Katie Furl

I am so upset.

Last week Time Magazine solicited a piece from me on Zohran Mamdani & anti-Muslim hate. I pitched a framing re the dehumanization of Muslims & how Mamdani’s inclusive, socialist campaign in its content resists that. They agreed. I wrote the piece. 1/

Here are some data to drive this point home in sociology. Over the last 10 years we saw a decline from 333 to 200 asst prof jobs posted to the ASA job board - and that's until 2024, which was widely seen as a better market year than 2025

Now I'm about to get on a flight and I'm sitting here in my helplessness not sure what to do. It feels farcical to pretend that everything is normal. Hug each other please. Choose love.

A sketched out budget with $55/day UNC Chapel Hill graduate student funding. Two deficit columns are broken down into the per day costs. Academic/campus costs: .43 for work appropriate wardrobe (mostly secondhand), 4.67 for lunch snack (360 calories, inadequate), 5.25 for days’ parking, .97 for cost of attendance of one annual academic conference. Total -11.32/day. Chapel Hill living costs: 17 rent, 4 power & internet, 1.33 medication, 11.16 groceries, 13.61 car payment and insurance, .37 gas, .62 glasses and annual eye exam. Total -48.09/day. 55 -48.09 -11.32 = a total daily budget negative of -4.41.

you will note the lack of a budget for a $60 book in my already negative daily budget 🙃

The State terrorizing citizens / people, snatching them away semi-/illigally while the world watches. I can’t but see Argentina in the 70s or Germany in the 30s. This is the USA 2025.

Covering The Beauty Myth in theory tomorrow, & the following seems timely w/ the rise of Mar-A-Lago face: "Women insisted on politicizing health; new technologies of invasive, potentially deadly 'cosmetic' surgeries developed apace to re-exert old forms of medical control of women."

Column | The hidden way using a rewards card can cost you more Starbucks tracked my every purchase — then gave me fewer deals. It’s called surveillance pricing.

Loyalty programs screw their best consumers over, and they sell your private data to others. And this administration just shut down FTC efforts to monitor and regulate what companies do with your private data, including how they use it to engage in surveillance pricing.

The resistance reaches into Trump country As organizers for No Kings 2 seek historic turnout on Oct. 18, the broader pro-democracy movement has already broken new ground.

My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium (@djpressman.bsky.social, Hammam, & Chris Shay) has a new piece, whose title speaks for itself. A 🧵 with some key descriptive takeaways:

I like to teach through my mistakes! In a recent attendance poll, students selected which natural disasters they knew of. One student hadn't heard of any & asked what to select. I acknowledged my biases, added a "none" option, & encouraged them to note both what's there & what's missing in surveys.

New article out this month on how doctors become fascists.

50% of German physicians joined the Nazi Party––twice the proportion of any other profession. US doctors today are arguably the most conservative in the world, and we're heading along a similar path.
drive.google.com/file/d/1CAk9...

Just a reminder that Wikipedia is the only remaining reliable source of information that right wing billionaires can't control. (Although they'll never stop trying.)

Please donate to them whenever you can. Even a little bit helps.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The reclaiming/reframing of frogs as Antifascist after enduring years of the execrable Pepe is glorious and I am here for every scrap of new heroic frog art

photo of Google News search results for Amazon Prime Day (the second this year)

twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

Academic careers have become a professional sport - Impact of Social Sciences Academia like professional sports is increasingly a system defined by competition, precarity and quantification does this lead to a loss of meaning?

💥New: Academic careers have become a professional sport

✍️ @swallaschek.bsky.social

#AcademicSky #ECRchat #AcademicCareers

It’s the weirdest mix of relief and regret when the grading you’ve been putting off far too long only takes a couple minutes.

One thing that comes through awfully clearly in these ICE videos is how many of these goons gravitated toward the job because being able to assault people with impunity is a big thrill for them.

it's funny to me that the people who talk about the criminal mindset, which is not a real thing, are the same people who talk about the success mindset, which is just crime

As long as the far right shapes public opinion, and mainstream parties follow public opinion, the far right dominates politics, whether in government or not.

photo of paulina borsook

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

Happy Bi Visibility Day! Interesting fact for you... bisexuality was first discovered in 1995, thanks to the hard-hitting investigative journalism of Newsweek

From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: why strongmen rely on women at home Fascist regimes pushed narratives of domestic bliss, yet relied on women’s unpaid labor. In the US today, ‘womanosphere’ influencers promote the same fantasies

“What fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses."

And, I'd add, they get women to fill these gaps by making patriarchy's coattails the only way means by which women can achieve security or esteem.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

welcome to The Resistance,

*checks notes*

*sighs*

*weeps gently*

...michael eisner

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Donate to help cover the costs of Ivy's emergency surgery!, organized by Meredith Furl Help cover the cost of Ivy's foreign body surgery! For those … Meredith Furl needs your support for Donate to help cover the costs of Ivy's emergency surgery!

Hi all, my younger sister’s cat recently required emergency surgery totaling thousands of dollars.

I wouldn’t typically share something like this on bsky, but Meredith is a kind, hardworking graduate student, and even the smallest bit would help her weather this.

www.gofundme.com/f/ivy-recove...

Relevant that this photo's a staple of my class slides to illustrate how expanding media in early America allowed postcards with images like this to be circulated, taking slavery from an abstract phenomenon to a concrete horror show that inflamed public opinion and helped build abolitionism

This may explain why there’s an aggressive response to people who merely post Kirk’s own words. It threatens the existence of the alternate Kirk - the motivational speaker that had been marketed to young kids and white Christian groups through selective quotation & clips.

@bluesky moderation is suspending people for posting Kirk's own words which tells you everything you need to know.

"AI work is just as good as human work" is a statement that *always* flows from the direction of power. Employers to workers, producers to consumers, but not the reverse.

Because it's not a thing people actually believe, but an argument: slop is good enough for you; you are slop.

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?"

A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons.

Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

An office window, with a view of other office buildings, and a small plant.

Pictured: window, glorious window. After so many years of windowless fluorescence, your view of the outside world is deeply cherished.