I attended Michigan during the decade of DEI and it’s hard to overstate how lost the university became in racial grievance rather than what universities should aim for: enlightenment and education.
To me, the DEI system seemed to be a patronage mechanism for certain preferred minority groups and a tool of ideological conformity. It was an inappropriate position of administrators when the real engines of the university should just be students and professors.
DEI at Michigan was, primarily, a de facto ban on hiring moderate Democrats, administered largely by people who "feel unsafe" in the presence of moderate Democrats.
Moderate liberals are the natural enemies of leftist radicals (old term, I know) because they fear slow progress will satisfy the people’s needs and dissuade them from revolution.
I think it's true, but it's also a little deeper. There are a lot of leftist radicals who simply agree more with the far right than they do with the center left. Leftist radicals' substantive policy preferences might be more distant from the far right, but not everything in life is about policy preferences. The far left and the far right share similar views on the need to burn down the system, the contemptible nature of electoralism and civility, the purifying effect of street violence, etc. Both think dictatorships are basically fine in principle.
I think a bit of it is also that moderate democrats are more perusable by the left wing than conservatives/republicans, therefore left wing people spend more time trying to persuade them (and sometimes that “persuasion” takes the form of cultural opprobrium).
I think we might be defining moderate differently. I mean moderate Democrat voter, not moderate Democrat staffer or elected official. Like none of the faculty hired in my department since '15 are moderate Dems by the broader US standard. (I might count, but I was hired before DEI and I am eg way more trans inclusive than a typical blue leaning swing voter.)
I'm talking about any position that required a pre evaluated statement before the file goes to the department, so all of the collegiate fellow positions that were the primary avenue into tenure track jobs.
Useful feedback! I glanced at the list and I might have been misremembering the years that some individuals were hired. And there’s a couple assistant professors whose views I don’t know!
Yeah, I don't think any of the assistant or associate profs would vote for Buttigieg over Warren. We have had postdocs and non TT people with more eclectic views during the period in question, those positions didn't require statements.
Yeah, the article makes it sound like Ono was pressured to shut down the DEI program because of politics. But the NYT link sure doesn't describe that program very favorably, so maybe shutting it down was a good thing.
I graduated in the pandemic years and my experience wasn’t this bad. I got the impression Central Campus was much more gung ho about this than the engineering school, though.
I think what this only glances at is that the DEI initiatives were largely started by other presidents, since Ono was relatively new. There was some really unethical personal behavior under Schlissel that makes the DEI look like window dressing in hindsight.
Segregated ethnic lounges, segregated events, speech codes, tens of millions in funding to 100+ DEI positions, “bias” speech reporting, fake hate crimes, vigils for the fake hate crimes, central student government’s annual Israel hate-a-thon, the DEI director sending sneering anti-Jew texts. All rotten.
Unsurprised to hear the engineers weren’t as captured
Yeah those aren’t segregated in the sense of actually forbidding people from going. I’m not sure what is supposed to be problematic about smaller groups having designated events where it’s easy to meet other group members.
Having been in college when those groups were around, I can confirm that whatever rules are written down, you are not welcome if you do not fit the description.
And now Berkeley are getting themselves sued because a faculty member put into writing in FREAKIN WHATSAPP that a job offer had been withheld to protect the fee-fees of grad-students in a way that Berkeley themselves found violated civil rights. Son of a bitch, I want science and higher ed protected from Trump's wrecking ball as much as anyone, but which absolute moron suckered all the university administrators into believing the federal judiciary would go by the progressive stack instead of Titles IV and XI?
“Harvard has to understand, the last thing I want to do is hurt them,” [Trump] added. “They’re hurting themselves. They’re fighting.”
Christ onna gluten-free cracker, talk about victim-blaming abuser talk! "I never wanted to hit you! You forced me to, by making me so angry. If you stop making me angry, I won't have to hit you anymore!"
Student government at Michigan (and at many places) distributes funds to lots of student organizations, and the goal was to shut that down as a protest.
"In protest of the Omnicause, we have cancelled frat parties and chess club for the year. We promise those people far away are the ones truly to blame, not us who cancelled your stuff."
Honestly I feel like this is a great thing. No encampants, violence or vandalism, just students voting democratically, if they want to shut down a bunch of non-essential services and perks to make a political statement, let them, much healthier. All the students who don't like it can make sure to vote next year for a different party for student government.
DEI was revolutionary in 2016. Unfortunately, by 2019 it became clear that it offered no real improvements on the Obama-MLK formula, besides providing so much fuel for grift and leftist infighting.
The shortest version is that they spent a shit ton of money and didn't change either the enrollment numbers or the lived experience of minority students on campus.
In what respect was it revolutionary? (Serious question). Inter alia affirmative action, student affinity groups, and ethnic studies all seem like evolutionary precursors.
It has an intellectual heritage, but IMO what was revolutionary was the way that it turned critical theory into a mass movement and infiltrated cultural power centers. It discredited the previous paradigm, perhaps unrecoverably, (even though most people seem to prefer the old synthesis).
I think this is a fair description of what it did, part of this is just a sense that this was in full swing by 2013-2014 as social justice stuff increasingly escaped containment from Tumblr and certain other parts of the progressive blogosphere. I guess the 2016 initiative might be more of a concrete reification in some ways, but Justine Sacco lost her job in 2013 over a combination of a Twitter mob and Poe’s Law…
I have no idea and I find it impossible to give a shit one way or the other. I always got the distinct impression it was just another dialect of office politics.
But what do you mean by that? HBCUs? Black/gay/Jewish/Christian student clubs? Churches and mosques? Institutionalized, mandatory participation affinity groups in workplaces and educational programs? See, I’ve seen affinity groups that run from healthy to innocuous to downright toxic. The whole spectrum from motte down to bailey. That’s why I ask what was meant.
These, predominantly. I’m not making a value judgment about toxicity or innocuosness of any given group, just that “institutional support for minority identitarian communities” isn’t something without precedent (nor is sensitivity training and the like.) even if in practice most of what many such groups do is co-sponsor speakers with five other student affinity groups and sponsor a cookout once a semester. Again, my quibble is with the specific claim “revolutionary.”
I'm not sure I agree with your premise. A radical project was trying to smuggle a revolution in under an innocuous slogan. The word "equity" was explicitly redefined from "impartiality" to something more like "equality of outcomes". Also, depending on how you ask the question, somewhere around 25% of the country holds explicitly racist beliefs, which unfortunately isn't almost nobody.
I don't understand this comment. If somebody holds beliefs like "<X racial group> is less honest than others", "<Y ethnicity> have a lot of irritating faults", why is it the word "racism" not "useful" to describe those beliefs?
Even talking seriously about "equality of outcomes" presumes, without evidence at this point, that it means something other than "write the check to the nice nonprofit if you know what's good for you."
Maybe a more fruitful way to phrase this is “what should be done when some people are given special privileges based only on their skin color?” Answer A is “yell at the people doing this to make them stop” and Answer B is “give everyone else special privileges to try to make it equal out”.
I’ve framed Answer A too provocatively for sure. But the original question is one that people on diametrically opposed sides would answer verbally the same way, because they disagree about when it’s happening and what constitutes an advantage.
As in, we never got back to full employment after 2008 until 2021, or even after 2001 until 2021, and that quite reasonably generated political discontent... for which various governments like Bush and Obama tried to make up by pretending that if you "did the right thing" in various symbolic ways, you'd be ok, and everyone else deserved it anyway for their bad choices.
The high unemployment 2003-2008 is not easily explained by too restrictive monetary policy (assuming 2% PCE IS the growth maximining average inflation rate) The rest of the period PCE was mainly below target, especially 2009-2020.
I am. I consider that the slow growth late 2008-2020 was caused by monetary policy that mainly failed to keep inflation at (and probably for a time in 2009-10 above) target. But I wanted to recognize that is not the only reason.
I think that Matt’s recent twitter activity around the whole Gaza issue has been kind of embarrassing? His thinking about the issue recently shifted significantly, but even when he talks about the shift, he seems to feel a need to aggressively dunk on the people who got there before he did.
On the whole, I think the gestalt mostly just makes him look petty and immature— you can agree that somebody was right about an object-level issue that you were wrong about without having to agree that they’re right about everything you disagree on, and you can acknowledge that and wait to dunk until you’re talking about some other issue.
I have some empathy insofar as some of the people who Matt is dealing with are very annoying and some of them use bad arguments or engage in bad faith or are wrong about other important things. I know that I’ve sometimes indulged a desire to lash out rather than engaging constructively. But if, like Matt, you want to be a factional thought leader rather than just a guy who has takes, you need to be more patient and diplomatic— especially because the drift of thermostatic polarization has recently sharply reversed and he’s now swimming against the current in the sort of intra-Dem factional arguments that he wants to intervene in; when conditions are tough like this you gotta work extra hard on the slow boring of hard boards rather than just behaving expressively.
I have seen many people lose out on the value of Matt's long form writing because they are pissed off about something he said on twitter, when what he said was just tongue in cheek to begin with.
It's a shame -- he preaches message discipline to parties and politicians, but cannot exercise it himself.
The problem is, Matt cannot resist a good snarky comeback or an ironic troll.
Here's Dr. Johnson on Shakespeare's inability to resist a cheap pun or play on words (a.k.a. a "quibble"):
A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.
And who is the competitor throwing down the three golden apples, tempting the detour? The algorithms of social media?
And in that same preface to his edition of Shakespeare's plays, Dr. Johnson reflects on the role of criticism, quoting Pliny "When in doubt, don't". Perhaps an admonition to us all. To not stoop for quibbles.
Somebody should put this in next week's mailbag thread: "why are you such a jackass on Twitter, and doesn't it run counter to what you preach?" Or something like that
And perhaps the ones that Polytropos had in mind are among the bad ones -- I have not looked them up.
But I have definitely encountered people on the web saying, "fuck Yglesias, he said the most awful thing on twitter today, I'm never going to read his stuff," when in fact it was just Matt doing a bit, once again. Just Matt trolling and having fun, and if you know his schtick then it's obvious. But alas, there are lots of folks to whom it's not obvious.
What does it mean to be “just doing a bit” here? Does it mean that he’s in character for one tweet, but it’s a one-off? Or does it mean that there are recurring characters that he does continually? Because the latter starts to look less like a bit.
I don't think repetition is incompatible with artifice. There are writers and comedians who do the same character repeatedly, even when that character is at some distance from their IRL self. Think SNL actors and some of their repeated characters. One might even complain about repetition-- he's doing the same bit that he always does! Or consider on-line trolls such as dril/wint -- I doubt that the author behind that is much like the persona of dril/wint.
Now, it may also be true that one's sense of humor reflects one's other beliefs. Misogynistic jokes are seldom told by non-misogynists, e.g., and the same for racism. But the connections are going to be indirect, and the inferences fallible. Sometimes jokes invert one's beliefs!
I dunno -- suppose that MY's behavior no longer falls into the category of "doing a bit" -- what follows from that?
While his accountant maybe be upset that those people are turned off, don't you think Matt wants to repel the kind of person upset by an obviously sarcastic tweet?
A lot of the problem is that sometimes it’s the “bits” are just positions which he’s expressed something adjacent to in the long-form writing, but framed in a much more glib and hostile way, and often in an emotional register that internet veterans will recognize as “pretending not to be mad, but obviously actually seething.”
I think when he writes articles he has time to think and follow his own advice, but when he tweets he.... does not. Or not always.
On the other hand, I do sometimes think he deliberately sparks fights with online leftists to show democratic politicians it's not that scary, but I'm worried that line of thinking makes me sound like a MAGA believing Trump is playing 4D chess.
I don't Twitter / X either, but I sometimes get the same idea from his mailbag responses. He seems to get angered by, and sometimes read bad intentions into, questions that I find fairly innocuous or at worst just ignorant.
I think he's mostly good tonally on mailbag Qs with a few notable exceptions that he generally gets excoriated for in the comments. The aggravating ones are often where he gets a thoughtful question and then either goes on an unrelated tangent or just gives a glib one-liner response (where it isn't called for.)
The weirdest part for me was when Matt got upset at the commenters a few time for not submitting "enough" high quality questions, as though he has some obligation to answer a minimum number of questions each week regardless of their quality or whether they would make an interesting subject to write about.
What it's really undercut is his old short blog posts that would be about the length of about 3-4 tweets. Which of course is what Twitter took over from much blogging in general.
A lot of the problem is that sometimes it’s the “bits” are just positions which he’s expressed something adjacent to in the long-form writing, but framed in a much more glib and hostile way, and often in an emotional register that internet veterans will recognize as “pretending not to be mad, but obviously actually seething.”
I think two things are true: 1) the left sandbagging the left-of-center presidential candidate(s) in a two person race was a world-historical own goal that had the opposite effect they sought, and 2) the fine line between total war and genocide may have *recently* been crossed. The truth of 2) doesn't negate the truth of 1), and the truth of 1) doesn't mean we can ignore the truth of 2). Policing the bad behavior of factional competitors--saying don't campaign against the candidate most likely to do what you want and least likely to do what you hate--is worthwhile, even if its awkward. Now, if he's doing this in September 2026 then he's committing the same sins as the left during the 2024 cycle, but we're still in 2025, so its fair game.
I experienced my first "we must destroy the woke mind virus" moment ever.
I watched Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest yesterday. I was baffled at how bad it was. Like genuinely, I'm still shook. It's one of those movies that is so bad you immediately try to read every review and piece of commentary on it.
The reviews are excellent? It has a 91% on RT? The film is a true piece of shit? For reference, 25th Hour has an 80%! Malcom X has an 89%! Fucking 91% is one point less than Do the Right Thing! Black Kurosawa by Spike Lee should have been one of the best film moments of 2026 but this thing is brutal.
The film criticism around this movie is an abomination. I truly feel like one of those conservatives watching mainstream media or at a Pride parade or something. I don't know what I'm looking at and I'm angry and confused.
I legit can't help but think tons of critics are deeply biased.
As someone who saw Weapons in theaters based on superlative reviews, I don’t think the breathless praise for bad films is DEI-specific, but it doesn’t help.
I liked Weapons! I thought if most people thought it was "good" or "above average," I wouldn't mind. It's got some stuff going for it, it's take a shot at something interesting. It's a film.
I dunno, it's this specific movie and its reviews that's making me insane lol.
I thought it was...fine. Had some good scares and a fun final act, but it involved a lot of straining credulity that the villain could be as conspicuous as they were for as long as they were without anyone investigating. But the reviews are absolutely wild - so much hyperventilating praise for how it's actually really about school vouchers, trans kids, mass shootings, religion and/or defunding public education? My friends who saw it with me and I are playing a game where we text each other the most insane, over-intellectualized reviews we can find.
Spike Lee's movies are always like that Da 5 Bloods got 92% on Rotten Tomatoes despite it being racist and just plain bad about nearly aspect of Vietnam it tried to depict. It really hammered home that Lee is unable to empathize with any minority group that he isn't a part of.
From a local reviewer here in Vietnam when the movie came out,
"The first few minutes, sadly, ruin any potential depiction of racial equality or nuanced character portrayal.
An early scene set inside Apocalypse Now features a young beggar with one leg calling the lead characters "G.I.," while the group eyes two elderly Vietnamese men referred to as "VC." When they exit the nightclub, the same beggar throws firecrackers on the ground at them and again taunts them with shouts of "G.I!" "G.I.!"
This would simply never happen; besides the fact that fireworks are illegal here (pedantic, I know), I can't envision a Vietnamese person of any age calling older Americans "G.I.""
That seems like an unnecessary inference. I disagree with critics all the time, and I think widely-praised movies are crap all the time, without jumping to, "so the critics must be unfairly praising it because it was made by black people."
That's largely because 90% of the time when the work was unjustly praised, it was not made by black people -- it was just made by non-black people who were doing a lousy job and getting praised for it.
Disagreement about the worth of art is universal. It requires no explanation in general. And disagreement about the worth of Spike Lee's new film is no different -- people like different stuff.
I love Spike Lee. I literally made an effort to compare the reviews to some of his classics. This movie is awful in the extreme. Its badness is reaching the state of "objective opinion," like "Hitler was evil" or "Jordan was the GOAT" - it can be argued but only in a very tight band.
This is something that can't really be discussed until you watch it.
The net effect is it makes people LESS likely to see films made by directors and writers of color, because audiences know in those cases you can't trust the advice of critics on whether or not to see them.
The Woke Mind Virus brings to mind white people to me. I don't think saying a movie/art is explicitly Woke implies black. It makes me think of Hannah Einbinder in 'Hacks'.
"...The Woke Mind Virus brings to mind white people to me. ..."
Agreed! I thought Alan's suggestion was that the (predominantly) white film critics were grading S.L.'s movie on a curve because they were infected by the WMV.
Forgive me if you addressed this - but what ties it to Woke or Progressive Politics or reverse racism or whatever it feels like? As opposed to just a bad film that either critics or audiences like for some other weird reason?
I can't really think of a legendary directory whose later works are anywhere close to their earlier works. Perhaps Spielberg? Then again I'm not much of a movie guy.
(His very last few movies, while good, are mostly forgotten today, but Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds were made in an incredible five year run near the end of his career).
If you expand to producer/mogul types, Walt Disney also.
I'm a big proponent of late Spielberg. I think West Side Story and Fabelmans are about as good as anything anyone makes these days. I can say a lot for Munich and Lincoln. But no, his 1970-2000 was far too great.
I think most directors lose it, probably. QT maybe? He's not that dynamic, but I think I probably like the latter stages of his career (Basterds on) than the earlier?
I think it's common for filmmakers seem to have multiple peaks in their careers.
Here are a few other examples of artists whose mid- or late-career movies were as good as or better than their career defining work (in addition to Hitchcock and Allen): Eastwood (Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby), Tarantino (everything), Scorsese (the Departed, Killers of the Flower Moon), George Miller (Fury Road), Almodovar (Talk to Her), Kurosawa (Ran, Kagemusha) Bigelow, (the Hurt Locker), Kubrick (2001, Full Metal Jacket) and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation).
Of course, YMMV! I don't like all of those equally, (and they aren't all legendary) but I think together they make a decent case that directors aren't just shooting stars.
I think part of it is that modern directors are so auteur that their filmographies are quite short. It's funny to see like Sofia Coppola on this list, Lost in Translation was her 2nd film, she probably still had the juice.
I haven't seen Highest 2 Lowest, but I recognize the feeling you're expressing because I experienced something similar when I started reading the reviews of True Detective: Night Country. It was hot flaming garbage but almost every critic felt they had to pretend it wasn't, and to me the simplest explanation was that the showrunner was a woman of color. I'm open to other theories (as long as you, unlike the critics, admit it was bad).
I guess I didn't finish it, so I didn't have as visceral a reaction, but I thought after the first 2 episodes, Night Country was really pretty bad.
I listen to "The Watch," a podcast from The Ringer, and they liked it. And I don't need critics to agree with me, but I'm pretty vanilla, my tastes sorta line up with the general consensus, I think. So, yeah that was surprising.
I also had the same experience with Night Country. Reviewers who I generally respect, like Alan Sepinwall, all seemed to love it. In fact Sepinwall said it was the best season of TD. And for me it was utter dross with almost no redeeming qualities. I managed to finish it but only because the preposterous plot and acting choices became so bad that they were funny. It was really the first time that I felt like there might be truth to the "mind virus" concept.
To The Watch's credit, they soured on it by the end and the Ringer's Exit Survey was predominantly negative takes as well.
I'll be curious to check out Highest 2 Lowest now....
It's more that I can't accept people making the bad thing good. I enjoy all sorts of unpopular and bad things. I also dislike a lot of popular things, but I can accept it's not to my taste, or I'm the weird one.
I thought the acting was very very weak. I'm not an acting snob, and I find that Spike's movies sometimes have these funny actor choices, but this was not really that. The wife and son were both quite bad. Dean Winters (Dennis from 30 Rock) was really rough as a police detective. I have my own issues with ASAP Rocky's performance, but it isn't even in the top 20 of problems.
The score, especially in the first half, is bizarre to the extreme. It's literally soaring.
It follows Kurosawa's three acts but the first act is so sloppy when compared to High and Low, which is this taut one-act play. Of course, this is its own thing, but when put in contrast, it falls so flat.
The third act is transformed into this cat and mouse...thing...but it's terrible. Just awful. 70 year old Denzel, with a piece, is chasing Rocky through the streets. Up through the Bronx, into the subway, and they duke it out. It's jaw dropping. This after they already find out with the kidnapper lives! They meet his (also poorly acted) babymama!
And the ransom scene, which comprises most of Act 2, I'm not a Spike hater, I like his weird proclivities and interposition of random New York culture into scenes, but the Puerto Rican festival background was sooooo long. And that's probably the heart of it, the movie feels sooooo long and has almost no visual propulsion.
Also typing this out, the kidnapper has this elaborate escape plan with all these dudes on mopeds, but like in act three none of your crew is hanging out with you? Some old fucker just sneaks up on you to jack your shit? Cmon wtf.
Got it. I haven't been much of a Spike Lee fan over the years. I thought he was a pretty electrifying filmmaker back in the, uh, 80s or so. I'm not a hater, either, just indifferent.
I could handle the First Act (until the Kamala poster) better than Act 2 and 3. The Dean Winters stuff, the shoddy ass chase? It was awful. I'm not gonna act like High and Low's ransom scene was some Michael Bay chase but I dunno what Spike was doing.
The ASAP Rocky and the rap battles and stuff was corny as shit, B. And this is from a guy who regularly watches Moesha reruns. I've got no beef with Black media or any other Spike Lee joint - this thing was unwatchable,
No one was even acting except for Jeffery Wright and Wendall Pierce in a 30 second scene!!
I truly wonder whether movie reviews even matter much anymore, given how diffuse entertainment is these days. We're all going to find that we like some things and don't like other things that will differ from other people, and concur in part and dissent in part from the consensus as a whole.
Rotten Tomatoes as whether a movie is great is a bad factor, because a 2 1/2 star out of 4 star review is the same as a 4 star.
It's Metacritic average is a 73, which you can still disagree with, but it's closer to the reality of the views.
Also, Spike Lee is an established, well-known filmmaker. Those people get a pass. Even Megalopolis that was basically totally panned was only a 55 on Metacritic.
Letterboxd, a viewer review site for film snobs, has it at 3.2. This gave me a little relief, as Do the Right Thing has a 4.4 (correct), Malcom X has a 4.3 (correct), and 25th Hour has a 3.9 (too low). I guess I'm lead to believe this is a 1.5 movie that every bumped up 1.5 points cause a legend directed it.
The withdrawal of the offer for the Florida job is the most brutal real-life example of why an academic should never submit written notice of resignation til you have the final offer in writing from the next institution.
That said, Ono dodged a bullet here. Being president of an American university in 2025 is already kind of a thankless job, you have to be truly crazy to want to do it (sort of like being mayor of NYC). And being president of the University of Florida with De Santis and the rest of the wingnut Board of Governors dictating your every decision sounds the most thankless of all.
EDIT: haha fair yes the compensation package would make me put up with a lot of bullshit. But he’s probably making close to that working for Ellison, right? You have to compare it to other work someone with that level of management experience could be doing instead.
But without being thanked? He said it was "thankless." And if they don't say, "thanks!", then all of that money is just worthless, not even worth having.
Me, I'd do it for minimum wage -- provided that they thank me. After all, what greater reward could I desire than sincere gratitude?
Yes, Ono resigning from the Michigan job after being unanimously approved by the University of Florida Board of Trustees and then just waiting for the rubber stamp by the DeSantis appointed Board of Governors reminds me . . . of something . . .
I thought that BZC's initial post was rude ("...you come across as a very credulous..."), but maybe you think my reply is rude, too? I don't mean it to be, and will happily edit out any rudeness.
I read the edited post and was confused about how it possibly could have been perceived as rude, but maybe the edit fixed it. Anything that talks about best practices or "translat[ing] cutting-edge research into real-world impact" always makes me gag too.
"Ms. Bennett is quoting it, or paraphrasing it, from press-releases. No human with a functioning brain would write such blather voluntarily -- certainly not a human whom Matt Y thought was worthy of employment."
That's not the impression I'm getting at all. She had a post the other day and it was clear that she'd seen a press release that she was inclined to believe so she just accepted it unquestioningly.
What we need is someone who gets a press releases from the National Vegetable Council saying vegetables are good for you and thinks long and hard - Maybe they are full of shit. They could be just taking up their book.
This is a weird, arrogant angle of attack. Either agree or disagree with the take, the ad hominem inflection of your commentary is unnecessary and strange.
I too am kinda hypersensitive to this sort of thing. Mostly from reading too many articles of the "local crime beat reporter launders police press release as reporting" variety.
Does anyone have any tips for remembering the difference between credulous and incredulous? I think "this journalist should be asking harder questions and thinking more deeply about this situation" pretty much every day but in the moment I can never remember if they need to be more or less credulous.
I don't understand this at all. Can't his "championing ambitious climate and diversity programs" just be, like, an objective fact? I don't read it as a value judgment at all, as to whether the programs were good or bad, just that a lot was invested in them and he supported it.
I agree that there is such a thing as slanted language, but I don't consider the phrase "championed an ambitious program" to be very slanted at all! I didn't take it as an expression of support. If anything I feel the word "ambitious" is often used to suggest that someone set themselves to a task that turned out to be a little more than they could handle. And "championing" something reads to me like a neutral term for publicly advocating that thing. Difference in our regional vernaculars, I suppose.
Are they? They might "support" those things, but to my mind to properly "champion" something you have to be a person of some current authority who is lending the weight of their prominence to a cause. I think it's an act that can't really be performed by an anonymous soup-thrower.
I think you're reading too much into a somewhat anodyne statement about what he did. I mean, clearly, he *did* champion those things. And maybe they were good!
Scientific academic here (postdoc). I'm currently in the running for positions in the UK, Austria, Finland, and one other country. I turned down an offer in a fifth country since it was, ultimately, waaaaaay too far away and would have me completely alone. Then there's industry. I might make it in time to apply to the job at Michigan my supervisor recommended to me, but I'm wary of it.
What I'm saying is, all of us who need a new job are attempting to bail the heck out of the USA. The writing is on the wall, especially when a bunch of the people we'd prefer to collaborate now have their funding frozen by the federal government for being at certain institutions (you know, the ones everyone used to want to work at).
Ok but this is sort of like “to decimate” means “to kill 1 in 10,” not “to kill everyone,” and it’s understood to imply “to hurt or damage really badly!”
If 20% of the cohort you know is contemplating getting the hell outta the country that has hitherto been known as the undisputed champion of biomedical research in the entire world, that is really, really doubleplusungood!
None of them are US citizens- so? America owes much of its success in science and technology to immigrants, plus who knows how many of them would go on to become naturalized citizens if they stayed. That’s what I did - came to the US for grad school, met my future husband, he sponsored me for a Green Card, and eventually I became a citizen.
At the level of statistical significance we're talking about, 20% is not measurably different from the year 2015. It certainly is not "all of us", the latter is not a colorable exaggeration.
I guess we are all still grappling with the "it's worthy and good for the Elite to tell noble lies to the masses" thing.
For crying out loud, it’s not a lie, noble or otherwise, to point out that a lot of scientists are considering getting out of the US or not coming in the first place. Not so much established investigators, but trainees/early career scientists.
Not "a lot" (whether or not this is true, which is as-far-as-I-know anecdotal). "All". People know what that word means, even knuckle-dragger MAGAists.
My cards on the table, I think the collapse in trust in elite institutions and subject matter experts is _the_ challenge of our time. We did our fair job to earn it. People just very casually say things that are obviously bullshit to anyone who's paying an inkling of attention. They think nothing of it! There's a grain of truth, and it's *directionally* appropriate, so if it steers the conversation or the Overton Window or whatever, then all's fair in love and war.
I don't know how we're going to recover the sort of trust we've so casually lit on fire, or if we even deserve to.
The current predicament is entirely deserved. It’s time to stop blaming “misinformation”. I know many institutions are more concerned with my moral edification than with providing sound answers that stand up to scrutiny in the real world. I know the accumulation of third rails is bound to handicap honest interrogation of pretty much anything.
Every academic I know is an ideologue who no longer has a functional bullshit detector when it comes to info that flatters their priors. I know it’s not all academics, but not enough were intellectually honest enough, and vocal about it, to stop the overall slide into unreality. And it’s not just academics.
I specified "who need a new job", and by the way, I was born a US citizen. Technically I'm still a US citizen, though of course I understand that the New York City metro area, where I'm from, is not in Real America and thus I am not a Real American. And certainly I'm not a Heritage American. Ellis Islander, baby.
Maybe we're in different fields entirely, but I'd love to know where you're finding all these securely-funded open postdoc or faculty jobs in the United States :-(.
Really? That’s surprising. Everyone I know who is looking for academic jobs is looking much more actively at non-US jobs than they would have a few years ago. And I know a few people who are looking who wouldn’t have been a few years ago.
Looking is one thing, actually going is another. I only know one postdoc who is taking a faculty position in France, but that's because after a couple years of trying, she never even got an interview in the US. But the teaching load is rough (sounds to be ~3x what we do where she is going) for a lot less money. I'll be curious to see if anyone would actually prefer a job abroad vs. one on offer here.
Yes - I know a couple people who have moved to Toronto or UBC. I don’t know if positions in continental Europe are actually looking attractive enough for people to take yet.
I’m really sorry to hear that. This a-hole is doing long-term damage to America’s leadership in science. It’s painful to witness. Best wishes for your postdoctoral search!
As long as I'm kvetching, I've also lost one job opportunity in the USA to Trump's funding freezes on established investigators, had my current department thrown into turmoil by the NIH's 15%-overhead thing (though I think that's more of a policy issue than a "fuck you scientists" thing), and lost several more job opportunities in the United States to everyone understanding that you can't afford to shell out liquid funding to hire someone and just write a grant to get more money later.
I'm actually plenty critical of the status-quo system pre-Trump, but "everyone has to batten down and try to retain the staff they have, even if that means dropping cohorts on the floor when they finish a career stage" has been a bad experience so far.
The 15% overhead was always DOA. I agree that this year is proving to be rough as everyone is being very conservative, and I'm sorry you're getting caught in the middle of it (we aren't hiring, for example). My expectation is that things will stabilize though and then places will be relatively flush next year with their saved cash.
Note, I have been too optimistic before. But despite some turmoil in the spring, the system seems to be running according to schedule now (I just agreed to serve on a study section, for example). My next NIH increment also came right on time without difficulty. And so on.
No one is denying that; it's why everyone is being conservative right now. If things blow up, universities will have resources to prop things up for a few more years. I'm saying that there are signs right now pointing to stabilization. If that doesn't bear out in the next year, we'll continue to conserve and adapt. I'm not sure how any of what I said is "dangerous"?
As it stands, it looks like Senate Republicans don't actually want to defund the NSF or NIH, so the question is at what point Trump can be compelled by the courts and Congress to follow the instructions of Congressional appropriations bills: staff the agencies and let them disburse allotted funds by some fixed procedure.
In addition to yanking away federal funding for University research, which is a very inexpensive way to develop products and patents that the private sector can monatize, Trump is strangling all mRNA funding, which is probably the greatest scientific discovery of the 21st century. And we all know how that was discovered.
Funny thing: through a complicated story, I almost wound up working in an industry-funded double-posting, just narrowly didn't, and then that company basically went into some kind of stealth lockdown type of thing. Now they opened up one (1) job again, so I applied and have an initial interview soon.
They're full of people I like and hung out with at the big conference last December, so hey, I'm happy to go work with them, especially for industry pay.
Where I'm against "there's always the private sector" is the idea of completely changing careers and totally refocusing to, for instance, become a quant or something.
Like I said, nothing's wrong with the private sector in principle. I just wanna do the kind of work I'm trained for in either an academic or an industry environment. My line of work isn't locked purely into one or the other, but it's easier to find work I'm trained for and will enjoy in academia vs industry without changing fields or retraining.
I was catching up with a friend who has been here for 11 years and is originally from France. His husband came here as a physics postdoc at Yale and eventually moved into a leadership role at a physics research center there. They are now leaning toward returning to France. I told him I don't blame them.
No kidding. And they're shuffling in Mekhi Becton at guard, hoping that he wasn't just a one hit wonder in Philly's outstanding system. Storm clouds already hovering over San Angeles.
Harbaugh got in trouble because he had someone shoot videos to "steal" opponents' signals? Anything that is visible to the public, to the fans, ought to be fair game.
> The stated reason for the rule is that not all programs can afford to do it.
It's that, but also that it meant that they could also not have everyone pay for radio helmets for QBs and LBs like the NFL has. In the wake of the Stallions things, D1 programs now have those, so plays can be radioed in.
It makes sense, but of course eventually someone was going to cheat the rule so egregiously that it would have to change.
He didn't have anybody do anything, that guy acted on his own. He probably should have reported it sooner when he discovered it, but I think the evidence Harbaugh directed it is very thin
More people targeted by Trump should go abroad, like the Hungarian universities did under Orban. China apparently just launched a new visa program for skilled workers that seems fairly easy. The most reasonable way for Trumpism to go away for good is for people to touch the stove and see Trumpist America fall behind other countries in science and technology.
I can live without the USA's technological edge if it means that Stephen Miller and his followers don't get to rule the world. Frankly, I'd prefer it that way.
That’s already baked in. Unless the Constitution is rewritten in a way that prevents any of this from happening ever again, over the next ten or twenty years universities in the United States just won’t have the same shine in the job market that they have for the past 80 years. The question is just whether there is further short term active destruction.
Make you flee from ideology and willing to accept a check from anyone? I was just trying to think of a hypothetical where a person makes the swing from Great Awokening Michigan to taking Ellison’s money. This person is probably through with caring about culture war altogether.
I would think someone with this history would have extremely strong feelings about the culture war and not want to be affiliated with anyone actively fighting it.
But obvious we need a take here so I'll step up to the plate [takes a deep breath]
One analogy for The Power Broker could be the classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which is a very well written narrative piece of history that pulls from a variety of sources, including a lot of great anecdotes from the author himself, but is based on a very questionable thesis. The TLDR version is most modern historians don't give much credence to Shirer's idea (which he stole from AJP Taylor's The Course of German History) that Hitler was the inevitable outgrowth of the nature of German people themselves.
Or as Matthew Zeitlin said: "Robert Caro’s fixed view of his subjects isn’t troubled by new evidence? I’m hearing this for the first time"
I'm shocked at this as well, gambling, in this establishment?!?!?!
Shirer's book is such a fantastic, readable, detailed history that who cares what his "idea" was. You learn so much about the course of the Third Reich from it.
I mean, I read the book and that thesis didn't even stick with me.
Sure it's a good place to start, but I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out it's major flaws. Likewise it's possible to write a very readable into book that doesn't make major category errors, see Battle Cry of Freedom
Even if he comes back with "ok here's your peace deal, Putin gets all of Ukraine," that's not our decision to make. The worst we can do is be useless and embarrass ourselves and we're already doing the second one.
He could put all the blame on Zelensky and cut off all aid we're still providing, including the sell arms to Europe deal and the intelligence sharing. That would be deeply unfortunate.
Yeah, it'd be bad, particularly the intelligence sharing, but US aid has been mostly replaced with Euro aid at this point both financially and in terms of equipment. I'll say that due to some new directives from State targeting American volunteers last week (which hit me directly for the second time in the last four months- looking for a new job now) a lot of relationships between the US IC and Ukraine are already breaking down and Euro intel agencies are starting to fill in the gaps. Losing US intel would suck, nobody does satellite intel better than the Americans, but we'd survive.
Also I had high hopes for Marco Rubio when he got nominated, but the dude's been a lackey 100% of the way. We might share a name but that guy can take a long walk off a short pier.
Except about that Marco Rubio thing. He's one of T.S. Elliot's "Hollow Men." Tap him with your finger and listen to the echoes coming from the empty interior.
I want to keep helping Ukraine. Sadly I'm mentally making peace with the fact that we may not. But the worst we can do is stop supporting them. We can't force them to take a deal they don't want, which Trump is acting like he can do.
My guess is: pull the plug on Ukraine. I'm not suggesting there's *zero* chance US pressure could be resisted by Ukraine and the Europeans. But I reckon it would be difficult.
I was thinking more a JD Vance-style event where everyone in the room gangs up on Zelenskyy and creates a pretext for Trump to flip-flop back toward Putin again.
I trust my mother, my father, my brother, my half-brother, and almost no one else. I see an ambush when it's coming. And a Ukraine-Russia "peace summit" in Viktor Orban's Hungary is an ambush.
I attended Michigan during the decade of DEI and it’s hard to overstate how lost the university became in racial grievance rather than what universities should aim for: enlightenment and education.
To me, the DEI system seemed to be a patronage mechanism for certain preferred minority groups and a tool of ideological conformity. It was an inappropriate position of administrators when the real engines of the university should just be students and professors.
DEI at Michigan was, primarily, a de facto ban on hiring moderate Democrats, administered largely by people who "feel unsafe" in the presence of moderate Democrats.
The “feel unsafe” discourse was pervasive. I remember thinking to myself “what the fuck are they even talking about”
Lefties always seem to hate moderate Democrats more than anyone else.
Moderate liberals are the natural enemies of leftist radicals (old term, I know) because they fear slow progress will satisfy the people’s needs and dissuade them from revolution.
I think it's true, but it's also a little deeper. There are a lot of leftist radicals who simply agree more with the far right than they do with the center left. Leftist radicals' substantive policy preferences might be more distant from the far right, but not everything in life is about policy preferences. The far left and the far right share similar views on the need to burn down the system, the contemptible nature of electoralism and civility, the purifying effect of street violence, etc. Both think dictatorships are basically fine in principle.
They were even less fond of conservatives, but even prior to DEI there was very little prospect of conservatives being hired
I think a bit of it is also that moderate democrats are more perusable by the left wing than conservatives/republicans, therefore left wing people spend more time trying to persuade them (and sometimes that “persuasion” takes the form of cultural opprobrium).
Anyone who doesn’t toe the line, exactly. Excommunication. Toxic, completely.
What sort of roles are you talking about? Because I know plenty of moderate democrats on the faculty there, some of them hired within the past decade.
I think we might be defining moderate differently. I mean moderate Democrat voter, not moderate Democrat staffer or elected official. Like none of the faculty hired in my department since '15 are moderate Dems by the broader US standard. (I might count, but I was hired before DEI and I am eg way more trans inclusive than a typical blue leaning swing voter.)
I'm talking about any position that required a pre evaluated statement before the file goes to the department, so all of the collegiate fellow positions that were the primary avenue into tenure track jobs.
Useful feedback! I glanced at the list and I might have been misremembering the years that some individuals were hired. And there’s a couple assistant professors whose views I don’t know!
Sorry for being incognito btw, I had a student discover my comments a while back and got spooked!
Yeah, I don't think any of the assistant or associate profs would vote for Buttigieg over Warren. We have had postdocs and non TT people with more eclectic views during the period in question, those positions didn't require statements.
What about hiring Republicans? Where’s my laughing uproariously emoji when I need it??
I read the NYT takedown of the UofMich insanity. It was a whole system of grift, explicitly illegal racial discrimination, and censorship.
I heard it was ambitious.
Yeah, the article makes it sound like Ono was pressured to shut down the DEI program because of politics. But the NYT link sure doesn't describe that program very favorably, so maybe shutting it down was a good thing.
Maybe? :)
I graduated in the pandemic years and my experience wasn’t this bad. I got the impression Central Campus was much more gung ho about this than the engineering school, though.
I think what this only glances at is that the DEI initiatives were largely started by other presidents, since Ono was relatively new. There was some really unethical personal behavior under Schlissel that makes the DEI look like window dressing in hindsight.
Segregated ethnic lounges, segregated events, speech codes, tens of millions in funding to 100+ DEI positions, “bias” speech reporting, fake hate crimes, vigils for the fake hate crimes, central student government’s annual Israel hate-a-thon, the DEI director sending sneering anti-Jew texts. All rotten.
Unsurprised to hear the engineers weren’t as captured
Were there really segregated events?
I think when they do it they call them "affinity" events.
Yeah those aren’t segregated in the sense of actually forbidding people from going. I’m not sure what is supposed to be problematic about smaller groups having designated events where it’s easy to meet other group members.
Having been in college when those groups were around, I can confirm that whatever rules are written down, you are not welcome if you do not fit the description.
Seems like a good way to put it!
And now Berkeley are getting themselves sued because a faculty member put into writing in FREAKIN WHATSAPP that a job offer had been withheld to protect the fee-fees of grad-students in a way that Berkeley themselves found violated civil rights. Son of a bitch, I want science and higher ed protected from Trump's wrecking ball as much as anyone, but which absolute moron suckered all the university administrators into believing the federal judiciary would go by the progressive stack instead of Titles IV and XI?
https://jweekly.com/2025/08/20/lawsuit-alleges-uc-berkeley-denied-dance-scholar-a-job-because-she-is-israeli/
From the latest NYT piece on Trump's attack on universities: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/us/politics/trump-universities-financial-penalties.html
“Harvard has to understand, the last thing I want to do is hurt them,” [Trump] added. “They’re hurting themselves. They’re fighting.”
Christ onna gluten-free cracker, talk about victim-blaming abuser talk! "I never wanted to hit you! You forced me to, by making me so angry. If you stop making me angry, I won't have to hit you anymore!"
😡🤮🤬
The depths of my contempt for him are only exceeded by his own depravity.
Shouldn't you hold him in contempt to the same degree as his depravity? If you ain't hating, you ain't trying.
It’s kind of a “different infinities” problem.
There's a video on infinities on the "History of the Universe" YouTube channel that is MIND-BLOWING.
"...contempt to the same degree as...."
Perhaps my ability to hold people in contempt is just limited in ways that his depravity is not.
Catholic guilt can get in the way of stuff like that.
I sometimes wonder if his addled mind hears himself talk, or if it all just spills out semi-reflexively like so much fetid wastewater.
The latter. I think he’s been “playing a character” for so long that it’s second nature.
I literally don't believe Trump has self-talk, the little self-conscious voice in his head. It's just not there.
I mean, Ukraine launched the war against Russia, didn't it?
Heard that from Trump too.
Was... was shutting down student government supposed to have sounded like some kind of threat?
These might be people who have watched too much anime.
Almighty Student Council President the LADY KIRYUUIN SATSUKI would never tolerate these blatant wreckers in her august institution.
(Search for that name on YouTube if you don't understand why the title is so elaborate and comes with CAPITAL LETTERS. I promise it's entertaining.)
"You promise?"
Student government at Michigan (and at many places) distributes funds to lots of student organizations, and the goal was to shut that down as a protest.
"In protest of the Omnicause, we have cancelled frat parties and chess club for the year. We promise those people far away are the ones truly to blame, not us who cancelled your stuff."
This may be relevant to your interests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh3TXsx8B40
Honestly I feel like this is a great thing. No encampants, violence or vandalism, just students voting democratically, if they want to shut down a bunch of non-essential services and perks to make a political statement, let them, much healthier. All the students who don't like it can make sure to vote next year for a different party for student government.
DEI was revolutionary in 2016. Unfortunately, by 2019 it became clear that it offered no real improvements on the Obama-MLK formula, besides providing so much fuel for grift and leftist infighting.
The shortest version is that they spent a shit ton of money and didn't change either the enrollment numbers or the lived experience of minority students on campus.
On the other hand it did seem to enflame racial tensions so their is that.
Disparate impact theory and ignoring the effects of your policies, NAMID
No Google search returns a definition of NAMID that enlightens me.
Name a more iconic duo
"these things are robustly correlated"
And, most tragically of all, their abuses provided an entry for the federal government to micromanage their affairs.
Unfortunately, it turns out "revolutionary" and "improvement" are not even close to synonymous.
In what respect was it revolutionary? (Serious question). Inter alia affirmative action, student affinity groups, and ethnic studies all seem like evolutionary precursors.
It has an intellectual heritage, but IMO what was revolutionary was the way that it turned critical theory into a mass movement and infiltrated cultural power centers. It discredited the previous paradigm, perhaps unrecoverably, (even though most people seem to prefer the old synthesis).
I think this is a fair description of what it did, part of this is just a sense that this was in full swing by 2013-2014 as social justice stuff increasingly escaped containment from Tumblr and certain other parts of the progressive blogosphere. I guess the 2016 initiative might be more of a concrete reification in some ways, but Justine Sacco lost her job in 2013 over a combination of a Twitter mob and Poe’s Law…
I have no idea and I find it impossible to give a shit one way or the other. I always got the distinct impression it was just another dialect of office politics.
What do you mean by affinity groups?
People who look like me and think like me.
But what do you mean by that? HBCUs? Black/gay/Jewish/Christian student clubs? Churches and mosques? Institutionalized, mandatory participation affinity groups in workplaces and educational programs? See, I’ve seen affinity groups that run from healthy to innocuous to downright toxic. The whole spectrum from motte down to bailey. That’s why I ask what was meant.
“Black/gay/Jewish/Christian student clubs”
These, predominantly. I’m not making a value judgment about toxicity or innocuosness of any given group, just that “institutional support for minority identitarian communities” isn’t something without precedent (nor is sensitivity training and the like.) even if in practice most of what many such groups do is co-sponsor speakers with five other student affinity groups and sponsor a cookout once a semester. Again, my quibble is with the specific claim “revolutionary.”
Gotcha!
Things like LGBT student clubs and Black Students Alliance and Hillel.
The left got really mean in 2016. Just very verbally abusive and scolding.
The problem was the words got capitalized. Nobody (almost) is against diversity, equity, and inclusion.
I'm not sure I agree with your premise. A radical project was trying to smuggle a revolution in under an innocuous slogan. The word "equity" was explicitly redefined from "impartiality" to something more like "equality of outcomes". Also, depending on how you ask the question, somewhere around 25% of the country holds explicitly racist beliefs, which unfortunately isn't almost nobody.
The redefinition is sort of what I meant by "capitalization."
Maybe the 25% problem is in the definition of "racist" (even accepting it to apply to ethnic, religious, national origin, sexual/gender orientation)
In practice DEI was simply updated branding for "affirmative action."
> depending on how you ask the question, somewhere around 25% of the country holds explicitly racist beliefs,
Seems like a less than useful definition if it still picks up 25% of people in the year 2025.
The racists are more visible in 2025 than they were during my previous four decades. They're running the government.
I don't understand this comment. If somebody holds beliefs like "<X racial group> is less honest than others", "<Y ethnicity> have a lot of irritating faults", why is it the word "racism" not "useful" to describe those beliefs?
That's fair. Do you have a link to a specific example? I failed to find it on a quick search at least.
I took those examples from the ADL survey, which only looks at antisemitism, but found a prevalence around 20%
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-attitudes-america-2024
Here's a survey of black Americans that found a majority feel that they have experienced racism: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/06/15/racial-discrimination-shapes-how-black-americans-view-their-progress-and-u-s-institutions-2/
6% of people in the US disapproved of interracial marriage last time it was polled in 2021: https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx
This 2022 online poll found that, for various racial and religious minorities, 10-20% of the country believes that they "weaken US society": https://criticalissues.umd.edu/sites/criticalissues.umd.edu/files/American%20Attitudes%20on%20Race%20and%20Ethnicity.pdf
Even talking seriously about "equality of outcomes" presumes, without evidence at this point, that it means something other than "write the check to the nice nonprofit if you know what's good for you."
Depending on how you ask the question! Do you mean questions like “should a person be given special privileges based only on their skin color?”
Maybe a more fruitful way to phrase this is “what should be done when some people are given special privileges based only on their skin color?” Answer A is “yell at the people doing this to make them stop” and Answer B is “give everyone else special privileges to try to make it equal out”.
I disagree, this is a much less fruitful framing.
I’ve framed Answer A too provocatively for sure. But the original question is one that people on diametrically opposed sides would answer verbally the same way, because they disagree about when it’s happening and what constitutes an advantage.
The whole Obama formula in the second term was precisely that there would be symbolic "improvements" to make up for the material losses.
???
As in, we never got back to full employment after 2008 until 2021, or even after 2001 until 2021, and that quite reasonably generated political discontent... for which various governments like Bush and Obama tried to make up by pretending that if you "did the right thing" in various symbolic ways, you'd be ok, and everyone else deserved it anyway for their bad choices.
The high unemployment 2003-2008 is not easily explained by too restrictive monetary policy (assuming 2% PCE IS the growth maximining average inflation rate) The rest of the period PCE was mainly below target, especially 2009-2020.
Sorry? Who was talking about monetary policy?
I am. I consider that the slow growth late 2008-2020 was caused by monetary policy that mainly failed to keep inflation at (and probably for a time in 2009-10 above) target. But I wanted to recognize that is not the only reason.
I think that Matt’s recent twitter activity around the whole Gaza issue has been kind of embarrassing? His thinking about the issue recently shifted significantly, but even when he talks about the shift, he seems to feel a need to aggressively dunk on the people who got there before he did.
On the whole, I think the gestalt mostly just makes him look petty and immature— you can agree that somebody was right about an object-level issue that you were wrong about without having to agree that they’re right about everything you disagree on, and you can acknowledge that and wait to dunk until you’re talking about some other issue.
I have some empathy insofar as some of the people who Matt is dealing with are very annoying and some of them use bad arguments or engage in bad faith or are wrong about other important things. I know that I’ve sometimes indulged a desire to lash out rather than engaging constructively. But if, like Matt, you want to be a factional thought leader rather than just a guy who has takes, you need to be more patient and diplomatic— especially because the drift of thermostatic polarization has recently sharply reversed and he’s now swimming against the current in the sort of intra-Dem factional arguments that he wants to intervene in; when conditions are tough like this you gotta work extra hard on the slow boring of hard boards rather than just behaving expressively.
I fell like Twitter Matt has always sort of undercut his long form writing.
Like its almost suppose to be a character but if you aren't "in the know" its just jerky hot takes.
"... has always sort of undercut his ...."
I have seen many people lose out on the value of Matt's long form writing because they are pissed off about something he said on twitter, when what he said was just tongue in cheek to begin with.
It's a shame -- he preaches message discipline to parties and politicians, but cannot exercise it himself.
The problem is, Matt cannot resist a good snarky comeback or an ironic troll.
Here's Dr. Johnson on Shakespeare's inability to resist a cheap pun or play on words (a.k.a. a "quibble"):
A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.
And who is the competitor throwing down the three golden apples, tempting the detour? The algorithms of social media?
And in that same preface to his edition of Shakespeare's plays, Dr. Johnson reflects on the role of criticism, quoting Pliny "When in doubt, don't". Perhaps an admonition to us all. To not stoop for quibbles.
Somebody should put this in next week's mailbag thread: "why are you such a jackass on Twitter, and doesn't it run counter to what you preach?" Or something like that
I nominate you to be that somebody!
I think assuming it is tongue in cheek is perhaps a bit too generous.
Sometimes he just genuinely has bad takes.
"...genuinely has bad takes...."
Oh, no doubt.
And perhaps the ones that Polytropos had in mind are among the bad ones -- I have not looked them up.
But I have definitely encountered people on the web saying, "fuck Yglesias, he said the most awful thing on twitter today, I'm never going to read his stuff," when in fact it was just Matt doing a bit, once again. Just Matt trolling and having fun, and if you know his schtick then it's obvious. But alas, there are lots of folks to whom it's not obvious.
What does it mean to be “just doing a bit” here? Does it mean that he’s in character for one tweet, but it’s a one-off? Or does it mean that there are recurring characters that he does continually? Because the latter starts to look less like a bit.
"...the latter starts to look less like...."
I don't think repetition is incompatible with artifice. There are writers and comedians who do the same character repeatedly, even when that character is at some distance from their IRL self. Think SNL actors and some of their repeated characters. One might even complain about repetition-- he's doing the same bit that he always does! Or consider on-line trolls such as dril/wint -- I doubt that the author behind that is much like the persona of dril/wint.
Now, it may also be true that one's sense of humor reflects one's other beliefs. Misogynistic jokes are seldom told by non-misogynists, e.g., and the same for racism. But the connections are going to be indirect, and the inferences fallible. Sometimes jokes invert one's beliefs!
I dunno -- suppose that MY's behavior no longer falls into the category of "doing a bit" -- what follows from that?
While his accountant maybe be upset that those people are turned off, don't you think Matt wants to repel the kind of person upset by an obviously sarcastic tweet?
Matt’s whole deal is supposed to be about how you have to do the hard work of persuading people, even those you find very annoying.
No. He would lose half his readers here if we were all forced to read his tweets.
A lot of the problem is that sometimes it’s the “bits” are just positions which he’s expressed something adjacent to in the long-form writing, but framed in a much more glib and hostile way, and often in an emotional register that internet veterans will recognize as “pretending not to be mad, but obviously actually seething.”
I think when he writes articles he has time to think and follow his own advice, but when he tweets he.... does not. Or not always.
On the other hand, I do sometimes think he deliberately sparks fights with online leftists to show democratic politicians it's not that scary, but I'm worried that line of thinking makes me sound like a MAGA believing Trump is playing 4D chess.
I don't read Twitter but such exposure as I do have to Twitter Matt (mostly through SB comments) seems to strongly back up this thesis.
I don't Twitter / X either, but I sometimes get the same idea from his mailbag responses. He seems to get angered by, and sometimes read bad intentions into, questions that I find fairly innocuous or at worst just ignorant.
I think he's mostly good tonally on mailbag Qs with a few notable exceptions that he generally gets excoriated for in the comments. The aggravating ones are often where he gets a thoughtful question and then either goes on an unrelated tangent or just gives a glib one-liner response (where it isn't called for.)
The weirdest part for me was when Matt got upset at the commenters a few time for not submitting "enough" high quality questions, as though he has some obligation to answer a minimum number of questions each week regardless of their quality or whether they would make an interesting subject to write about.
What it's really undercut is his old short blog posts that would be about the length of about 3-4 tweets. Which of course is what Twitter took over from much blogging in general.
A lot of the problem is that sometimes it’s the “bits” are just positions which he’s expressed something adjacent to in the long-form writing, but framed in a much more glib and hostile way, and often in an emotional register that internet veterans will recognize as “pretending not to be mad, but obviously actually seething.”
I’m often confused about if he’s being ironically or genuinely asinine. It’s like raaaeeeaaain, on your wedding day …
Sounds like a good reason to avoid Xitter
"...a good reason...."
One of N for very large N.
I think two things are true: 1) the left sandbagging the left-of-center presidential candidate(s) in a two person race was a world-historical own goal that had the opposite effect they sought, and 2) the fine line between total war and genocide may have *recently* been crossed. The truth of 2) doesn't negate the truth of 1), and the truth of 1) doesn't mean we can ignore the truth of 2). Policing the bad behavior of factional competitors--saying don't campaign against the candidate most likely to do what you want and least likely to do what you hate--is worthwhile, even if its awkward. Now, if he's doing this in September 2026 then he's committing the same sins as the left during the 2024 cycle, but we're still in 2025, so its fair game.
I experienced my first "we must destroy the woke mind virus" moment ever.
I watched Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest yesterday. I was baffled at how bad it was. Like genuinely, I'm still shook. It's one of those movies that is so bad you immediately try to read every review and piece of commentary on it.
The reviews are excellent? It has a 91% on RT? The film is a true piece of shit? For reference, 25th Hour has an 80%! Malcom X has an 89%! Fucking 91% is one point less than Do the Right Thing! Black Kurosawa by Spike Lee should have been one of the best film moments of 2026 but this thing is brutal.
The film criticism around this movie is an abomination. I truly feel like one of those conservatives watching mainstream media or at a Pride parade or something. I don't know what I'm looking at and I'm angry and confused.
I legit can't help but think tons of critics are deeply biased.
As someone who saw Weapons in theaters based on superlative reviews, I don’t think the breathless praise for bad films is DEI-specific, but it doesn’t help.
I liked Weapons! I thought if most people thought it was "good" or "above average," I wouldn't mind. It's got some stuff going for it, it's take a shot at something interesting. It's a film.
I dunno, it's this specific movie and its reviews that's making me insane lol.
I thought it was...fine. Had some good scares and a fun final act, but it involved a lot of straining credulity that the villain could be as conspicuous as they were for as long as they were without anyone investigating. But the reviews are absolutely wild - so much hyperventilating praise for how it's actually really about school vouchers, trans kids, mass shootings, religion and/or defunding public education? My friends who saw it with me and I are playing a game where we text each other the most insane, over-intellectualized reviews we can find.
Spike Lee's movies are always like that Da 5 Bloods got 92% on Rotten Tomatoes despite it being racist and just plain bad about nearly aspect of Vietnam it tried to depict. It really hammered home that Lee is unable to empathize with any minority group that he isn't a part of.
From a local reviewer here in Vietnam when the movie came out,
"The first few minutes, sadly, ruin any potential depiction of racial equality or nuanced character portrayal.
An early scene set inside Apocalypse Now features a young beggar with one leg calling the lead characters "G.I.," while the group eyes two elderly Vietnamese men referred to as "VC." When they exit the nightclub, the same beggar throws firecrackers on the ground at them and again taunts them with shouts of "G.I!" "G.I.!"
This would simply never happen; besides the fact that fireworks are illegal here (pedantic, I know), I can't envision a Vietnamese person of any age calling older Americans "G.I.""
"...my first "we must destroy the woke...."
That seems like an unnecessary inference. I disagree with critics all the time, and I think widely-praised movies are crap all the time, without jumping to, "so the critics must be unfairly praising it because it was made by black people."
That's largely because 90% of the time when the work was unjustly praised, it was not made by black people -- it was just made by non-black people who were doing a lousy job and getting praised for it.
Disagreement about the worth of art is universal. It requires no explanation in general. And disagreement about the worth of Spike Lee's new film is no different -- people like different stuff.
I love Spike Lee. I literally made an effort to compare the reviews to some of his classics. This movie is awful in the extreme. Its badness is reaching the state of "objective opinion," like "Hitler was evil" or "Jordan was the GOAT" - it can be argued but only in a very tight band.
This is something that can't really be discussed until you watch it.
The net effect is it makes people LESS likely to see films made by directors and writers of color, because audiences know in those cases you can't trust the advice of critics on whether or not to see them.
The Woke Mind Virus brings to mind white people to me. I don't think saying a movie/art is explicitly Woke implies black. It makes me think of Hannah Einbinder in 'Hacks'.
"...The Woke Mind Virus brings to mind white people to me. ..."
Agreed! I thought Alan's suggestion was that the (predominantly) white film critics were grading S.L.'s movie on a curve because they were infected by the WMV.
Interesting take. I can get that. I haven't seen the movie so I don't have an opinion.
It was such a joy every time the character got humiliated.
The Last Jedi famously has a 90% score on RT, but maybe that's DEI-related, idk.
91 critic or 91 audience? The critic score is reverse correlated for me.
I think 86% audience. Maybe it's me lmao
The audience reviews are 86% positive so there are apparently a lot of people who disagree with you. (This doesn't mean you're wrong.)
Forgive me if you addressed this - but what ties it to Woke or Progressive Politics or reverse racism or whatever it feels like? As opposed to just a bad film that either critics or audiences like for some other weird reason?
I was kinda being tongue in cheek, cause Spike’s THE American black filmmaker.
I don’t think, in reality, it had more to do with him being black than him being a legend.
I can't really think of a legendary directory whose later works are anywhere close to their earlier works. Perhaps Spielberg? Then again I'm not much of a movie guy.
Hitchcock.
(His very last few movies, while good, are mostly forgotten today, but Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds were made in an incredible five year run near the end of his career).
If you expand to producer/mogul types, Walt Disney also.
Woody Allen.
I'm a big proponent of late Spielberg. I think West Side Story and Fabelmans are about as good as anything anyone makes these days. I can say a lot for Munich and Lincoln. But no, his 1970-2000 was far too great.
I think most directors lose it, probably. QT maybe? He's not that dynamic, but I think I probably like the latter stages of his career (Basterds on) than the earlier?
Robert Altman and David Lean come to mind.
I think it's common for filmmakers seem to have multiple peaks in their careers.
Here are a few other examples of artists whose mid- or late-career movies were as good as or better than their career defining work (in addition to Hitchcock and Allen): Eastwood (Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby), Tarantino (everything), Scorsese (the Departed, Killers of the Flower Moon), George Miller (Fury Road), Almodovar (Talk to Her), Kurosawa (Ran, Kagemusha) Bigelow, (the Hurt Locker), Kubrick (2001, Full Metal Jacket) and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation).
Of course, YMMV! I don't like all of those equally, (and they aren't all legendary) but I think together they make a decent case that directors aren't just shooting stars.
I think part of it is that modern directors are so auteur that their filmographies are quite short. It's funny to see like Sofia Coppola on this list, Lost in Translation was her 2nd film, she probably still had the juice.
We're out of those grindhouse days.
Oh snap, I forgot LIT was her second film.
I find Spike Lee kind of befuddling as a concept.
Of course, what I mean is choosing to root for the Knicks. But also the other stuff.
I haven't seen Highest 2 Lowest, but I recognize the feeling you're expressing because I experienced something similar when I started reading the reviews of True Detective: Night Country. It was hot flaming garbage but almost every critic felt they had to pretend it wasn't, and to me the simplest explanation was that the showrunner was a woman of color. I'm open to other theories (as long as you, unlike the critics, admit it was bad).
I guess I didn't finish it, so I didn't have as visceral a reaction, but I thought after the first 2 episodes, Night Country was really pretty bad.
I listen to "The Watch," a podcast from The Ringer, and they liked it. And I don't need critics to agree with me, but I'm pretty vanilla, my tastes sorta line up with the general consensus, I think. So, yeah that was surprising.
I also had the same experience with Night Country. Reviewers who I generally respect, like Alan Sepinwall, all seemed to love it. In fact Sepinwall said it was the best season of TD. And for me it was utter dross with almost no redeeming qualities. I managed to finish it but only because the preposterous plot and acting choices became so bad that they were funny. It was really the first time that I felt like there might be truth to the "mind virus" concept.
To The Watch's credit, they soured on it by the end and the Ringer's Exit Survey was predominantly negative takes as well.
I'll be curious to check out Highest 2 Lowest now....
You don't have to like the popular thing. That's ok. You're still allowed to do that.
It's more that I can't accept people making the bad thing good. I enjoy all sorts of unpopular and bad things. I also dislike a lot of popular things, but I can accept it's not to my taste, or I'm the weird one.
This is something else.
Well, what in particular didn't you like about it? (I haven't seen it.)
I thought the acting was very very weak. I'm not an acting snob, and I find that Spike's movies sometimes have these funny actor choices, but this was not really that. The wife and son were both quite bad. Dean Winters (Dennis from 30 Rock) was really rough as a police detective. I have my own issues with ASAP Rocky's performance, but it isn't even in the top 20 of problems.
The score, especially in the first half, is bizarre to the extreme. It's literally soaring.
It follows Kurosawa's three acts but the first act is so sloppy when compared to High and Low, which is this taut one-act play. Of course, this is its own thing, but when put in contrast, it falls so flat.
The third act is transformed into this cat and mouse...thing...but it's terrible. Just awful. 70 year old Denzel, with a piece, is chasing Rocky through the streets. Up through the Bronx, into the subway, and they duke it out. It's jaw dropping. This after they already find out with the kidnapper lives! They meet his (also poorly acted) babymama!
And the ransom scene, which comprises most of Act 2, I'm not a Spike hater, I like his weird proclivities and interposition of random New York culture into scenes, but the Puerto Rican festival background was sooooo long. And that's probably the heart of it, the movie feels sooooo long and has almost no visual propulsion.
Also typing this out, the kidnapper has this elaborate escape plan with all these dudes on mopeds, but like in act three none of your crew is hanging out with you? Some old fucker just sneaks up on you to jack your shit? Cmon wtf.
Got it. I haven't been much of a Spike Lee fan over the years. I thought he was a pretty electrifying filmmaker back in the, uh, 80s or so. I'm not a hater, either, just indifferent.
Fascinating take. The first half hour is genuinely Bad but after that it was a fun time IMO.
I could handle the First Act (until the Kamala poster) better than Act 2 and 3. The Dean Winters stuff, the shoddy ass chase? It was awful. I'm not gonna act like High and Low's ransom scene was some Michael Bay chase but I dunno what Spike was doing.
The ASAP Rocky and the rap battles and stuff was corny as shit, B. And this is from a guy who regularly watches Moesha reruns. I've got no beef with Black media or any other Spike Lee joint - this thing was unwatchable,
No one was even acting except for Jeffery Wright and Wendall Pierce in a 30 second scene!!
I truly wonder whether movie reviews even matter much anymore, given how diffuse entertainment is these days. We're all going to find that we like some things and don't like other things that will differ from other people, and concur in part and dissent in part from the consensus as a whole.
Rotten Tomatoes as whether a movie is great is a bad factor, because a 2 1/2 star out of 4 star review is the same as a 4 star.
It's Metacritic average is a 73, which you can still disagree with, but it's closer to the reality of the views.
Also, Spike Lee is an established, well-known filmmaker. Those people get a pass. Even Megalopolis that was basically totally panned was only a 55 on Metacritic.
It just means that 91% of the reviewers of the film thought it was at least a 5.1 on a scale of 1-10 right?
This is what's causing my conniptions.
I thought it was 3/5 stars or 6/10 for minimum, but that doesn't really change your point.
And... I can't actually find any hard numbers, probably because reviewers all rate things differently(thumbs up vs down, letter grade, etc)
Audience score is based on what percentage give at least 3.5/5, so maybe critics who rate out of 10 need a 7/10?
Letterboxd, a viewer review site for film snobs, has it at 3.2. This gave me a little relief, as Do the Right Thing has a 4.4 (correct), Malcom X has a 4.3 (correct), and 25th Hour has a 3.9 (too low). I guess I'm lead to believe this is a 1.5 movie that every bumped up 1.5 points cause a legend directed it.
https://letterboxd.com/film/highest-2-lowest/
Spike Lee made a BAD movie!?
The withdrawal of the offer for the Florida job is the most brutal real-life example of why an academic should never submit written notice of resignation til you have the final offer in writing from the next institution.
That said, Ono dodged a bullet here. Being president of an American university in 2025 is already kind of a thankless job, you have to be truly crazy to want to do it (sort of like being mayor of NYC). And being president of the University of Florida with De Santis and the rest of the wingnut Board of Governors dictating your every decision sounds the most thankless of all.
EDIT: haha fair yes the compensation package would make me put up with a lot of bullshit. But he’s probably making close to that working for Ellison, right? You have to compare it to other work someone with that level of management experience could be doing instead.
> kind of a thankless job
"offered a base salary of $1.5 million and a total package worth more than $3 million."
I offer to do it for the low, low price of 2.9M
Two point seven, and I'll buy my own chalk.
"...for the low, low price of 2.9M...."
But without being thanked? He said it was "thankless." And if they don't say, "thanks!", then all of that money is just worthless, not even worth having.
Me, I'd do it for minimum wage -- provided that they thank me. After all, what greater reward could I desire than sincere gratitude?
Yeah, sign me up for 2 mil and have to deal with Desantis. I have thick skin and a do not give crap attitude.
How much of the 2 mill would be guaranteed money? Would there be a signing bonus?
Yes, Ono resigning from the Michigan job after being unanimously approved by the University of Florida Board of Trustees and then just waiting for the rubber stamp by the DeSantis appointed Board of Governors reminds me . . . of something . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYQCb3qrBpo
Halina, you come across as a very credulous and unquestioning journalist. You might benefit from a little more questioning of the received wisdom.
"championing ambitious climate and diversity programs"
Is that a terrible thing? It comes across like the thought that it could be has never crossed your mind.
"...you come across as a very credulous and unquestioning...."
I had a different reaction, namely that she was just repeating the nonsense that she read, and probably ought to put more of it into quotation marks.
E.g.: "Its Oxford branch is undergoing rapid expansion, aiming to translate cutting-edge research into real-world impact."
Cutting edge research! Real world impact!
That's all just press-release blather. Presumably Ms. Bennet is quoting it, or paraphrasing it, from press-releases.
So, maybe Ms. Bennet should ladle on more quotation-marks. But I don't think she was being credulous.
This seems a bit rude tbh
"...This seems a bit rude tbh...."
Can you say what the "this" refers to?
I thought that BZC's initial post was rude ("...you come across as a very credulous..."), but maybe you think my reply is rude, too? I don't mean it to be, and will happily edit out any rudeness.
Mostly your reply. Third to last sentence in particular.
"...Mostly your reply...."
Wow! I am very surprised. That was not my intent, so I have edited out that sentence.
(Note: BZC is the one saying she is "credulous and unquestioning": I am saying that she is not credulous and not unquestioning.)
I read the edited post and was confused about how it possibly could have been perceived as rude, but maybe the edit fixed it. Anything that talks about best practices or "translat[ing] cutting-edge research into real-world impact" always makes me gag too.
Bennet has only one "t". Like in Pride and Prejudice. The extra 't' is unconscionable.
"...The extra 't' is unconscionable...."
My most abject apologies. Updated to remove the offending gemination.
"Ms. Bennett is quoting it, or paraphrasing it, from press-releases. No human with a functioning brain would write such blather voluntarily -- certainly not a human whom Matt Y thought was worthy of employment."
That's not the impression I'm getting at all. She had a post the other day and it was clear that she'd seen a press release that she was inclined to believe so she just accepted it unquestioningly.
What we need is someone who gets a press releases from the National Vegetable Council saying vegetables are good for you and thinks long and hard - Maybe they are full of shit. They could be just taking up their book.
This is a weird, arrogant angle of attack. Either agree or disagree with the take, the ad hominem inflection of your commentary is unnecessary and strange.
She's a journalist and if she is coming across as too credulous then she deserves to know.
The accusation that you’ve made is that she’s naive and incompetent. Doubling down that she ‘deserves to know’ is out of this world, preposterous.
Maybe to you. Not to me.
I too am kinda hypersensitive to this sort of thing. Mostly from reading too many articles of the "local crime beat reporter launders police press release as reporting" variety.
I mean, if you’re only using manure as fertilizer then technically they are full of water and …
"Maybe they are full of shit"
Full of fiber anyway.
Does anyone have any tips for remembering the difference between credulous and incredulous? I think "this journalist should be asking harder questions and thinking more deeply about this situation" pretty much every day but in the moment I can never remember if they need to be more or less credulous.
That would be being less credulous. The easy way to remember is just to think of "incredible" and "credible."
Well the "in" part I get, it's more just remembering what the base word means. It sounds like they need to be more INcredulous.
Now, should the Slow Boring office avoid open flames near furniture because flames are flammable or inflammable?
What a country!
Only biweekly!
incredulous = does not believe it
incredible = i cannot believe it
credulous = believes it
credible = i can believe it
Thinking of other words with the root "cred" maybe?
Credit, for example. Meaning faith/trust.
An incredulous stare says, "yeah, right: you are not fooling me."
I don't understand this at all. Can't his "championing ambitious climate and diversity programs" just be, like, an objective fact? I don't read it as a value judgment at all, as to whether the programs were good or bad, just that a lot was invested in them and he supported it.
I champion an ambitious program. You spearhead efforts. He relentlessly pushes an agenda.
Are these all objective facts? Why do they sound different?
I agree that there is such a thing as slanted language, but I don't consider the phrase "championed an ambitious program" to be very slanted at all! I didn't take it as an expression of support. If anything I feel the word "ambitious" is often used to suggest that someone set themselves to a task that turned out to be a little more than they could handle. And "championing" something reads to me like a neutral term for publicly advocating that thing. Difference in our regional vernaculars, I suppose.
The devil’s in the details; the kids throwing soup at paintings are championing ambitious climate programs (probably diversity too).
Are they? They might "support" those things, but to my mind to properly "champion" something you have to be a person of some current authority who is lending the weight of their prominence to a cause. I think it's an act that can't really be performed by an anonymous soup-thrower.
I think you're reading too much into a somewhat anodyne statement about what he did. I mean, clearly, he *did* champion those things. And maybe they were good!
Scientific academic here (postdoc). I'm currently in the running for positions in the UK, Austria, Finland, and one other country. I turned down an offer in a fifth country since it was, ultimately, waaaaaay too far away and would have me completely alone. Then there's industry. I might make it in time to apply to the job at Michigan my supervisor recommended to me, but I'm wary of it.
What I'm saying is, all of us who need a new job are attempting to bail the heck out of the USA. The writing is on the wall, especially when a bunch of the people we'd prefer to collaborate now have their funding frozen by the federal government for being at certain institutions (you know, the ones everyone used to want to work at).
I guess you can make all sorts of wild statements if you're willing to use sufficiently small values of "all".
Maybe, uh, 20% of the cohort I know, and flat zero who are US citizens.
Ok but this is sort of like “to decimate” means “to kill 1 in 10,” not “to kill everyone,” and it’s understood to imply “to hurt or damage really badly!”
If 20% of the cohort you know is contemplating getting the hell outta the country that has hitherto been known as the undisputed champion of biomedical research in the entire world, that is really, really doubleplusungood!
None of them are US citizens- so? America owes much of its success in science and technology to immigrants, plus who knows how many of them would go on to become naturalized citizens if they stayed. That’s what I did - came to the US for grad school, met my future husband, he sponsored me for a Green Card, and eventually I became a citizen.
At the level of statistical significance we're talking about, 20% is not measurably different from the year 2015. It certainly is not "all of us", the latter is not a colorable exaggeration.
I guess we are all still grappling with the "it's worthy and good for the Elite to tell noble lies to the masses" thing.
For crying out loud, it’s not a lie, noble or otherwise, to point out that a lot of scientists are considering getting out of the US or not coming in the first place. Not so much established investigators, but trainees/early career scientists.
Not "a lot" (whether or not this is true, which is as-far-as-I-know anecdotal). "All". People know what that word means, even knuckle-dragger MAGAists.
My cards on the table, I think the collapse in trust in elite institutions and subject matter experts is _the_ challenge of our time. We did our fair job to earn it. People just very casually say things that are obviously bullshit to anyone who's paying an inkling of attention. They think nothing of it! There's a grain of truth, and it's *directionally* appropriate, so if it steers the conversation or the Overton Window or whatever, then all's fair in love and war.
I don't know how we're going to recover the sort of trust we've so casually lit on fire, or if we even deserve to.
Tom Nichols wrote an interesting book about it (epistemically collapse, loss of trust in experts).
I actually agree with you on your critique of the institutions, I suspect.
The current predicament is entirely deserved. It’s time to stop blaming “misinformation”. I know many institutions are more concerned with my moral edification than with providing sound answers that stand up to scrutiny in the real world. I know the accumulation of third rails is bound to handicap honest interrogation of pretty much anything.
Every academic I know is an ideologue who no longer has a functional bullshit detector when it comes to info that flatters their priors. I know it’s not all academics, but not enough were intellectually honest enough, and vocal about it, to stop the overall slide into unreality. And it’s not just academics.
I specified "who need a new job", and by the way, I was born a US citizen. Technically I'm still a US citizen, though of course I understand that the New York City metro area, where I'm from, is not in Real America and thus I am not a Real American. And certainly I'm not a Heritage American. Ellis Islander, baby.
Yes, I read your entire comment.
So you're just ignoring the bit that restricts to a population who have reason to be more mobile than the stably-employed?
I chose my words carefully. "The cohort I know", i.e., people in postdoc-y positions who are in search of new roles.
Maybe we're in different fields entirely, but I'd love to know where you're finding all these securely-funded open postdoc or faculty jobs in the United States :-(.
Really? That’s surprising. Everyone I know who is looking for academic jobs is looking much more actively at non-US jobs than they would have a few years ago. And I know a few people who are looking who wouldn’t have been a few years ago.
The majority still aren’t looking though.
Looking is one thing, actually going is another. I only know one postdoc who is taking a faculty position in France, but that's because after a couple years of trying, she never even got an interview in the US. But the teaching load is rough (sounds to be ~3x what we do where she is going) for a lot less money. I'll be curious to see if anyone would actually prefer a job abroad vs. one on offer here.
Yes - I know a couple people who have moved to Toronto or UBC. I don’t know if positions in continental Europe are actually looking attractive enough for people to take yet.
I’m really sorry to hear that. This a-hole is doing long-term damage to America’s leadership in science. It’s painful to witness. Best wishes for your postdoctoral search!
As long as I'm kvetching, I've also lost one job opportunity in the USA to Trump's funding freezes on established investigators, had my current department thrown into turmoil by the NIH's 15%-overhead thing (though I think that's more of a policy issue than a "fuck you scientists" thing), and lost several more job opportunities in the United States to everyone understanding that you can't afford to shell out liquid funding to hire someone and just write a grant to get more money later.
I'm actually plenty critical of the status-quo system pre-Trump, but "everyone has to batten down and try to retain the staff they have, even if that means dropping cohorts on the floor when they finish a career stage" has been a bad experience so far.
The 15% overhead was always DOA. I agree that this year is proving to be rough as everyone is being very conservative, and I'm sorry you're getting caught in the middle of it (we aren't hiring, for example). My expectation is that things will stabilize though and then places will be relatively flush next year with their saved cash.
Note, I have been too optimistic before. But despite some turmoil in the spring, the system seems to be running according to schedule now (I just agreed to serve on a study section, for example). My next NIH increment also came right on time without difficulty. And so on.
I think predictions about what Trump will do are highly uncertain if not dangerous.
You may expect that things will stabilize but the Random Number Generator in Chief may have a different view.
No one is denying that; it's why everyone is being conservative right now. If things blow up, universities will have resources to prop things up for a few more years. I'm saying that there are signs right now pointing to stabilization. If that doesn't bear out in the next year, we'll continue to conserve and adapt. I'm not sure how any of what I said is "dangerous"?
I live right next to UCLA. In the past week or so, Trump said he's taking $1 billion in scientific research funds back from the school.
Some stabilization.
As it stands, it looks like Senate Republicans don't actually want to defund the NSF or NIH, so the question is at what point Trump can be compelled by the courts and Congress to follow the instructions of Congressional appropriations bills: staff the agencies and let them disburse allotted funds by some fixed procedure.
That sucks ass, and I am sorry. ETTD (Everything Trump Touches Dies)
I haven't seen—and won't see—the wall, so I gotta ask: What does the "writing is on the wall" say?
"Academia is cooked."
Academia cooked itself.
By relying on government grants rather than getting rich people to fund everything?
In addition to yanking away federal funding for University research, which is a very inexpensive way to develop products and patents that the private sector can monatize, Trump is strangling all mRNA funding, which is probably the greatest scientific discovery of the 21st century. And we all know how that was discovered.
There's always the private sector.
Funny thing: through a complicated story, I almost wound up working in an industry-funded double-posting, just narrowly didn't, and then that company basically went into some kind of stealth lockdown type of thing. Now they opened up one (1) job again, so I applied and have an initial interview soon.
They're full of people I like and hung out with at the big conference last December, so hey, I'm happy to go work with them, especially for industry pay.
Where I'm against "there's always the private sector" is the idea of completely changing careers and totally refocusing to, for instance, become a quant or something.
But you have to earn a living somehow, no? What’s wrong with the private sector where almost everyone works?
Like I said, nothing's wrong with the private sector in principle. I just wanna do the kind of work I'm trained for in either an academic or an industry environment. My line of work isn't locked purely into one or the other, but it's easier to find work I'm trained for and will enjoy in academia vs industry without changing fields or retraining.
I was catching up with a friend who has been here for 11 years and is originally from France. His husband came here as a physics postdoc at Yale and eventually moved into a leadership role at a physics research center there. They are now leaning toward returning to France. I told him I don't blame them.
What do you think though when you see the salaries in other countries? Postdocs here in the US make more than faculty in a lot of places.
I think that, given the circumstances, it's better than doing something soul-crushing 9-5 or going unemployed.
I don't think you can fully evaluate Ono's tenure at Michigan without at least mentioning Jim Harbaugh.
Hail to the victors, but poor Jim, apparently he's not allowed to coach in college any more.
He'll be yearning for college again when he runs into the immovable force known as Chargering.
It's great if your goal is to start your vacation early after the Wild Card round.
The Chargering came early this year. Rashawn Slater out for the season.
No kidding. And they're shuffling in Mekhi Becton at guard, hoping that he wasn't just a one hit wonder in Philly's outstanding system. Storm clouds already hovering over San Angeles.
Now he gets to be tortured by Andy Reid and Pete Carroll every year.
Extreme Sean Payton erasure!
I don't think Payton delights in screwing with Harbaugh the way Pete Carroll does.
Harbaugh got in trouble because he had someone shoot videos to "steal" opponents' signals? Anything that is visible to the public, to the fans, ought to be fair game.
I think his guy was hanging out in disguise on the sidelines with the team, which is a bit worse but mostly just hilarious.
My understanding is he just had fans go to opponents' games and just point a cell phone at the coach sending in plays.
It really seems like the kind of thing you aren't prohibited from doing. After all, if the TV feed happens to show that angle is fine.
The stated reason for the rule is that not all programs can afford to do it.
> The stated reason for the rule is that not all programs can afford to do it.
It's that, but also that it meant that they could also not have everyone pay for radio helmets for QBs and LBs like the NFL has. In the wake of the Stallions things, D1 programs now have those, so plays can be radioed in.
It makes sense, but of course eventually someone was going to cheat the rule so egregiously that it would have to change.
He didn't have anybody do anything, that guy acted on his own. He probably should have reported it sooner when he discovered it, but I think the evidence Harbaugh directed it is very thin
It is one of the most goofy but linguistically-intelligible sentences in the Michigan dialect of the English language.
Harbaugh harbaugh Harbaugh harbaugh harbaugh harbaugh Harbaugh harbaugh
Both this sentence and football have too many Harbaughs.
More people targeted by Trump should go abroad, like the Hungarian universities did under Orban. China apparently just launched a new visa program for skilled workers that seems fairly easy. The most reasonable way for Trumpism to go away for good is for people to touch the stove and see Trumpist America fall behind other countries in science and technology.
On one hand, I’d like Trumpism to end, on the other I rather the USA not lose its technological edge.
On my third hand, I don’t think this would operate on the time scale for which a “swing” voter can interpret cause and effect.
I can live without the USA's technological edge if it means that Stephen Miller and his followers don't get to rule the world. Frankly, I'd prefer it that way.
Unfortunately for us, Stephen Miller has decided he rather live out his fever dream fantasies even if it destroys our comparative advantage.
That’s already baked in. Unless the Constitution is rewritten in a way that prevents any of this from happening ever again, over the next ten or twenty years universities in the United States just won’t have the same shine in the job market that they have for the past 80 years. The question is just whether there is further short term active destruction.
Half the country won't care.
I find myself somewhat surprised Ono landed at an institution funded by well-known friend of MAGA Larry Ellison
There’s nothing like that situation at Michigan to make someone move to the right.
And being screwed over by the Florida Board of Governors after you already left your excellent job does what to you?
Make you flee from ideology and willing to accept a check from anyone? I was just trying to think of a hypothetical where a person makes the swing from Great Awokening Michigan to taking Ellison’s money. This person is probably through with caring about culture war altogether.
I would think someone with this history would have extremely strong feelings about the culture war and not want to be affiliated with anyone actively fighting it.
More excellent content on The Bird Site today on the most important issue facing our nation today: is The Power Broker overrated? https://x.com/aarmlovi/status/1957790117889802328
But obvious we need a take here so I'll step up to the plate [takes a deep breath]
One analogy for The Power Broker could be the classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which is a very well written narrative piece of history that pulls from a variety of sources, including a lot of great anecdotes from the author himself, but is based on a very questionable thesis. The TLDR version is most modern historians don't give much credence to Shirer's idea (which he stole from AJP Taylor's The Course of German History) that Hitler was the inevitable outgrowth of the nature of German people themselves.
Or as Matthew Zeitlin said: "Robert Caro’s fixed view of his subjects isn’t troubled by new evidence? I’m hearing this for the first time"
I'm shocked at this as well, gambling, in this establishment?!?!?!
Gibbon’s “Rise And Fall Of Rome” is also overrated. Similar example of being well written and argued but pretty much wrong on everything.
Shirer's book is such a fantastic, readable, detailed history that who cares what his "idea" was. You learn so much about the course of the Third Reich from it.
I mean, I read the book and that thesis didn't even stick with me.
Sure it's a good place to start, but I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out it's major flaws. Likewise it's possible to write a very readable into book that doesn't make major category errors, see Battle Cry of Freedom
White House eyes Budapest for peace talks with Zelenskyy and Putin
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/19/exclusive-white-house-eyes-budapest-for-peace-talks-with-zelenskyy-and-putin-00514596
Warning lights going off with me, here.
Even if he comes back with "ok here's your peace deal, Putin gets all of Ukraine," that's not our decision to make. The worst we can do is be useless and embarrass ourselves and we're already doing the second one.
He could put all the blame on Zelensky and cut off all aid we're still providing, including the sell arms to Europe deal and the intelligence sharing. That would be deeply unfortunate.
Yeah, it'd be bad, particularly the intelligence sharing, but US aid has been mostly replaced with Euro aid at this point both financially and in terms of equipment. I'll say that due to some new directives from State targeting American volunteers last week (which hit me directly for the second time in the last four months- looking for a new job now) a lot of relationships between the US IC and Ukraine are already breaking down and Euro intel agencies are starting to fill in the gaps. Losing US intel would suck, nobody does satellite intel better than the Americans, but we'd survive.
Also I had high hopes for Marco Rubio when he got nominated, but the dude's been a lackey 100% of the way. We might share a name but that guy can take a long walk off a short pier.
Good points.
Except about that Marco Rubio thing. He's one of T.S. Elliot's "Hollow Men." Tap him with your finger and listen to the echoes coming from the empty interior.
https://allpoetry.com/the-hollow-men
I want to keep helping Ukraine. Sadly I'm mentally making peace with the fact that we may not. But the worst we can do is stop supporting them. We can't force them to take a deal they don't want, which Trump is acting like he can do.
*Hopefully* it’s not America’s decision to make. My fear is it is exactly that.
What would we do, arm Putin?
My guess is: pull the plug on Ukraine. I'm not suggesting there's *zero* chance US pressure could be resisted by Ukraine and the Europeans. But I reckon it would be difficult.
Warning about what? That the Hungarians will arrest Zelenskyy?
Orban is Putin-friendly
Yes, I'm well aware of that. So is your theory that the Hungarians are going to assassinate Zelenskyy or abduct him or something?
I was thinking more a JD Vance-style event where everyone in the room gangs up on Zelenskyy and creates a pretext for Trump to flip-flop back toward Putin again.
Oh, that's a bit underwhelming. I thought that Trump had already flipped back to being pro-Putin?
What day is it, again? It’s August and I work in higher ed; I’m lost.
Per my other comment, it could be a very Putin-friendly meeting. But all Zelensky has to do is say "no" and nothing changes.
lol
I trust my mother, my father, my brother, my half-brother, and almost no one else. I see an ambush when it's coming. And a Ukraine-Russia "peace summit" in Viktor Orban's Hungary is an ambush.
If that happens, I feel like Poland might then invade Hungary.
I’m all for it. It’s certainly Poland’s turn to do some conquering
The counter-argument, which I think is not entirely without merit, is: all TACO talk is meh until proven otherwise.
Zelensky should just say, "Nope, let's talk Turkey." (Or however you're supposed to spell it.)
I just wrote a blog post about replacing race-based affirmative action with income-based affirmative action.
https://open.substack.com/pub/elizarodriguez/p/the-majority-of-americans-still-support?r=16xusl&utm_medium=ios
Good for you.
I had heard that it was "model" of what to avoid in DEI.