to know people were asking the same questions 4,000 years ago that we ask today.
@duniabest.bsky.social and I posed it in the form of a song:
Gained in Translation
Netanyahu has done more to aid the cause of global antisemitism than the leaders of Hamas could ever dream of.
Any settlement that doesn’t include breaking up Live Nation into little pieces and firing them directly into the sun isn’t a settlement worth reaching.
Netanyahu has done more to aid the cause of global antisemitism than the leaders of Hamas could ever dream of.
There’s no cause for clickbait in science journalism. Just tell us the damned thing.
They finally did it. They made the funniest possible post.
Congrats everyone, we can finally stop social media-ing
Also, FWIW I've been on multiple grants committees, put in weeks of my life reviewing lengthy proposals just so relatively tiny amounts of money could be distributed to worthy scholars and artists, and these lazy DOGE MFers couldn't be bothered to read more than a paragraph before destroying careers
AOC for president
