Citizen of Somewhere Else

At least one a day will be my reading challenge until I finish this. Starting with “Water” in honor of the ending of Beloved and In the Wake @hystericalblkns.bsky.social

The real AI apocalypse is not about robots messing with the power grid it is AI destroying the minds of kids, who, with educators pushing these tools, are at real risk of loosing the ability to write independently.

Freud is going to have to rethink the whole “narcissism of minor differences” thing methinks

This is one of my favorite comic pages I ever wrote, and Matt Groening loved it. Also, I asked Grant Morrison to check the language and they did!

In the first installment of The Edge Dialogues, a new series hosted by Tech Policy Press and The Privacy Center at Georgetown Law, Dr. Alondra Nelson of the Institute for Advanced Study joined us to discuss AI manifestos, power and who gets to build the future. Listen or read: buff.ly/Ha52jp1

Earlier today, I weighed in on the Great Instructional Debates of 2026 by sharing my mental model of effective instruction. You can make of it what you will, but make sure to check the reflective and insightful comment left by @biblioracle.bsky.social about his own teaching.

In one of the first statewide data points for enrollment this fall, Michigan's public universities saw their first collective enrollment decline since 2022. The smallest institution saw a 14% decline in just one year.

Good news for melanoma patients! The first ever mRNA vaccine to target cancer is in our near future. ~15 yrs ago, patients w/advanced melanoma survived for a few months. A successful Phase 3 clinical trial showed that intismeran reduced the risk of recurrence by 42%. 🧪 archive.today/pp6mX

Why authoritarians attack universities.

Volume 17 of the @aaup.org Journal of Academic Freedom is now online! Edited by Karim Mattar, the issue examines the "initiatives pursued, strategies deployed, coalitions built, and ongoing work" of academic freedom as a practice of democracy. Check out the full issue at www.aaup.org/JAF17

Wake up babe another @cnewf.bsky.social dropped utotherescue.blogspot.com/2026/10/line...

Here’s one way to get to the @standupforscience.net press release featuring Faculty Council of Community Colleges President @csvacin.bsky.social and yours truly www.einpresswire.com/article/9523...

Colleges exist to serve communities, not corporate interests or political agendas. We must defend affordable, quality, & democratic higher ed in the 2026 midterms! Tell candidates to stand with us: #HigherEdVoter https://bit.ly/47vCnHN

This is @gailsimone.bsky.social level trolling. Hats off

“A campus where students are pressured to stay silent about abuse, where students are doxxed, threatened and swatted for filing complaints, where victims are forced to share classrooms and living spaces with their abusers, is not a campus that respects physical safety or free speech.”

At face, the lack of an ACIP board seems like a DC red tape thing, but this is a sneaky eugenics effort. When vaccines are not recommended by ACIP, they are not covered by insurance or available for free through Medicaid…meaning the most physically and financially vulnerable don’t have access.

Happy to share: This semester, I am teaching a grad course called "Educational Policy and Leadership for AI and Other Emerging Technologies." It's a brand new course, and it's going as well as I'd hoped, especially for a fully asynchronous online course (a modality I don't love).

Bluesky has eight kinds of users

“Researchers received letters last spring about their federal grant applications from a Department of Health and Human Services employee who hadn’t worked for the government in months.”

New episode of AAUP Presents podcast is out! We discuss the AAUP report, “Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, & Shared Governance,” which exposes how the Trump admin has extended its pay-to-play approach to governance into higher education. ⬇️⬇️⬇️ bit.ly/47BZn8a

Frederick Douglass Haynes III's congressional priorities sound great to me: ✅ Abolish ICE ✅ End US imperialism ✅ Third Reconstruction ✅ Race-conscious economic justice ✅ Keep impeachment *on* the table ✅ Create a “true cost-of-living wage” ✅ Name and oppose white (supremacist) Christian nationalism

I'm going to try to do this cleanly. Today's right wing governments are networked to each other. Those networks are well-documented. You can read about them in books. Following the elections in one node of that network is good practice for understanding the U.S. node.

AAUP President Todd Wolfson: Trump's assault on American higher education is worse than McCarthyism. #defendhighered #mccarthyism

If you're still pondering, a few tickets are available for my online salon with Jon Evans on Interintellect tomorrow, Tuesday October 27th. We'll be talking technology, history, mythology, Renaissance, Vikings, the works! buff.ly/gghx8lI

New journal article @aaup.org Journal of Academic Freedom: Context Collapse and Retaliatory Firings: Higher Education in the Wake of Charlie Kirk’s Assassination www.aaup.org/JAF17/contex...

The College Scorecard just got a major update, including new data on students' earnings seven years after graduation and the return of post-college earnings data for all students receiving financial aid. Minority-serving institution indicators were removed. collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/changel...

Yesterday (Oct. 24) 100+ higher ed worker-organizers came together in Chicago at "Against the AI Campus: Building Power in Higher Ed," a one-day conference hosted by HELU and UIC-UF. Listen to some of the participants' concerns and reasons why AI is a higher ed issue for their unions.

Hope you'll listen to this conversation on @aaup.org's Extorted Compliance report. Proud to have played a part in its writing and in this podcast. www.buzzsprout.com/1837772/epis...

It’s barely even news at this point when the Trump admin breaks the law. But we should not let ourselves become inured to the administrations lawlessness. And we must be ready to hold them accountable. www.fedweek.com/federal-mana...

Read Our National Call to Action here: released by the SUNY UFS Executive Committee in September, endorsed by the full body in October! hdl.handle.net/1951/89089

SUNY's University Faculty Senate and Faculty Council of Community Colleges, the system-wide governance bodies for SUNY's 64 schools, have both signed America's Compact for Higher Education 🎉 ✊️

Siri, what are three good qualities my child possesses? Siri, is this my beautiful house? Siri, is this my beautiful wife? Siri, how did I get here? Siri, is it the same as it ever was??????

WOAH!

Woa not bad for an academic tome only in pre-orders!!!

The U.S. is the only major economy where planet-warming pollution has increased dramatically in the last year.