Correct.
We must fight antisemitism. And we cannot fight it by restricting free speech.
Listen to @aclu.org, @splcenter.org @truahrabbis.bsky.social @ncjw.bsky.social, and Hannah Rosenthal — former CEO of Milwaukee Jewish Federations, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, & US envoy on antisemitism.
The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”
That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.
Reminder that, as of the latest reports, Liam Ramos is still in prison in Texas - now for 5 days.
His parents are legal asylum seekers with no criminal record.
The world seems so dreary, but this is such a bright spot.
Ethiopian food has been #1 on my “please bring to Champaign-Urbana” since moving here. And now to learn that alllll their injera will be 100% teff? It’s enough to melt this celiac girl’s heart!
Screenshot of a data visualization titled “The Cost of American Exceptionalism,” subtitled “What would change if the U.S. matched the OECD average?” The page explains that each card shows how outcomes would change if the U.S. matched the average of 31 peer democracies. Below, a section labeled “Economy & Inequality” displays eight cards comparing U.S. figures to OECD averages. Highlights include: +$19K per household per year in redistributed income and +$96K in redistributed wealth if the top 1% matched OECD shares; a 71% lower CEO-to-worker pay ratio (from 354× to 101×); 50 million more workers with union coverage; 26 million more people with health insurance; $2.1 trillion saved annually in healthcare spending; $691 less per person per year in prescription drug costs; and intergenerational economic mobility being twice as high. Each card shows the U.S. value alongside the OECD average.
If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this:
America's problems are solved problems. Just not here.
What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵
Honestly I feel sorry for the authors who are the ones who really benefit from having the same reviewer take a second look at the revision.
Editors: please do better! And I say this as someone who doesn’t even celebrate Xmas!
Academic journals are so ridiculous.
- Request to re-review an R&R arrives in my inbox on Monday Dec 22
- Reminder to respond delivered (by Santa?) on Dec 25
- Today — Sunday Dec 28 — an email saying my services are no longer needed.
Just a reminder that at least 600 Americans were fired for failing to show sufficient respect after Charlie Kirk's murder.
The “canceled people” database listing victims of cancel culture, which includes oft-repeated cases such as Bret Weinstein (Evergreen State College) and James Damore (Google), has a little over 200 entries across 18 years.
canceledpeople.org
ASREC Graduate Student Workshop
19-21 March 2026
Orange CA
Join me, @avitallivny.bsky.social, Dan Hungerman, and Jonathan Schulz for one day of lectures overviewing the field followed by attending the ASREC conference
Deadline: 14 November
Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
"A 2,000-household survey in Gaza... suggested that the official figures were likely to be undercounting the number of people killed in the war by roughly 39 percent... The majority of those killed — some 56 percent — were women, children and the elderly." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/o...
Having reviewed ~250 applications, I'm writing to share that fly-out candidates for the UIUC Behavior search were contacted yesterday.
Thank you to those who applied and/or supported someone who did. This was a large, exceptionally talented pool -- we wish we had more than one job to offer!
Having reviewed ~250 applications, I'm writing to share that fly-out candidates for the UIUC Behavior search were contacted yesterday.
Thank you to those who applied and/or supported someone who did. This was a large, exceptionally talented pool -- we wish we had more than one job to offer!
“ADL deletes Glossary of Extremism under pressure from conservatives over Charlie Kirk entry The organization stands by a separate resource that describes Kirk’s Turning Point USA’s ties to ‘extremists’”
This is the main reason the ADL originally existed, and now they’re giving it up entirely because it made some right-wingers upset. They are no longer pretending to be anything other than a pro-Israel advocacy group. And they are prioritizing Israelis above American Jews.
The free speech activist who built a list of professors he worked to get fired for their speech must be celebrated for his support of free speech, and anyone who quotes his speech accurately in context will be fired and/or face state punishment by the champions of free speech, do I have that right?
It should be needless to say, but it is perhaps at this moment worth saying, that transgender individuals have the same right as anyone else to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Charlie Kirk was a person. He might not have cared if I died, but if I don’t care that he died then I’ve already lost.
I believe in the dignity of all human beings and I want to live in a society that treats each of us as sacred and ensouled.
The MSNBC commentator saying that most political violence has historically come from the left just once again showed how we suffer from failing to learn history. Lynching, pogroms, race riots, the political violence that ended Reconstruction, and against the Civil Rights Movement. Come on.
Screenshot of Elon Musk tweet from shortly after Charlie Kirk was shot. Elon says "The Left is the party of murder" and is quote tweeting a post from Shaun Maguire that reads: The Left lectured us for the last decade about the dangers of violence from the Right From the assassination attempts of President Trump To Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO, being murdered Now to Charlie Kirk The danger was actually on the Left
I'll merely note that today, like all days, is a great day to stop posting on Twitter, a platform whose owner force feeds this slop into people's brains with an algorithm designed to boost his views and trample yours.
Political violence is bad. It usually begets more political violence.
Celebrating political violence is bad. It usually encourages more political violence, against various targets.
Campus shootings are bad. They make everyone on campus less safe.
It's bad that what I wrote here is controversial.
Just over one week to go before the September 16 deadline.
Excited to review the applications and engage with folks’ work!
The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.
This is not a joke. This is not normal.
Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.
If you hear about a Mexican Independence Day celebration in your area, go.
There is strength in numbers and — especially if you’re white — you can protect your community just by being there and not flinching if ICE shows up.
These goons are cowards. Don’t be one.
Perfect encapsulation of the Trump administration: The guy suing Harvard for alleged antisemitism is a straight-up Hitler-admiring Nazi.
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/02/m...
Perhaps because so many of us have talked about Turkey's "authoritarian slide" for so long (rightly!), many will discount the gravity of the power grab currently taking place in Turkey. They shouldn't.
Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s top scholars on the crime say
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...
“Intimidation and pressure have not succeeded in silencing [Middle East Studies] faculty or breaking the field. One [colleague] described himself as ‘determined, needed, and doing my job.’ As another put it, ‘our students need us – our expertise and our empathy – now more than ever.’”
🫡🫡🫡
This is exactly--and I mean exactly--how Holocaust deniers have long discredited the Final Solution being a concerted effort & high-level order. "The Jews in the camps all died of typhoid outbreaks"
