Simon St.Laurent

In other words, the elite colleges have the means to weather this storm, but the downstream effects on smaller colleges will be devastating.

As elite colleges lose international students, they are opening up their waitlists to add more undergraduate students (despite not having the infrastructure to support), which means that smaller 4-year colleges are losing students late in the game, (After budget decisions based on deposits)

DILLEY IMMIGRATION PROCESSING CENTER ICE Detention Facility Statistical Report Data as of July 21, 2025 - Using Interval ADP Calculations

ICE Detention Facility-by-Facility statistics are updated through July 21 on detentionreports.com

one problem with wonky plans is that even if they are good and correct and potentially popular is people understandably believe it won't benefit them

Pale solar disk with red rim on orange-brown sky framed by trees and lightpost

Smoky parking lot sunrise.

It's the going for help with Pritzker that makes this truly remarkable and potentially a sign of national Democratic coordination

also the people vowing to impeach and remove him would be legitimately elected

also removing a fascist from office by whatever means is an antifascist act, stop reading the rulebook on behalf of the Nazi team

Curate your own newspaper with RSS Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read

Newsletter: In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

Here’s how to use RSS.
www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-...

i live with 2 beloved people, both of whom have profound long Covid. I mask for them & for everyone else, too.

Something that's kinda missing from the Loneliness Discourse is that even if you "work on yourself", are a decent human, and treat people well, you mightn't find your person because so much of it is down to luck. Loneliness is part of life, learning how to manage it is as important as "solving" it.

ThinkPad designer David Hill dishes on unreleased models Interview: We almost got more butterfly keyboards and foldable workstations

www.theregister.com/2025/08/02/t...

Cornell Reportedly Nears Up to $100 Million Settlement With Trump Admin to Restore Frozen Federal Funding Cornell is reportedly in talks with the Trump administration to soon close on a settlement to pay up to $100 million to restore its frozen federal funding.

Extortion seems to be working again, now locally. www.cornellsun.com/article/2025...

I’m not engaging with art on an output level. I don’t care how fast the machine does a thing or how many paintings or books the machine can produce. I’m looking at art as the creative evidence of human creativity and depth. If a machine does it instead, it says nothing to me. It means nothing.

The first, is it?

“As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies …”

There are pretty good reasons photography was considered deeply commercial and gauche for capital-A Artists for a long time!

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

“My analysis of the network's FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.” open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

People want to be more afraid because it’s actually easier. They will continue consuming media and finding community that reinforces their fear as a safety blanket. In order to attract them to courage we need to show how great the payoff is when you commit to living in courage.

The sudden shift from “the Internet isn’t real life” to “the Internet is real life and everything else is irrelevant” over the last decade or so has been absolutely astounding to witness.

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

It’s not just the dollars. It’s the goodwill the US generates, the connections we create student by student—what a devastating loss

memory unlocked: Y'all remember having to do door-to-door sales of candles and shit for school or sports or things?

Yeah, I hated that. I hate selling. I would ride around on my bike for an hour or two and not knock on any doors.

piece of the puzzle.

He's promising to protect the integrity of the data by firing statisticians who follow established methods of data collection and processing whenever those methods yield numbers that don't please the boss.

Trump And Miller Compel Colleges Not To Enroll International Students Trump officials are using rules, policies and agreements to compel and discourage U.S. universities from enrolling international students.

Wow. Had not realized that Columbia’s settlement with Trump admin included a commitment to decrease international student enrollment. In what way does this help “combat antisemitism,” which is supposedly the administration’s objective?
www.forbes.com/sites/stuart...

Sunday Reading "I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion,"

Plus www.patheos.com/blogs/slackt...

WELKER: Does the administration have any evidence that the jobs numbers were rigged?

HASSETT: The evidence is that there have been a bunch of revisions

WELKER: But hard evidence?

HASSETT: The revisions are hard evidence


(They are not "hard evidence")

Like their argument for why I should refinance to a higher rate is “we would like more money.”

I just wish weird psychosexual obsessions functioned the way they used to. 19th century weirdos aiming to end masturbation made us both a breakfast cereal and a tasty cracker. That NEVER happens today. Nobody tries to criminalize IUDs and accidentally invents a new kind of Milano.

When a company is sufficiently financialized, its product stops being what it sells and the consumer stops being the people buying its product.

Its product becomes the promise of endless metastatic growth, and the consumer becomes its own CEO and those of investment firms.

Torture Light half the torment of regular Torture but all the trauma.
Minimize cruelty, how about stopping cruelty.

There was some hype a while back about “power causes brain damage” (which was a clickbait headline—it doesn’t) and the discourse around that distracted everyone from the more interesting finding

which was that power causes people to lose the skills that got them into power

When I teach the 1918 flu, we read about how much of the news on the flu was censored due to WWI (Newspapers were scared of the Sedition Act). And yet, everyday people could see the death and chaos around them.

People could believe nothing they were being told, so they feared everything.