@mwyarbrough
JD/PhD. Interdisciplinary sociologist, law & society, transnational gender & sexuality. I research marriage, esp in S Africa. And I organize with colleagues to defend higher ed. Opinions mine not employer's. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2802-3365
The first draft of my book manuscript is completed and proofread. I’m now making the necessary edits. Keep your eyes out on @BloomsburyBooks for “Smalltown Urban: Performing the City in Rural America”. #intensemoments #smalltownfun
“A DOJ source told the Miami Herald that agents found her to be credible—and that they would not have interviewed her four times if they thought she was lying.”
@jkbjournalist.bsky.social bringing it home
www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...
Stop literally everything.
Steve Albini's Fugazi sessions, widely bootlegged and full of lore, now available officially for the first time.
fugazi.bandcamp.com/album/albini...
I share this frustration. So, if I suspect AI usage, I simply assign a minimum score and leave a comment that the student needs to come and talk to me. If they don't, the grade stands. If they do, then I investigate. This (more) aligns effort between the parties.
The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America by Michelle S. Phelps
Michelle S. Phelps
Congrats to @michellesphelps.bsky.social, whose book The Minneapolis Reckoning won the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Outstanding Book Award. This urgent work describes how Minneapolis arrived at the brink of police abolition and why reform is so difficult.
Get your copy: hubs.ly/Q0453BKz0
HUGE payrolls miss, wow
Feb Payrolls -92k vs +55k est/+130k prev
2m net revision -69k
Unemplomyent 4.4% vs 4.3% est/4.3% prev
Avg hourly earn YoY +3.8% vs +3.7% est+/3.7% prev
Jan Retail sales MoM -0.2% vs -0.3% est/0.0% prev
Control group est MoM +0.3% vs+0.3% est/-0.1% prev
Find one near you >>>>>>>
-92K jobs lost last month (mid-Jan to mid-Feb).
-69K jobs in revisions of prior 2 months.
The big picture
How does recent growth compare to recent years?
Economy added just 0.16 million jobs over 12 months to Feb 2026.
Job growth stopped.
And the Iranian ship was unarmed, which the US knew - and they made no attempt to rescue survivors. Mass murder.
The world health organization has found that the US and Israel have bombed several health facilities in Iran.
We have also bombed two ADDITIONAL schools this week, not counting the girls schools earlier. Making that 4 in total.
We are the bad guys in this illegal war.
#SheShed
New article in Global Studies Quarterly - the first academic piece developing my “materialized science fiction” framework. Thiel, Musk, and Andreessen don’t just love SF; they’re turning it into a blueprint for sovereignty. Fully open access: academic.oup.com/isagsq/artic...
Short thread ↓
My university received a few years ago the promise of the largest single gift to a public university in U.S. history. It was equivalent to 12 hours of bombing Iran.
With just 1 day to go, let's CHECK IN!
* What rally are you attending?
* What's your sign going to say? What t-shirt will you wear?
* What is YOUR biggest issue? #Research, #healthcare, #education, #climatechange, all of the above...
▶️ We want to hear from you: Smash that "reply" button! ◀️
Every single person in the entire chain of command that massacred the schoolgirls in Minab, and that is currently carpet bombing Iranian civilians, needs to be tried and jailed in The Hague. Sick, depraved monsters drunk on imperial hubris.
What I might hate most about AI is that it's turning back the clock decsdes on all the progress we've made in making education accessible for disabled folks.
"No stupid rules of engagement." — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, March 2, 2026
"The strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the Middle East." — Reuters, March 5, 2026
The last photo of third-grader Mikaeil Mirdoraghi, waving to his mom before he left for school. He was killed shortly after in the U.S./Israeli strike on a primary school in Minab.
A New York Times investigation indicates that it was a US strike on an Iranian school that killed 175 people, mostly children.
lol!
I have various approaches depending on the class, but I always say that any student can talk to me if they think I'm mistaken in my judgment that work was AI-produced, though I'll be asking them very specific questions about it. But yeah I detest the "cop" dynamic--it's the opposite of how I teach.
I keep saying that genAI isn't actually a timesaver. It may make you more productive so that you are doing more work with the same amount of time and pay but that work is less good. The time you saved usually gets kicked down the road, sometimes to you but often to someone else who didn't use genAI.
This is one of the worst parts! The other, related issue, is that it makes me feel like a distrustful cop instead of an educator. I don’t want to not trust my students! It feels awful!
it's just so disheartening, and I teach middle school!
I know what my job is, and if the only way to get it done is to eliminate technology altogether, then that's what I'll do. I went back to doing everything on paper this year, and it's been better for me and them.
I retired from classroom teaching before this garbage but I'm having the same experience as a preprint moderator. The real research from real people can be checked for basic format & policy compliance in under a minute. The garbage takes time to investigate and review for boundary cases.
This is my actual objection. Our entire jobs have been transformed overnight into entirely different jobs, of far less social worth, and with zero relationship to the reason most of us got into them in the first place. All we want to do is contribute and AI billionaires are like HAHA NOPE.
It creates more work for mentoring in CS/bioinformatics as well because I don't know what they don't know. For student-written code, a short conversation lets me pinpoint where their misunderstanding is. For AI code, I can debug it, but I can't teach in the process because there's nowhere to start.
even worse, it philosophically and materially changes my relationship to my students. now i am a cop rather than a teacher. I have no interest in that role. i have no interest in policing children.
Oh yes, that's my actual objection. Our entire jobs have been transformed overnight into entirely different jobs, of far less social worth, and with zero relationship to the reason most of us got into them in the first place. All we want to do is contribute and AI billionaires are like NOPE.
This post is not an invitation for people who've never taught a day in their lives to tell teachers how to teach. Ahem.