Nick Carnes

My experience has been that dying is easy. It's the end of living, that's hard.

Printing stuff off my phone feels like the future

It’s probably the only technology in my life that feels like the future, the rest is awful

I Need AI to Write Better Lesson Plans So My Students Stop Using AI to Write Their Papers I care deeply about my students’ learning, but with all the new technologies available to help them cut corners, I worry that they’re not doing the...

"I prompted the AI to devise a lesson plan that explains why students need to become proficient in prompting AI—so they can land writing jobs in the future, where they will spend their days prompting AI."

Please read this.

Not to pile on, but www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/u...

My new op-ed with @lkfazio.bsky.social:

Trump sent a 'compact' to our universities. They should reject this devil's bargain.
Any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would forever be subservient to the whims of the government.
www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

I'm just going to assume these kinds of videos are all AI now

The Sora AI disinfo nightmare is here

For more like this:
tiktok.com/@drewharwell
instagram.com/bydrewharwell

I was told not to teach a class on the intellectual histories of Zionism and Anti-Zionism next year - not because they doubted I could teach it fairly, but because it would attract too many politicians scrutinizing the syllabus.

A society where that is a valid fear is no longer fully democratic.

@schiff.senate.gov It does bro, it has. You gonna do something about it other than go on talk shows and look surprised

There is a massive overinterpretation of the 2024 election results in the media as being some huge pro-Trump swing. 2 out of 100 people net switched from the Democrats to the Republicans.

Just wait. There is going to be a big swing back to the Democrats in the upcoming elections and midterms...

The image is an X post by Mike Nellis (@MikeNellis ) from 19 hours ago, stating: "So let me get this straight: a Blackhawk helicopter and dozens of masked, armed federal agents roll up on a Chicago apartment building, cuff everyone—including kids—and then run checks for warrants and immigration status? What the hell is going on in this country? How is that not fascism?" The post includes a verified badge.

Narrator: This is fascism.

Norman Rockwell man standing up a meeting painting.

“Mastodon actually has a lot of great people and if everyone here wants to pick up and move there that’s fine by me.”

The fact they jumped straight to AI actors modeled after women when, if I’m not mistaken, male actors are a higher labor cost kind of says it all doesn’t it,

Purdue’s gotta shake it off.

So many things have to go wrong socially, politically, and personally to create the conditions where a group of young men, armed agents of the state, deliberately and violently suppress a person’s constitutionally protected right to criticize government.

I visited the apartment building ICE raided on Tuesday today. Story to come, but you can walk right in. Half of the apartments have no doors on them. Children's stuff abandoned in some flats. *Citizen* residents told me they were arrested and held for hours in zipties. This is America

What do you have to do to a person to make them behave like this? What brings a person to a point in their life where they’re gleefully inflicting lawless, unjust violence like this?

I remember my conservative grandparents telling me as a child that what made Saddam Hussein unquestionably an evil man was that he used chemical weapons against his own people.

Homeland Defender (Immigration Services Officer) DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY Citizenship and Immigration Services Field Operations Directorate Protect your homeland and defend your culture. Join USCIS, America's frontline defense against illegal foreign infiltration and fraud. This entry-level role requires no college degree and offers up to $50,000 in signing and retention bonuses. If you're driven and ready to serve with pride, join USCIS and become a vital part of homeland security!

overt nazi language in this DHS job listing (which i’m told is for a low-level but important job in adjudicating immigration applications and requires knowledge of the law)

The dead wife who motivated the Punisher’s lifetime of murderous vigilantism recently came back to life in the comics just long enough to express her horror that he had done such monstrous things in the name of their children and disavow him.

Never forget who we are.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46550/...

The massive agency of secret police wants to vacuum information and build files on Americans to figure out who they should sweep up and remove from the country.

I recommend reading the fantastic book IBM and the Holocaust to think about how tech companies facilitate fascism.

Protect the Mother of Exiles. Got it. Can do.

I was just thinking this. I remember ranting about that graph any time a relative told me the cuts were about "waste" or "efficiency." Now I can just quote the President.

Terrible ad on the NYC subway with great defacement. The ad says "friend [frend] noun, someone who listens, responds, and supports you" The graffiti "AI Con" and a drawing of a skull in the product, which is a white pendant.

One cool thing about writing a book with the title "The AI Con" is that the phrase has become a bit of a cultural meme.

Here it is, on graffiti of the incredible awful "friend" ad in NYC subways.

#1: Love that "AI Con" is a graffiti now. Logging that info for later.
#2: ARE WE REALLY sure friend.com is real and not an ad for Black Mirror? This is an ongoing debate in my household.

Updated paper with @adambonica.bsky.social w/ many more measures of candidate ideology

Mass politics is volatile & uncertain these days, and you should take very confident pundit/consultant claims about What Candidates Should Do™ with a big grain of salt

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mjih7...

Trump Administration Asks Colleges to Sign ‘Compact’ to Get Funding Preference

Loyalty oaths for universities. The thing of the Third Reich. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...