Rebekah Fitzsimmons

Great info and resources in Pittsburgh.

staynebby.com

Slide 1: a blue graphic with an outline of the United States. Red and white text reads: Call. National Book Banning Bill Proposed in US House of Reps. Tell your rep: Vote no on H.R. 7661.

Slide 2: a blue and red graphic with white text that reads: House Republicans have introduced a bill to effectively grant the federal government decision-making power over what books make it into the library. Misleadingly called the "Stop the Sexualization of Children Act," H.R. 7661 is a national-level book banning bill that would ban any book that, according to the bill's language, "(ii) involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism." This means any book about a trans person or the trans experience would be banned from every public school in the United States.

Slide 3: a blue and red graphic with white text that reads: The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Education and Workforce. If you are represented by one of the members of this committee listed below, they need to hear from you. Rep. Kevin Kiley, California (CA-3) (Chair) - entering vulnerable election cycle Rep. Mary E. Miller, Illinois (Vice Chair) Rep. Glenn "GT" Thompson, Pennsylvania Rep. Burgess Owens, Utah Rep. Michael A. Rulli, Ohio Rep. James C. Moylan, Guam - entering vulnerable election cycle Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, Pennsylvania - entering vulnerable election cycle Rep. Mark Harris, North Carolina Rep. Mark B. Messmer, Indiana Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, Oregon, Ranking Member Rep. Jahana Hayes, Connecticut Rep. Summer L. Lee, Pennsylvania Rep. John W. Mannion, New York Rep. Frederica S. Wilson, Florida Rep. Alma S. Adams, North Carolina Rep. Adelita Grijalva, Arizona

Slide 4: a blue graphic with red and white text that reads: If you are represented by the congresspeople listed above: Call your reps. Tell them they must oppose this bill at every turn. It is egregiously unconstitutional, targets ideas based on ideological disapproval, and misleads parents and the public about the content of children's books. It does nothing to protect kids and will badly harm education. It will tie school material funding into knots and hurt anyone who is a library materials vendor, regardless of content. If you are a bookseller, librarian, or author, tell them your livelihood depends on the next generation of readers.

You can read the full text of the bill here: www.congress.gov/bill/119th-c... Thank you to @authorsabb.bsky.social for these slides and the alt text, which you can also share on their insta: www.instagram.com/authorsagain...

A digital drawing of author Maia Kobabe, a white nonbinary person with short brown hair wearing a patterned blue shirt, who scowls while holding up a copy of eir book GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR. Maia is saying: H.R. 7661 is a national book banning bill which seeks to remove any book that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" from all public schools in the US. This would ban my books, and any other book with trans themes, from public schools. PLEASE call your House Reps and say: NO ON H.R. 7661!

H.R. 7661 is a national book banning bill which seeks to remove any book that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" from all public schools in the US. This would ban all my books, & any other book with trans themes, from public schools. PLEASE call your House Reps & say: NO ON H.R. 7661!

Thank you to @authorsabb.bsky.social heroes @beccacoffindaffer.bsky.social and Ed Underhill, we have some slides that can be shared by anyone about this, with particular reps to target. Let's kill this bill in committee.

Feds zip-tied a 14-year-old girl during Idaho raid, sparking fresh questions about ICE tactics A 14-year-old girl said she was "crying" and "struggling to breathe" when law enforcement officers herded her onto a racetrack with other detainees and zip-tied her hands.

"Images obtained by CBS News appear to show the zip ties and bruised wrists of Anabel Romero's 14-year-old daughter SueHey, a U.S. citizen who was tending to her 6- and 8-year-old siblings when the agents descended on the crowd in military-style gear and herded them into a confined area."

Essay: Ricky Martin's Super Bowl performance was an act of justice for the 1990s Though it lasted only 30 seconds, Martin's Super Bowl moment was a symbolic demonstration of how far Latin music has come in the United States.

did you see this piece? the emotion is justified www.latimes.com/delos/story/...

Case 1:24-cv-09429-KPF Document 227 Filed 02/05/26 Page 1 of 33 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK FLYCATCHER CORP. LTD and FLYCATCHER TOYS, INC., Plaintiffs, -V.- AFFABLE AVENUE LLC, doing business as CJ DIST; OZMOS COMPANY LLC; EYTAN GROSSMAN, doing business as EYG DEALS; CREATIVE REWARDS INC.; JOSHUA CHAVEZ, doing business as ONESTOPFASTSHOP; TOP EXPERIENCE COMPANY LLC, doing business as WE PAY COST LLC; PRETTY PRINCESS LLC, doing business as NORVI; AYANEE LLC; FORTUNA KG LLC, doing business as FORTUNAKG; JASON MANAGEMENT LLC; JOAN ALEXANDER SORIANO, doing business as PRIMECHOICEMART; A WAHABI CORPORATION, doing business as MCPROFITS; MODA ORIGINAL LLC; VALLEY BODEGA WHOLESALE INC.; EYAD WAHBY; SAM SHAMLOO; S&N GLOBAL SUPPLY INC.; VALUE VALLEY WHOLESALE LLC; ADAM HAMIDA; and JOHN DOES 1 to 25, Defendants. 24 Civ. 9429 (KPF) OPINION AND ORDER KATHERINE POLK FAILLA, District Judge: In June 2025, Steven A. Feldman, counsel for Defendant Affable Avenue LLC ("Affable"), filed a brief in support of Affable's motion to dismiss that was peppered with false citations. Concerned about both the genesis of these misstatements and counsel's delay in correcting them, the Court issued an Order to Show Cause. Perhaps not appreciating the gravity of the situation, Mr. Feldman responded to that Order with a submission that appeared to have been created by generative artificial intelligence ("Al"), and that itself contained a false citation. The Court's response was stern and unmistakable: "Mr.

Case 1:24-CV-09429-KPF Document 227 Filed 02/05/26 Page 2 of 33 Feldman [wals not excused from this professional obligation [of verifying that the cases he submitted to the Court were valid] by dint of using emerging technology." (Dkt. #169 at 4). Mr. Feldman persisted. A few days prior to the Court's hearing on the Order to Show Cause, Mr. Feldman submitted a proposed reply brief in further support of Affable's motion to dismiss. Once again, his brief contained false citations. And at the August 22, 2025 hearing, Mr. Feldman was unable to respond directly to, much less answer, the Court's questioning about his submissions. Mr. Feldman has not, and apparently cannot, learn from his mistakes. And while the Court does not oppose the use of Al to assist in legal research and writing, it must take a stand where, as here, counsel repeatedly files submissions with false citations because counsel refuses to verify those submissions. This Court can do no more. For the reasons that follow, the Court sanctions Mr. Feldman pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 and the Court's inherent powers by striking Affable's submissions and entering default judgment against it.

Hey, so, I don’t do civil litigation, is it generally considered good when the judge does this?

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Health Advice From A.I. Chatbots Is Frequently Wrong, Study Shows

Chat bots give the wrong medical advice more than half the time. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/w...

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

Fuck ICE

Washington’s Corruption Has Created Another Humanitarian Crisis in Puerto Rico The island’s earthquakes are its latest man-made disaster.

If you didn’t catch the significance of the exploding transformers in Bad Bunny’s halftime show, I gotcha. Here’s one of a bunch of pieces I wrote from/on Puerto Rico about the crisis—and Trump’s role in it. slate.com/news-and-pol...

That said, I learned A LOT last year from the kind folks who patiently explained the finer details of Kendrick Lamar’s nuanced performance. I’m looking forward to improving my understanding the layers of this performance as well

I don’t speak Spanish but I understood quite a lot of what Bad Bunny just had to say. Visual poetry and protest at its finest.

Thanks Emily! I was so lucky to get to work with @vanessajoosen.bsky.social and @paavovde.bsky.social on this issue! There is some truly wonderful scholarship represented!

Really looking forward to exploring this open access special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn dedicated to the intersection of Children’s Literature and Digital Humanities co-edited by @drfitzphd.bsky.social muse.jhu.edu/issue/56268

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out.

As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class.

Here's what happened:

LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

Diagram illustrating the BookReconciler workflow. On the left, a book cover of The Book of Salt by Monique Truong appears alongside “Minimal Metadata,” listing Author: Truong, Monique and Title: The Book of Salt. An arrow points to a box labeled “BookReconciler” with book and diamond icons. A downward arrow leads to “Enriched + Clustered Metadata,” showing multiple editions of the book cover and expanded metadata, including several ISBNs, subject headings (e.g., Vietnamese–France fiction, women authors, household employees, gay men, cooking), and an author VIAF identifier.

Very happy to introduce a new tool, BookReconciler!

You can take spreadsheets with book data and add subject headings, descriptions, ISBNs, HathiTrust IDs, & more. You can also cluster editions & variations of the same "Work."

Led by @thisismattmiller.com and supported by @post45data.bsky.social.

More or less done with the reading list for History of the Database. You could take a lot of different approaches, but this is the one I went with.

Friday morning call for abstracts!

We're looking for chapters for our historical network analysis edited collection, under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. See the cfp for more! Email us at interlocked.universe@gmail.com #dh #digitalhumanities #networkanalysis

So many great pieces in this volume. Can’t wait to see it out in the world!

Also, "separating different color sprinkles" is an excellent metaphor for the kind of data prep work we so often do. #DHmakes

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

Solange Opens Free Digital Library Of Rare Black Books Solange has launched a digital library archive of Black and brown authors where readers can borrow books at no cost.

Solange Knowles’ Saint Heron has launched a free digital archival library of literature by Black and brown authors, poets, and artists. Readers can borrow rare and out-of-print books for up to 45 days

Left: washing machine with the words “Critical Washing” on it. Right: Quote: “When we critique AI, we should do so with intellectual honesty and in a principled way. Utmost care is needed to avoid ethics washing, greenwashing, and generally — what we dub — critical washing. (…) Researching and reflecting on the harms of AI is not itself harm reduction. It may even contribute to rationalizing, normalizing, and enabling harm. Critical reflection without appropriate action is thus quintessentially critical washing.” —Suarez, Müller, Guest, & van Rooij (2025) https://zenodo.org/records/15677840

Students think most other students regularly use AI for classes, but that they do so far less frequently.

Students think most other students regularly violate AI policies, but that they almost always follow them.

Preliminary data from @umich.edu survey on student AI use for class.

Most rarely/sometimes use AI & always follow class policies, but think others frequently use AI & only sometimes follow policies.

Perceptions of misuse ≠ reality

Misperceptions may provide implicit permission for misuse.

These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI Rumman Chowdhury, Timnit Gebru, Safiya Noble, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Joy Buolamwini open up about their artificial intelligence fears

yup, even as their expertise is CRYSTAL clear

www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Mamdani: "New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant."

CAIL = prerequisite knowledge for a critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims. For example, the idea that human-like systems are a sensible or possible goal is the result of circular reasoning and anthropomorphism. olivia.science/ai

🧵

Ahead of the 1st shutdown of US food aid to hungry Americans in 60 years, some of the 200,000 Little Free Library locations are converting into food pantries. Thanks @littlefreelibrary.bsky.social