The Cognitive Surplus Gets Personal

What do you do with your cognitive surplus, assuming you have one? (If you're not sure, take this test: If you watch any television at all, you have one.)

The term was coined by Clay Shirky, and it's the name of his latest book. (Which I haven't read yet, but it's on my list of Future Favorites.) The cognitive surplus is the amount of time and mental capacity left over among people who have eight-hour work days, gasoline-powered vehicles to move them around, and water, sewage, electricity, and labor-saving devices in their homes. Shirky credits the cognitive surplus with the creation of the Wikipedia, among other crowd-sourced innovations in recent years.

I spend much of my cognitive surplus on volunteer work, gardening, reading books and the interweb, and a little bit writing this blog. I admit to watching six to 10 hours of television a week (probably about the same amount of time I spend here). Despite the fact that I have a far-from-grueling schedule, there are evenings where I can barely gather the mental capacity to write something as Daughter Number Three. Why is that?

Science fiction writer John Scalzi -- who publishes at least one fiction book a year, does other paid writing, and has maintained a very active blog for 12 years -- had this to say in a response to the many folks who ask him how they can make time for writing, or how to find inspiration:

If you need inspiration, think of yourself on your deathbed saying “well, at least I watched a lot of TV.” If saying such a thing as your life ebbs away fills you with existential horror, well, then. I think you know what to do.

Which reminds me of the words of Tinkertown creator Ross Ward: "I did all this while you were watching T.V."

This is not about guilt over watching television. None of us needs anything else to feel guilty about. We need to transform that response, so that we don't feel guilt, but energy to create something, whether it's music, clothes, a garden, or words.

_________

Earlier posts on Clay Shirky:

Here Comes Everybody

Reporters Trapped Inside a Burning Business Model

More from Clay Shirky

Working the Cognitive Surplus

More from Clay Shirky

I posted yesterday about Clay Shirky's article Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, but here are a few quotes from it:

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem.

--

The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn't because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads.

--

Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That's been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we're going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Everyone should read this piece. Because it's about a lot more than the roll of printed tree-matter that lands on my doorstep every morning.

As Shirky says, "When we shift our attention from 'save newspapers' to 'save society,' the imperative changes from 'preserve the current institutions' to 'do whatever works.' "

To reiterate an earlier post on this topic, I have a list of standards I'll be using to judge the success of whatever replaces newspapers:

• beat reporters -- key to localism and citizen action
  
• investigative reporters -- with budgets that allow them to dig, enough so that if they sometimes come up empty, it's not a disaster
  
• editors -- not just copy editors (although I require those, too!), but overall editors who have an idea of what to cover, and who give us half a chance of turning information into knowledge
  
• serendipity -- odd juxtapositions that put stories in front of us that we never thought we'd read
  

I don't need newspapers to line my bird cages or make papier mache, and I can even give up having a tangible object to hold while I eat my toast each morning... but without these four standards, our society will have lost something very important to sustaining a democracy.

Markets Supply Less News Reporting than Democracies Demand

Clay Shirky argues that news has to be subsidized, so it can be cheap and free:

"Most people don't care about the news, and most of the people who do don't care enough to pay for it, but we need the ones who care to have it, even if they care only a little bit, only some of the time. To create more of something than people will pay for requires subsidy....

"If for-profit revenue is shrinking and non-profit funding won't make up the shortfall, we need much cheaper ways of gathering, understanding, and disseminating news, whether measured in information produced or readers served.

"And news has to be free, because it has to spread. The few people who care about the news need to be able to share it with one another and, in times of crisis, to sound the alarm for the rest of us."

Via Boing Boing

Past posts about Clay Shirky:

The Cognitive Surplus Gets Personal, September 2010

Reporters Trapped in a Burning Business Model, October 2009

Shirky Debunks Walls Street Journal Story, May 2009

Here Comes Everybody, April 2009

More from Clay Shirky, March 2009

Working the Cognitive Surplus, May 2008

Joining BoingBoing

Well, I finally gave in and registered for an account on BoingBoing yesterday. You don't have to have an account to comment on the site, but it helps (basically, your comment gets put up faster).

What Prompted It?

The thing that incited my unexpected enlistment was a post about a story called What Will Replace Newspapers by Clay Shirky. In it, Shirky succinctly summarizes all of the things that newspapers did wrong in the last 10 or 15 years as their business model began to evaporate. My favorite sentence from the longish snip on BoingBoing was this: "When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry."

The comments that followed were thoughtful and extended Shirky's words -- which, in my experience of reading comment threads, is something you don't see much on the interweb, except on BoingBoing. One commenter mentioned a recent story by David Simon (creator of The Wire) from the Washington Post, about the devolution of the Baltimore Sun, so I went and read that. It's a great, man-on-street/reporter-in-the-police-precinct counterpoint to Shirky's meta analysis.

The comment I wanted to make, and which provoked me to sign up, was primarily composed of a quote from Simon's article:

There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history [explained in Simon's full story]. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn't anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

And then I agreed with Simon's point (as I have written before) that beat reporting is the thing that will suffer most unless there's a way to train and pay people to do it.

About BoingBoing

BoingBoing (A Directory of Wonderful Things) has been around since January 2000, so I am clearly a Janey-come-lately to the party. I've only been reading it regularly since early 2008 or so. Regular readers of Daughter Number Three will not be surprised to hear that I've referred to BoingBoing 25 times since starting this blog.

BoingBoing is a fine example of how serendipity can be preserved in an age without newspapers.

I generally read or at least skim anything posted by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow (author of the excellent young adult novel Little Brother) or Mark Frauenfelder (creator of Make magazine). Just as I skip the sports in the daily papers, I completely ignore the recurring BoingBoing Gadgets posts, the constant barrage of Off World updates, and most of the videos.

One of my favorite things about BoingBoing is the great work posted by the guest bloggers, who each write whatever they want for a week or so -- lately, Dan Gillmor, Paul Spinrad, Steven Johnson, Gareth Branwyn and Charles Platt, Susie Bright, and a little while earlier, Clay Shirky.

If only I could find a local version of it. Hmmm... now there's an idea.

Working the Cognitive Surplus

I saw a neat talk by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody (which, as the book's subtitle says, is about organizing without organizations).

In the talk, Shirky describes the cognitive surplus of time that developed in the 2oth century in the U.S. as a result of the 40-hour work week and labor-saving devices generally.

What did we did we do with our cognitive surplus? We watched television.

Shirky's belief is that television is a transitional technology that cushioned us during the changes brought by the 20th century (similar, he says, to the way gin was used to cushion the beginning of the industrial revolution).

Now, he points out, some of us are doing other things with our time, whether playing online games, blogging, or building large web institutions like the Wikipedia. Like many people, I have wondered how "those people" find the time to build and maintain something like the Wikipedia. Haven't you?

The most amazing thing in Shirky's talk, though, was the estimated total number of hours Americans spend watching television. By his estimate, if all of that cognitive surplus time was used on other activities like creating content, it would be the equivalent of 2,000 Wikipedias every year.

Or imagine what would have happen if we could apply it to citizen participation. Gee. Maybe we could have a democracy.

Here Comes Everybody

Now that I've finished Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, I'm recommending it to anyone who has an interest in the ways things have been changing lately -- the death of the newspaper, the rise of social media, the shift in how politics operates, and more.

There were a lot of ah-ha moments as I read the book. Shirky does a good job of explaining how structured organizations have operated up until now, a necessary base for understanding how things have changed. I have to admit, this is not something I've thought a lot about, having had a lifelong resistance to joining structured organizations. That type of structure has a minimum cost to it, and because of that cost, companies have not been able to provide some services or products because the cost is too high compared to the price people would be willing to pay for them.

Examples where social media, which allow for organizing without organizations, have provided a service that no traditional corporation could afford to provide:

• Flickr photo sharing from events
• Flash mobs organized via LiveJournal or groups organized with Meetup
• A far-ranging encyclopedia created by users via the Wikipedia.

Key concepts in the book

Publish, then filter. Up until now, the standard has been filter, then publish -- which was the job of the editor, paid by some type of corporation. With social media, the cost of publishing has decreased so drastically that there is no need to limit what gets published. This turns everything on its head:

Though the filtering of the good from the mediocre starts as an economic imperative, the public enjoys the value of that filtering as well, because we have historically relied on the publisher's judgment to help ensure minimum standards of quality. Where publishing is hard and expensive, every instance of the written word comes with an implicit promise: someone besides the writer thought this was worth reading. (pages 97-98).

Mass amateurization, which results from the loss of preemptive filtering. The Wikipedia is an example of this, and while one might expect it means all those amateurs would contribute equally, that is typically not the case. In fact, there is a fairly standard curve that shows the amount of participation in different collaborative media, and that curve is very high at the left end (a small number of users) and very low for a long time at the right end (the vast majority of users).


Power law distribution is the name for that curve. Shirky writes, "This pattern is general to social media: on mailing lists with more than a couple dozen participants, the most active writer is generally much more active than the person in the number-two slot, and far more active than the average." (page 124) And this imbalance is not a bad thing:

...the imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet it is enough to create profound value for millions of users....

Though the word "ecosystem" is overused as a way to make simple situations seem more complex, it is merited here, because large social systems cannot be understood as a simple aggregation of the behavior of some nonexistent "average" user. (page 125)

This power law distribution is key to how social media work, because a few people who care a lot about something can suddenly have an effect because they can more easily hook up with a lot of people who care a little:

Having a handful of highly motivated people and a mass of barely motivated ones used to be a recipe for frustration. The people who were on fire wondered why the general population didn't care more, and the general population wondered why those obsessed people didn't just shut up. Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activists themselves. (page 182)

Open source works because it makes failure free. Well, not free to the person who fails, but free to the larger group. Here, the classic example is the development of the Linux operating system. It's publish then filter yet again -- or, as in the old saying, throw a bunch of ideas against the wall and see which ones stick. It almost sounds like natural selection.

The takeaway

The book concludes with a set of parameters that any successful social medium or movement must meet. Of course, these are easy to assess post hoc, and hard to create on purpose. They are:

• A plausible promise (why join?)
  
• An effective tool (how will coordination happen?)
  
• An acceptable bargain with the users/members (what can they expect, and what is expected of them?)

The promise is essential because, as Shirky writes, "Any new claim on someone's time must obviously offer some value, but more important, it must offer some value higher than something else she already does, or she won't free up the time." (page 262)

For instance, why have I started visiting Facebook every day? (And why did I just go reflexively check it when I wrote that sentence?) It's because it's giving me something -- mundane, day-to-day connection with people from all different parts of my life history. What have I given up to have time for it? Probably some television watching. Not much of a loss.

Getting a social media group going is hard, Shirky points out. Most people don't want to put energy into something that doesn't have critical mass, but a group can't attain critical mass without people putting energy into it. It's like stone soup for the soul, and the solution, he says, is for the organizers to be active hosts, circulating constantly to make people feel welcome. He quotes one of the founders of Flickr: "you have to greet the first 10,000 users personally." (page 264)

Finding the right tool is next. Two criteria to use in assessing tools are the number of people involved and the duration of the involvement. Shirky emphasizes that we not poo-poo existing tools like blogs or wikis, or even long-standing ones like email lists and discussion groups. He writes, "The most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years, because it isn't until they have a critical mass of adopters, adopters who take these tools for granted, that their real effects begin to appear." (page 270)

Finally, the bargain. "The essential aspect of the bargain is that the users have to agree to it... the bargain has to be part of the lived experience of interaction." (page 273) A wiki's bargain is that anyone can write, and anyone can edit anyone else's copy. Wikis that work do so because adherents take ownership, and prevent pranksters from destroying the content (at least, from destroying it for any great length of time). Some Flickr groups work by having rules about commenting on others' photos two times for every photo you upload, which leads to everyone getting feedback, thus fulfilling the group's bargain.

As an aside, Shirky points out that the way those Flickr groups work is called "equality matching," in the words of a UCLA anthropologist named Alan Page Fiske, who has written about four modes of participation: equality matching, communal sharing, authority ranking and market pricing. Traditional publishing with an editor's vetting is an example of authority ranking; market pricing is all too familiar in our capitalist economy. Which left me wondering how communal sharing would play out. Guess I'll have to go look up some of Fiske's work.

It's information like that, sprinkled throughout Here Comes Everybody, that makes reading Clay Shirky so fun and invigorating. There's always something more to think about.

Clay Shirky Diagnoses the Rumps

Twitter at its best gives you immediate access when people with interesting thoughts feel like putting them out in real time. Last night, media critic and theorist Clay Shirky -- who doesn't tweet very often -- went on a tweet storm, compiled here.

His main point is that social media has turned the Republican and Democratic parties into host bodies for third-party candidates. Some of the key tweets:

Politically acceptable discourse is limited by supply, not demand. The public is hungry for more than politicians are willing to discuss.

In order to preserve inherently unstable coalitions, party elites and press had to put some issues into the 'Don't Mention X' category.

These limits were enforced by party discipline, and mass media whose economics meant political centrism was the best way to make money.

But all of this was before cable television exploded, which gave us Ross Perot, and the interweb, which led to the Howard Dean phenomenon and then Barack Obama's ability to mobilize and fundraise. In 2016,

Reaching and persuading even a fraction of the electorate used to be so daunting that only two national organizations could do it. Now dozens can.

This set up the current catastrophe for the parties. They no longer control any essential resource, and can no longer censor wedge issues.

Each party has an unmentionable Issue X that divide its voters. Each overestimated their ability to keep X out of the campaign.

So here we are, with quasi-parlimentarianism. We now have four medium-sized and considerably more coherent voter blocs.

2 rump establishment parties, Trump representing 'racist welfare state' voters, and Sanders representing people who want a Nordic system.

Trump is a RINO, Sanders not even a Democrat. That either one could become their party's nominee is amazing. Both would mark the end of an era.

Over-large party coalitions require discipline to prevent people from taking an impassioned 30% of the base in order to win the primaries.

Who needs a third party when the existing two parties have become powerless to stop insurgencies from within?

More detail on his thinking in the full compilation of tweets.

David Duke, Meet Clay Shirky

I've been saving this screen snapshot of a David Duke tweet:


In it, Duke conflates "Western civilization" with a doe-eyed blonde gal, the classically virginal white woman who must be protected from rape by black and brown men. "This,"  he says with an unclear antecedent, is worth preserving.

The words superimposed over her photo say Western civilization, but the image says white womanhood, especially when Duke continues by saying he plans to "guide our people up the evolutionary stairway to the stars." Jeez louise. The evolutionary stairway takes us to being blonde and porcelain-skinned? And here I was hoping it would take us to more empathy and the ability to get along with everyone who doesn't look like us.

More recently, Clay Shirky responded to a Vox first-person story that has this headline: I’m voting for Jill Stein. It’s a moral choice. It reflects who I am as a person.

This is everything wrong with third-party voting, in one succinct headline.

A vote is a choice to join a power-seeking coalition. It is not a personal affirmation of a coherent ideology. It is not a moral choice.

Voting can never be a reflection of any individual voter's preferences, because those preferences are too varied between voters. There is no correlation among voters' ideal policy choices for economic vs. social vs. international issues.

If you want legal marijuana, I have no idea what you think of Syria. If you want a Syrian no-fly zone, I don't know what you think the top tax rate should be.

An imaginary world with only three issues — Legalize / No Fly / Raise Tax — and only Y/N preferences would still need eight parties to represent voters. A world with six issues and a moderate position between Y and N would need over 700 such parties, each representing ~0.1% of the electorate.

Even multiple parties can't represent most voters' preferences most of the time, and the U.S. system limits viable parties to two at a time. A strong Presidency and winner-take-all voting has cemented two-party politics since before the first competitive election, in 1796. This is a Constitutional issue, not an electoral one. A third party could only succeed if the Constitution were re-written.

Since democracy prevents the government from being run by a coherent ideology by design, it can only ever offer choices among lesser evils. Under these circumstances, all a Presidential vote can say is "This politician will use power in ways I marginally prefer over that one."

And all a third party vote can say is "Whatever everybody else decides is OK with me." It's a refusal of political engagement altogether.

"This politician will use power in ways I marginally prefer over that one" doesn't make for much of a slogan that appeals to our evolution-derived brains, however. Our brains vastly prefer a simple story with a clear moral, and tribal thinking like that displayed by David Duke.

One more piece of evidence against the idea of a divine creator.

Reporters Trapped Inside a Burning Business Model

Clay Shirky recently did a small-scale content analysis of the Columbia, Missouri, Daily Tribune, literally weighing how much of the paper was news, ads or other (sports, opinion, crosswords, etc.). He also quanitifed how much of it was created by the paper's staff, as opposed to acquired from another source (the Associated Press, comics syndicates, and so on). According to Shirky, the Tribune is "a classic metro daily and pretty good paper for a town of 100,000."

His results: One third of the paper was news. One third was locally created. And less than one-sixth of the content was news created by the paper's staff.

He also found out there are only six reporters creating all of the local news at the paper. And this is at a good paper in a competitive market (Columbia is home to the University of Missouri's acclaimed journalism school and its daily paper). In contrast, the Tribune has 11 people covering sports, plus a hefty list of columnists writing advice, cooking tips, and so on. And while those things are clearly not without value, as Shirky says,

it’s not news, and it’s not hard to do, and it’s not hard to replace. No one surveying the changes the internet is bringing to the newspaper business is saying “My God, who will tell me about Big 12 football! Where will I find a recipe for spicy chicken wings!” What matters in the Tribune, and what’s at risk, is Terry Ganey’s work on a state coverup of elevated levels of E. Coli in Ozark lakes, Jonathan Braden on anti-gay protesters from Kansas picketing in Columbia, Jodie Jackson’s reporting on a child molestation case against a local politician.

One idea bandied about for saving the local news function of the daily newspaper is the nonprofit model, which is a reality -- at least for now -- at sites like MinnPost and the Twin Cities Daily Planet. Remembering that the number of people who actually do the local news reporting is relatively small helps to make the nonprofit idea more realistic:

Seen in that light, what’s needed for a non-profit news plan to work isn’t an institutional conversion, it’s a rescue operation. There are a dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model. With that framing of the problem, the question is how to get them out safely...

Shirky linked his essay to one by Steve Coll in The New Yorker. Coll calls upon billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to cough up the first billion to create an endowment for papers like the Washington Post, so that the reporting staff can be run off the resulting interest in perpetuity. His model is the private university, many of which sit on endowments in the billions of dollars, and which generally shield them from the vagaries of political pressure or the sensibilities of stockholders.

Coll ends with these words: "Warren? Bill? You can secure the First Amendment for a generation at a time of historical transformation in national life, and in the country’s place in the world. If you’ll just put up the first billion, the rest of us promise to get busy helping to raise the rest."

Twitter for September 2022

It's hard to describe the combination of utter stupidity and vileness that defines our national "conversation" lately, with topics ranging from urgent and essential to trivial: democracy itself assailed by fascist white Christo-nationalism, the climate emergency in all its forms and effects, basic rights under attack in multiple ways (from laws and court cases to bomb threats against children's hospitals), people fleeing the effects of war and climate meeting a dysfunctional immigration and asylum system and governors who want to exploit it. 

In the same month that Ken Burns reminded us how Americans excluded Europe's Jews, leaving them to be killed by the Nazis, we saw Trump rallies that looked like Hitler rallies. And meanwhile, the right wing kept trying to elevate the smallest culture war trivialities to become major stories (Black mermaids! Black women playing dead white guys' flutes!) and managing to get those into national media to stoke outrage.

All of the tweets below the line are quoted from the attributed Twitter account, and are in roughly reverse chronological order. 

___

White Nationalists are complaining that Lizzo playing a historic flute was being disrespectful. Universities have hundreds of thousands of Native remains that they stole, dug up, dissected, desecrated. Harvard alone has the remains of 7,000 Natives (People!)... That's disrespect.
Lucas Brown Eyes

Periodically, I’ll think about how the only reason America implemented free breakfast programs for schoolchildren was because the Black Panthers had a similar program and the government was worried about them winning hearts and minds.
Noah Buckley

Transpo Dept:
- We designed this at 10mph above the speed limit.
- Everybody's driving 10mph above the speed limit.
- We recommend raising the speed limit.
- We now recommend redesigning the road to be 10mph above the new speed limit.
Andy Boenau

What a remarkable image. The daughter of Minoo Majidi—a mother of two who was killed by the Iranian regime while protesting for #MahsaAmini—stands at her mother's gravesite. She is defiantly unveiled, and in her left hand she holds the hair she cut from her head:


Karim Sadjadpour

Republican: free speech lets teachers misgender students
Teacher: i want to gender a student correctly
Republican: free speech is now irrelevant; you need parental permission
Parent: i give the teacher permission to gender my child correctly
Republican: you're under arrest
@bitterkarella

Every single one of you out there complaining about getting automated speeding tickets from cameras should feel bad about yourselves. Slow the fuck down.
David Roberts @drvolts

Santa Fe is the only state capital older than the Mayflower voyage.
MarkHay @McNmndad

The right-wing pushback on YIMBY [yes in my back yard] is just another culture war grievance, and all culture war grievances are basically the same. The right wants a single narrow culture (white, Christian, patriarchal, suburban) imposed by law. The left wants variation and pluralism. Reactionary psychology is quite literally unable to process a genuine devotion to pluralism, so it can only interpret these reforms as attacks on its specific culture by some other specific culture ("marxism" or whatever). They are dominant ... or persecuted. No other option.
David Roberts @drvolts

You’re not gonna believe me when I say this, but the “Feminists” column is supposed to be the bad one:


Hemant Mehta

It’s incredible how police are simultaneously integral to stopping the tidal wave of crime that will crash over us if they falter for but a minute, and also exist in a completely non-causal state where things just happen around them, unable to change or influence any outcome.
Donavon Indovino Cawley @hellodonavon

“Teens shouldn’t get top surgery because we don’t have enough research on long-term impact,” says a country gleefully committed to everyone getting COVID several times a year forever.
Dan Fishback @dangerfishback

*extremely brief googling*
from 2013 to 2020, seven years, there were 209 top surgeries on minors in the US. two reported regret.
[meanwhile] in the 2018 school year alone, there were 99,000 traumatic brain injuries caused by high school football
wonder which one people are concerned about
eevee

Difficult to avoid the conclusion that our biological and neurological machinery is simply maladapted to the problems of modernity. We are clever enough to create problems that we are not clever enough to solve.
David Roberts @drvolts

The right view 'criminality' as something done by a group of people who are 'criminals'. Criminals are not something you become by committing crime this is why they have trouble seeing Trump etc as criminals as they see them as in their group who aren't criminals by definition
@iansimmons1960

The Hijab Series: 'What if' (2014) by Yemeni photographer Boushra Almutawakel #WomensArt:


@womensart1

People wonder why Jews are neurotic. It’s because the chill ones didn’t make it. Every Jew you meet is the descendent of a Jew 200 years ago who was like “yo, the vibes are off. Let’s get on a boat.”
Dan Mahboubian Rosen @thedanrosen

If you get furious at looters during a riot but feel zilch about massive financial fraud during a pandemic, then maybe your real issue isn't the stealing.
George Takei

"Academics censor ideas all the time. We have to, to keep from being swamped by the bad ones." —Clay Shirky
Bill Grueskin

Academic freedom is mainly freedom of academics to self-discipline without interference from outsiders. It tracks that Republicans define academic freedom as "Conservative faculty are free from consequences of self-governance; liberals are blocked from self-governing."
Clay Shirky

Brigham Young University health insurance does not offer its female faculty birth control until after the birth of her 5th child. 5TH CHILD. Just wanted to remind you of that
@juliasasine

There's simply nothing more useless than a writer who is liberal when young and drifts right as cultural change makes them feel increasingly less comfortable. Like a leaf floating on the stream of time, unconnected to insight.
Daniel "Drex" Drexler @stsDrex

Let’s stop saying we’re ‘saving the planet’ when what we’re actually doing is marginally reducing the amount we’re fucking it up.
@ClimateDad77

One way to ban cars: legalizing real cities. (Photo of Toledo, Spain, from Travel & Tradition, @Archi_Traveler


The Urbanist

Can transport be accessible to all people, and not kill by collision, particulates or greenhouse gas emissions? Or is that too much to ask?
Extinction Rebellion

"Post-fascist roots" is the new "racially charged."
Jeet Heer @HeerJeet

The funniest alpha white male trait in America right now is being proudly afraid of all American cities.
Croy no Boys @BadBoyCroy

This stings: "If the car is to prevail, there’s still one solution: get rid of the cities. That is, string them out for hundreds of miles along enormous roads, making them into highway suburbs. That’s what’s been done in the United States." [quoted from a 1973 essay called "The Social Ideology of the Motorcar."]
David Zipper

Local Mom Who Claims Masks Harm Children Upset She Isn’t Allowed to Speed in a School Zone
New York Times Education Pitchbot @GreyLadiesNYC

“The number one barrier to walkability is crime”:


Ray Delahanty @Nerd4Cities

The problem with traditional patriotism is that it comes with the demand that you support the status quo. Progressive patriotism takes pride in the values that the nation aspires to — fairness, tolerance, equality before the law etc — and gets angry when they are not respected.
Billy Bragg

We’re all going to be drowning, freezing, burning, and boiling to death from these extreme weather events caused by climate change, and Republicans are going to be still telling us to be scared of trans people and immigrants.
Leah McElrath

Mea Culpa, I was wrong. I really thought Russia calling up 300k reserves in the first wave of mobilization meant Russia was calling up 300k men who had recently served or had specialist skills. Nope, turns out its just a giant ethnic cleansing operation in Russia's Asian oblasts.
@JBelcourt73

CDC recommends for the holidays! Stop living in fear!


Leta McCollough Seletzky, JD @LaSeletzky

"billionaires won't create jobs if we tax them” is a myth made up by billionaires so we won't tax them.
Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa

US news outlets did more coverage of the queen's death in the past two weeks than coverage of climate change in the past two YEARS.
Eric Holthaus

Minimum parking requirement = enormous land subsidy to the automobile industry.
Rik Adamski

If we're criticizing parents, perhaps we should criticize the unloving father that resulted in this cop becoming a "school resource officer" in the first place
Thorpe Langton @minnydawg

Where would Jesus send refugees?
God @almightygod

These were Elijah McClain’s last words. Just in case you forget why we still say Black Lives Matter even when we aren’t marching in the streets:


@deandrawrites_

I feel like if you asked anyone over the age of 12 living in NYC in 1983 how a Trump presidency would work out, they'd get it largely right.
Adam Davidson

The difficult truth is that the mechanics of the 20th century are dissolving, breaking, or inadequate to the tasks of the 21st, and instead of building new ones, our leadership is either desperately trying to hold it together or stealing everything that’s not nailed down.
Kaitlin Byrd @GothamGirlBlue

We had a two-decade-long run to build infrastructure and supportive housing at ~zero interest rates and we — the city, region, state, country — blew that once-in-a-generation opportunity
Clara Jeffery

Yea but on the other hand we did build a lot of different kinds of cryptocurrencies
@deapthoughts

Tucker Carlson going full Radio Rwanda on doctors who treat trans people feels like it should be getting more attention than it is, even with as much awful other stuff going on
@incrementalized

This brand new bus stop is a hilarious example of miscalibrated usability:


Schuldberg

Today I learned Ireland, which is about the geographic size of Indiana, now supports 280 active transport planners.
Angie Schmitt

Global aviation emissions are set to triple in the next 30 years while the rest of the world moves toward zero emissions. There's not even a plan from airline executives that's remotely realistic to stabilize that trend. Just critically morally negligent.
Eric Holthaus

the appalachian mountains are older than saturn’s rings. the appalachian mountains are older than dinosaurs. the appalachian mountains are older than trees. the appalachian mountains are literally older than BONES. the appalachian mountains should be regarded with pure terror.
the moon’s wife @bookishseawitch

And yet they're only 12% of the age of the Canadian Shield. The appalachian mountains are babies.
Jeff Nason @Eliminason

Wanting a livable planet is not an ideology. It’s survival instinct.
Mary Annaïse Heglar

Really weird how much of modern conservatism seems to literally just be adult oppositional defiant disorder
@kreuger_harmon

ICYMI: Blake Masters [Republican Arizona Senate candidate] is calling for a purge of the military and Claremont is organizing sheriffs. It doesn't take a weatherman to know there is a storm coming.
Jeet Heer @HeerJeet

By 1920, the network of interurbans in the US was so dense that a determined commuter could hop interlinked streetcars from Waterville, Maine, to Sheboygan, Wisconsin—a journey of 1,000 miles—exclusively by electric trolley.


Taras Grescoe

This is how democracy ends: not with a bang, but with a shitpost.
Oran Magal

drivers act like stopping and slowing are so hard in a car ignoring that they just have to tap a pedal with their foot. how the fuck can we possibly make this easier for you
Bike Lane Creature @Shredded_teat

Wow. 65% of American evangelicals deny original sin, and 43% deny Jesus’ divinity. So, literal heretics! But 90%+ are resolute against extramarital sex and abortion. @Kkdumez’s argument that evangelicalism is a culture rather than an set of beliefs has never looked stronger.
Jacob Huneycutt

Isn’t it curious that if someone used being blackout drunk as a defense for killing someone, they’d never be taken seriously but we allow that to excuse sexual assault and rape all the time
The Daily Taylr

Actual followers of Jesus don't call people "illegals."
John Pavlovitz

What would it take for a single government official, or even non-governmental public health leader, to say the US is in crisis, has lost a quarter century of gains in life expectancy, and is not on track to recover.
Justin Feldman @jfeldman_epi

I'm not certain it is widely appreciated that excess US deaths in 2022 nearly exactly match excess deaths in 2021. There is nothing about this pandemic that is "winding down" except for public health response, workplace safety precautions, and funding to keep it from worsening:


John Chodera

Have you ever noticed, Democratic governors of border states such as New Mexico’s Michelle Lujan Grisham and California’s Gavin Newsom never have border crises?
@s_schuckman

Republicans never have a crisis that is not based on, or related to racism.
Ruben Botello

Why does it feel like governments at all levels have glorious planning goals, but these are thwarted on every project by politicians who worry about getting re-elected
Lou Miranda @TheNewLou

Very cool that the next decade or more of American life will consist of watching the Alito Court repeatedly co-sign the lawsuit equivalent of right-wing Facebook memes.
Tim Carvell (commenting, specifically, on the Bremerton, Washington, praying football coach case)

If bike rack installers also placed swing sets:


American Fietser

This Brett Favre welfare scam reminds me of something connected to the media coverage of Linda Taylor. Around the same time the Chicago Tribune went big on the "welfare queen" story, the paper also wrote about a different public aid scandal. George Bliss, the same guy who broke the Taylor story, revealed wholesale Medicaid fraud by Chicago pharmacists. One example...: changing a prescription from 400 to 1400 pills, then getting... reimburse[d]. Provider fraud, not individual recipient fraud, was where the big losses were coming from. ...billing in the high six figures every year — way more than the (extremely exaggerated) amount that Taylor had allegedly stolen. And yet, the stereotype of the cheating pharmacist didn't take root, and politicians didn't rant about how pharmacists were stealing from honest taxpayers. ... It's just...interesting...to see who gets the benefit of the doubt in this country and who doesn't.
Josh Levin

"Distressingly topical" is a great podcast name.
Jennifer Mendelsohn @CleverTitleTK (posted in the context of the Ken Burns Holocaust documentary)

Very soon a Republican will propose killing the undesirables instead of merely building a wall or shipping them to blue states and this will be treated like a very normal policy proposal and the press will frame it as something that excites the base rather than fascist.
Oliver Willis

Guess what? Things are going pretty well for most people, but they think it’s not going well for the country. Why the disconnect? Media empires, now amplified by social media, and politicians have made a *business model* out of scaring and dividing people like never before:


Dr. Jonathan Foley @GlobalEcoGuy

At this point any pundit who tries to reassure you that any given worst case scenario isn't possible because norms or precedent or rule of law or whatever should really just be dismissed out of hand.
Tom Tomorrow

Why did we design American cities primarily for those who live outside them?
Pete Peterson @petepm

Texas' Department of Public Safety claimed on Facebook that troopers had "encountered over 700 criminal gang members” during Operation Lone Star. So reporters asked for proof. Their response: Gang affiliation is not a metric that is tracked.
ProPublica

All of Ron DeSantis’ great-grandparents were reportedly born in Italy and immigrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century — his great-grandfather in 1904, a year after this cartoon was published. They must be very proud as they look down on their boy:


Sherrilyn Ifill

If you’re a Republican, you can call your opponents all ‘pure evil’ and say God is on your side. If you’re a Democratic president you can’t say the word ‘fascism’ to describe an ideology, even with the word ‘semi’ in front of it. Them’s the rules…
Mehdi Hasan

The Fifth Circuit has dropped another opinion that makes me question why I bother being a lawyer. I like how a corporation has the religious right to decide what health benefits to provide to its employees, but not the right to prohibit racist speech. Fascinating stuff.
Andrew Kinsey

If you pay attention, you can watch many parts of this country 2 transforming from places where right-wing religious bigotry is 3 permissible to places where right-wing religious bigotry is required:


Alfie Kohn

carbon capture and net zero are cool because they're fake but also an excuse to just pollute until the last possible second
@panndder

Conservatives: life begins at conception
Also conservatives: your life has no value until you own a Fortune 500 Company
RoadRageDiogenes @Road2Diogenes

Car enthusiasts don't live next to busy roads. Free market advocates don't spend a lifetime in debt. Fossil fuel advocates don't live next to oil refineries. Why not when they love these things so much?
Extinction Rebellion

Pedestrian deaths in which striking vehicle was an SUV are up 76% between 2011 and 2020.
Angie Schmitt (data source in the original tweet)

I sincerely doubt that anything that could happen to Earth in the next 4 1,000 years could make it less habitable for humans than Mars already 5 is. We’d have a better shot in permanent underground bunkers, and I 6 wouldn’t want to be around for that. Also, here’s the Earth from Mars:


Rik Adamski

welcome back. if you're just joining us, the people who brought polio back are complaining about black mermaids
blaine capatch

A new study found uninsured victims of sexual violence were charged an average of $3,673 for visiting the emergency room in 2019. There were over 17,000 such patients that year. Even insured patients faced hundreds of dollars in out-of-pocket charges. Researchers found roughly 112,800 patients visited the ER for sexual violence in 2019. Nearly 90 percent of those patients were female, and 38 percent were children under 18
Rachel Cohen @rmc031

Having public meetings on where bike lanes should go is as counterproductive and guarantees suboptimal outcomes as having public meetings as where sewer or electric lines should go.
welcome to dot

School Administration Reminds Female Students Bulletproof Vests Must Cover Midriff:


The Onion

Do you guys ever think about how 100 years ago rail workers went on one of the biggest strikes in history, leading to the establishment of the Railway Labor Act to preserve labor peace and now we are staring down a national rail lockout because they won’t give workers days off
Jonah Furman

Kids: We got peanut allergy.
Policy: Although death is rare — no one brings peanuts to school!!
Kids: We want to safely make it to school.
Policy: Although motor vehicles are one of the leading causes of death among children, we can’t slow down the traffic. Godspeed!
Dr. Natalia Barbour

This is a crazy stat. In 67% of pedestrian fatalities, there was no sidewalk available.
Angie Schmitt (data source in the original)

The guiding meta-narrative of establishment media is that Democrats are responsible for the actions of random college sophomores and Republicans are not responsible for the actions of their elected leaders.
Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark

And this is a particularly toxic formula when applied to abortion 7 politics, when the Savvy position is that Republicans Never Really Mean 8 it no matter how many very material abortion regulations and bans are 9 passed by Republican legislatures
Scott Lemieux @LemieuxLGM

It has taken 233 years for the U.S. Congress to be fully represented by 10 this country’s indigenous peoples. Tonight, a Native American, a Native 11 Alaskan & a Native Hawaiian are sitting members of the people’s 12 House. Welcome U.S. Representative Peltola to the 117th Congress!


Congressman Kaiali‘i Kahele

There's an article going around about how libraries are basically the US' only source of early childhood infrastructure, but the takeaway is "yay libraries!" not that libraries are being asked to do too much for too little pay, resources, and staff.
Alex Brown @QueenOfRats

first of all the british monarchy is ceremonial and has no real power second of all if you try to hurt their feelings you are under arrest
@Ugarles

“Crime went up because you criticized the police” is such a bizarre defense of the police.
Adam Miller @ajm6792

America now builds more 3-car garages than 1 bedroom apartments. Our nation has an average of 1,000 sq ft of parking for each car vs. 800 sq ft of housing per person.
Zach Klein (source: Bloomberg)

We need car supremacy because that’s the only thing that makes American-style suburbs workable, and we need car-dependent suburbs because that’s the only thing that makes race-based resource-hoarding workable.
@EoboOboe


Extinction Symbol

Just FYI, more former Mormon bishops have been arrested for sex crimes against children in just the last year than trans people have in the entire history of Utah. But guess which one makes Mormon parents afraid
@TheDiscoUnicorn

During an unconference at @newmarkjschool this weekend, I had occasion to share these. Definitions like this are made for use. (Here it was journalists trying to sort through their relationship to users of the product.) There can always be other definitions that are also correct:
• Audience is an attention category. People attending to the same thing are an audience.
• A community is people who identify with common values or shared beliefs.
• A public is people who have common problems due to living in a shared space.
Jay Rosen

Around two-thirds of all Dutch children walk or cycle to school, preventing an estimated one million car trips across the country each morning. That’s less strain on their streets, their wallets, and their lives; simply by enabling safe and active travel.
Dutch Cycling Embassy

"These books about racism and sexual identity offend my religious sensibilities, so you must remove them from libraries and classrooms so other people's kids can't see them."
"By the way, if you oppose my censorship efforts, you're trampling on my religious freedom."
Alfie Kohn

Please pay attention: Years into bail reform in handful of cities & states round country. Research, reports, and data all are definitive. 100,000s more people free. $100,000,000s taxpayer dollars saved. No related increase in crime. These are facts. Stop believing lies.
Scott Hechinger

I hope everybody realizes that while we are having a national conversation about the crippling debt that so many Americans carry from college, ideologues on the right are trying to unmake K-12 public education so that it is more like our market-driven system of higher ed.
Jack Schneider @Edu_Historian

NYC is forever in my heart, and I have empathy for all who lose loved ones, no matter the cause. At this point — after a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans — these annual ceremonies feel like cynical rituals to keep support high for the military industrial complex. If leaders TRULY want to protect this country and value American lives, they’ll look ahead 20 years rather than to the past. If they do, they’ll see major cities and entire regions flooding, burning, or without potable water, and Americans turned into climate refugees en masse.
Leah McElrath (on September 11)

It’s increasingly clear electric cars may do little to mitigate the top cause of air-pollution-related cancer and illness — particulate matter 10 & 2.5, or tiny particles of pollution that lodge deep in lungs. Most car-related PM comes from tire wear. EVs make it worse.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo

I didn't realize that calling them fireflies was mostly a western U.S. thing. That is what I call them:


Union Tpke

"That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times."
— Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1))
Sticky Wonder @JusttBarb

It’s nearly impossible to make the factual statement that follows this clause without sounding like a crazy polemic and yet: even after the civil war, between roughly 1895 and 1966, there wasn’t a single southern state in the US — not one — that functioned as a democracy.
aderson francois @abfrancois

Heavier cars are safer for their drivers, but far deadlier for everyone else. This paper find that for every 1,000 pounds a car weighs over a Toyota Corolla, the chance of killing another person goes up by 46%! Heavier vehicles lead to 28k more US deaths.
Ethan Mollick

People who choose giant, heavy vehicles are directly, measurably raising risks to those around them. That should be reflected in prices/taxes. And in social mores.
David Roberts @drvolts

Give me a break — Chief Justice John Roberts says it is "gut-wrenching" to drive past barricades everyday at Supreme Court — for starters he should try being a woman being denied control over her own body to understand "gut-wrenching" — maybe if he actually tried to reform SCOTUS
Shanlon Wu

Here's a vehicle that can get 80% of people anywhere they need to go within 2 miles of their house. It takes up essentially no space, is mostly silent, emits no greenhouse gas, and costs less than two tanks of gasoline. People just have to feel safe using it:


Warren J. Wells

The mainstream media: “Coming up: Why do so many Americans seem to have fallen in love with the idea of autocratic rule? But first, here is 48 straight hours about the magical and enchanting spectacle of England crowning its new king.”
The Hoarse Whisperer @TheRealHoarse

I've been on nextdoor for a month, hoping to get news of things happening in my new neighborhood. What I have learned is that some huge percentage of middle aged white Americans are terrified all the time.
@NomeDaBarbarian

Whatever artistic or cultural statement organizers of #BurningMan planned to make this year will never be as important as the statement inadvertently made when all those people in the desert tried to drive home. The most powerful cultural force in North America: car dependency:


Brent Toderian

In a parallel universe, we built structures of collective care in the face of a virus and then leveraged them to limit climate disaster. In this universe, we still could.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

I think this is the greatest crime of white women. We get invited to the table and sit down instead of flipping it.
emily freeman @editingemily

We don't look at the Nazis and say you can't blame them because those were the moral standards of their day lol. It's all about who you want to make innocent somehow and who you want to keep guilty.
Puff the Magic Hater @MsKellyMHayes

The fact that ABC, NBC, and CBS are all airing King Charles’ first speech, but none of them aired President Biden’s primetime speech about the ongoing threats to American democracy shows exactly what is terribly wrong with today’s political mainstream media.
Andrea Junker @Strandjunker

I think the Queen would want us all to live the way she did, with free public housing, basic universal income, and full government health care.
@Spacejunc

This ham radio doesn't taste like I expected.
@JeremyCShipp

Cumulative confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people *in the last 12 months*:


wsbgnl

Where are the geothermal bros. Why is it always nuclear.
Ian Monroe @eean

We're in this place in BOTH the UK and US where we have a general consensus that our extremely bloody imperial histories were regrettable but necessary, which means we don't have to do anything about those histories, either as reparations or in consideration of current policies
@markpopham

Elizabeth II did not "preside over decolonisation," colonised peoples shot enough British soldiers that the costs of imperialism outweighed the benefits and we won our freedom. Elizabeth was not a gracious liberator, she was a hated foe who we overcame in armed struggle.
@cannibality

Intelligence without compassion is just being an asshole
@TheBlackNerd

Respectability politics will always prioritize the deceptive, grotesque veneer of civility over the glacier of bloodshed we are all expected to ignore.
Octavia Butler knew... @NotNikyatu

When Gaddafi died, there was unadulterated cheers in western halls of power. If Putin was to croak tomorrow, there would be a debauched party in London. But if a monarch with the blood of millions upon millions on multiple continents dies, we’re supposed to show class.
Vik Sohonie

In transportation, we talk a lot about safety improvements like curb extensions, RRFBs, new signal systems with reflective backs and so on — but spending time in New England is a good reminder that safety is mostly about inconveniencing cars. No fancy tech or engineering needed:


Nate Hood

Traditionalists use "feel-good" and “touchy-feely” as all-purpose epithets to disparage whatever seems suspiciously pleasurable. In education, that includes authentic assessments (vs. standardized tests) and creative exploration (vs. memorizing facts). Evidence of the remarkable effectiveness of such practices is waved away: If something is enjoyable, that’s reason enough to deem it insufficiently rigorous. Make a case for a more engaging curriculum, or for bringing kids in on making decisions, and the huffy response is that Life isn’t always going to be interesting (or responsive to kids’ preferences) — and students had better learn to deal with that fact.  The goal, apparently, isn't to promote enthusiasm about learning but to prepare kids for later unpleasantness.
Alfie Kohn

Time to mute a zillion new words to help me resist the urge to tweet “Monarchies are bad actually!” every 4 minutes.
Aubrey Hirsch

confused about why community input matters at all on bike lanes and parking minimums. i don't get consulted about sewer infrastructure or where the city will run power lines. these are basic infrastructure needs that shouldn't be up for debate.
scotus disrespecter @onekade

For a great example of how a minor change in policy can have major impacts, consider the 401(k). A small provision in the tax code in the late 1970s eventually destroyed defined benefit pensions in the private sector.
Dean Baker

Childhood used to mean adventure, healthy activity, autonomy. In North America, Australia, and the UK, they've been engineered out of our lives so that grown-ups can keep driving their cars.
Taras Grescoe

Was reminded today of this excellent list of scientific jargon to avoid, from R Somerville and @ClimateComms long ago but still completely relevant, especially as climate change work has become even more interdisciplinary:


Jennifer Marlon @JMarlonPhD

china passes united states in life expectancy. should be a headline in every us newspaper
ian bremmer

Besides the Fairness Doctrine going away, the worst thing to happen to journalism (TV, but impacts print too) is the 24-hour news cycle. Nature abhors a vacuum and the beast must be fed. Too often with empty calories like trying to create tension between #44 and #46.
Portia McGonagal

The United States will soon drop out of the Top 50 nations in terms of life expectancy. Every country above us has a public option for health insurance of a publicly funded healthcare system. Not some. Not most. Every single one.
John Green

If you believe that winning the birth-canal lottery is synonymous with "merit" then you believe in eugenics.
Cory Doctorow

A nuclear spy appointed 226 federal judges and 3 Supreme Court Justices.
Eric Garcia @EricG1247

That man stole nuclear secrets and he's out here holding rallies.
@covie_93

The most startling thing about the rise of fascism is how the "free" press finds profit in normalizing it and how voters see "freedom" in inviting in an iron fist.
Baron Brady

No AC in our classrooms, teacher to student ratio is 40:1, 80% of our students live at or below poverty level. But yeah let’s go ahead and give cops housing subsidies…that’ll help us.
Nicole Donanian-Blandón @nicole_d14

School reform would be radically reconfigured by the simple addition of an "s" and an apostrophe - that is, a shift from talking about "student achievement" (the aggregate results of standardized tests) to "students’ achievements" (the intellectual accomplishments of specific kids)
Alfie Kohn

The lack of free drinking water in public places is yet another reminder of something we could all benefit from but don't have because we insist on the criminalization and punitive treatment of people experiencing homelessness. See also: places to sit, bus stops with shelter and power, public fruit orchards and veggie gardens, transit into suburbs ...
@DrTaraGoddard

“No U.S. diplomats have been killed this year, anywhere in the world,” he said. “But three U.S. State Department officials have died in the Washington area — all hit by vehicles. Two have been hit on bikes. One was right here”:


Mary Pustejovsky @mpusto

Great work: FiveThirtyEight found 195 of 529 GOP nominees running for office in midterms "fully denied" the 2020 election. Another 61 "raised questions" about its legitimacy. No answer for 115 candidates. 71 accept results fully. 87 accept with reservations.
Jared Holt

Some good news: EV batteries are lasting much longer than expected—almost all of them are now expected to outlive the cars they're in, and get a second life backing up big solar arrays
Bill McKibben

If the name of a philosophy is an attempt to make an a priori claim of its correctness, it is a scam:
-Objectivism
-Effective Altruism
-Longtermism
GordonGoneWild @gone_gordon

Indoor smoking and car dominated cities are so similar. As soon as it’s gone it will seem intolerable that we ever had it.
Driving Is a Sin

School Days are Bicycle Days #BikeToSchool:


Cool Bike Art

Reminder that Barbara Ehrenreich had an essay ready for the New York Times about a journalist who’d been blinded with a rubber bullet during the George Floyd protests but they chose to run the Tom Cotton editorial instead
@dennisbhooper

The fact that people are fighting over what race mythical creatures truly are shows just how deeply entrenched racial logics are in how people make sense of the world. The idea that mythical creatures might somehow transcend race is seen as too fantastical for fantasy.
Nelson Flores

I know someone says this constantly, but it's really weird that social media is now like 50% screencaps from other social media
@techevangelista

When I’m cycling, motorists impede me far more than I impede them. When I’m driving, motorists unarguably impede my car’s forward progress more than cyclists impede it. The grief against people on bikes for “getting in the way” is empirically illogical.
Carlton Reid

Someone (not in education) was surprised to hear that teachers have to set up their own classrooms. She thought we had someone to do that for us and we just walk in the first day and start teaching. I had to explain it takes days of prep + physical labor. And we don’t get paid.
Andrea @teachbk

We are in the midst of a four-alarm fire, and our media figures, on television and in print, refuse to call out the arsonists and focus on criticizing the firefighters for putting their suspenders on the wrong way.
Norman Ornstein

70% of Canada's population is on this 800km near-straight line. A proper high speed railway would be straightforward to build, and could provide Toronto to Quebec timings of just over 3hrs. Hyperloop does not, and never will, exist:


Gareth Dennis

Putting it bluntly because it’s important (despite the risk this may alienate folks): the whiteness of climate grief is literally crowding out attention to many important things necessary for international intersectional climate justice. Channel that to working with others instead
Farhana Sultana, Ph.D. @Prof_FSultana

Imagine if we stopped saying “pollution” and started saying “poison.” Our water is poisoned. Our soil is poisoned. Our food, air, rain — poisoned.
OluTimehin K.

Human capital theory in school is “common sense.” We don’t care about learning for the sake of learning. This is why we mock philosophy degrees or any other degree where people ask “what are you gonna do with that?”
@Sisyphus38

The majority of student loan borrowers have less than $20k in debt. The median beneficiary of the student loan forgiveness is a low income person who will have their debt wiped out completely. Don't trust any "progressive" who says it's a drop in the bucket.
Brandon wants more neighbors @BRuddTweets

Millions of white Americans are on board for racist, nationalist "semi-fascism." Always have been. Even launched a treasonous war in its defense once! It is wild that we're about to let them destroy democracy and we can *still barely SAY it*.
David Roberts @drvolts

I think it is becoming clear now that we are not in the Anthropocene, but in the Capitalocene. It's not a species that's the problem, but the political-economic system imposed upon it by an elite driven by greed, short-term profit and a complete disregard for everything else:


@ProfBillMcGuire

our neighbor's house cleaner recently got an e-bike, and my wife overheard them talking. apparently they can get to all their jobs quite easily. they also can do most errands. imagine how transformative it would be if this city's leadership took climate action seriously.
build decarbonized passivhaus ecodistricts now @holz_bau

The people who encourage bomb threats to hospitals are very upset about the President’s tone
Acyn

Sort of feels like the enduring appeal of No Labels is that rich people with a lot of cultural capital tend to have homogenous political preferences, and since they only hang out with each other, this leads them to think there's a secret nationwide political consensus.
Ned Resnikoff

what kind of shithole media criticizes a speech against fascism but not the fascism itself
Jeff Tiedrich

[Claude] McKay composed “If We Must Die” during a bathroom break while employed as a waiter for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He first recited the lines “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” to his fellow Black laborers:


Reighan Gillam

Political violence has always been the answer from white supremacists when they don't get their way. –Dr. Jason Johnson on MSNBC
ProfB @AntheaButler

A single victory for a GOP secretary of state candidate in Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, or governor in Pennsylvania puts the 2024 election, and American democracy as a whole, at risk. This isn’t conjecture or Biden’s opinion: it’s what the Republican candidates in those races have said themselves repeatedly.
Travis Waldron

Cities need innovation. But not tech bro innovation.
Brent Toderian

The general interpretation [of decreases in K–12 test scores since COVID] is that our covid education approach was a mistake, of course. But what is the proper impact of a pandemic that kills 1M+ Americans on children's test scores? Should we expect no effect? Smaller effect? What are the costs associated with that? I am totally open to the idea that we bungled it. But we should also be open to the idea that other approaches could have ended up with more deaths and the same or even worse disruption to kids' education. As with any policy discussion, the proper question is, Compared to what?
Seth Masket @smotus

“Prison is necessary to deter crime.” We have the highest incarceration rate in the world and we’re not even a top 30 safest country. What are we deterring?
GNCordova

If someone ever criticises your tidiness, show them this, the New York Review of Books office:


Amanda Lees

Republicans are going to spin conspiratorial nonsense every time they lose an election and the media really should retire "claimed without evidence" and replace it with something like "fabricated theories."
Joshua Holland

We're challenged on the daily by the tech-amor folks who tout efficiency over conservation. This has been a problem for at least 40 years. The economic consequences of conservation leave them fewer paths to extractive wealth.
Mary Morse Marti

“The most important thing is to stop burning fossil fuels. The second most important thing is conserve the nature we already have. Trying to create new nature to absorb our fossil fuel emissions is way down the list of priorities.”
Dr Charlie Gardner

Folks: Kalamazoo Public Library now has foldable bike cargo *trailers* available in their 'library of things'. check it out, literally! There are 10 available:


lechplus @mlechs

How has America come so close to fascist rule? I hope the news organizations that treated Hillary’s emails as the biggest scandal of 2016 and normalized Trump with 24/7 softball coverage can inform and enlighten us about it.
Frank Conniff

Notice how coverage of the myriad crises plaguing public schools, from the repulsive lack of funding to the teacher shortage, so often treats these problems as if they simply manifested and weren’t the result of decades of carefully planned attacks by the Right.
Jared Yates Sexton

New study finds that planting rows of "tredges" (tree-height hedges) between schools and busy roads can reduce pollutants on school grounds up to 49%. Encouraging result, but my favorite approach remains "keep cars away from schools."
David Zipper

I still don’t think people understand what it means for 33 million people [in Pakistan] to be displaced. That’s 6 times more people than those internally displaced in Ukraine from war, that’s roughly 90% of the population of Canada. That’s how many people are internally homeless right now
Ayisha Siddiqa @Ayishas12

“In a monumental irony, both Julian Assange…and Edward Snowden…stand charged with the very same crimes that are likely to be brought against Mr. Trump. On both Mr. Assange and Mr. Snowden, Mr. Trump argued that they should be executed.”
@MilesTaylorUSA

New stencil:


Dígame Concejal @RSGAT