“…YOU HAVE TO START OUT BELIEVING THE LITTLE LIES”
“So we can believe the big ones?”
“YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING…”
Oof, sometimes Discworld hits you in the gut, and the build up to this conversation is… chef’s kiss
Congrats Sara! Glad you’re both doing okay ❤️
Six people legally living in the US and legally traveling for work were disappeared by the US government and the only reason we knew about it was because one woman was family friends with a county commissioner and her cell phone pinged to two detention centers.
Thursday, march 5: a binder clip with “I’m holding it together” written underneath. Friday, March 6: a cartoon bat hanging upside down, with “hang in there” written underneath
Is my pun-a-day calendar trying to tell me something?
Also: Ridicully might be my favorite Discworld side character…
memes as coping mechanism to prevent screaming into a pillow instead
as a former Wisconsonite, Ron Johnson always has to be in the mix also
Today’s reading, first chapter great! on studying bureaucratic effectiveness “every interesting answer is endogenous to the system we are trying to study”
In the current environment in the US of terrible cruelty to children, the fact that the Death (the personification) uses the fact that he’s being Santa to be kind to a child is really touching in an odd way
Little glimpses of wizard academia are also always fun to read as a PhD student
Discworld and a drink is my kind of Friday evening, and Death bewilderedly trying to be Santa Clause is 10/10 absurdist comedy. (A third of the way through my 9th Discworld book, Hogfather)
Today’s reading
I know it’s the new normal but watching this administration make a mockery of public health still hurts.
Casey Means is a deeply unserious nominee for surgeon general who will contribute to all of the endless harm done to population health
If you’d like a more comprehensive and reality-based take on what Trump has done for health, we can help, free to read
@xrkulik.bsky.social @hjarman.bsky.social @mirandayaver.bsky.social
How is our president who’s done such enormous harm this incoherent
Robin Vos was the (only) reason why Wisconsin was one of two states that didn't extend postpartum medicaid coverage for a year
www.propublica.org/article/wisc...
Robin Vos not running for reelection might be my favorite political news this week
I am about to re-sign a lease to stay in my apartment for a fifth year... the last time I lived in a single *state* for 5 years straight (much less a single home) was between the ages of 3 and 8.
(geographic stability, how I'll miss you)
Hot pot at home!
Happy (lunar) new year! 春节快乐！
In all the academic debate about genAI in the classroom, I rarely see discussion about how it seems to trigger psychosis, mania, and now stalking behavior/harassment/abuse in some. This entire article is excellent (and horrific)
There was an undocumented student in his class who had spoken pretty openly about how DACA changed her life and yet this teacher felt he could say basically that her family should have been murdered. Terrible at the time, *horrific* as a adult in hindsight
Re: political speech and teachers. Not my class so I’m fuzzy on the details, but a government teacher in my high school in GA circa ~2010 said IN CLASS that undocumented immigrants should be shot before they cross the border and I don’t think anything happened to him
It seems like this all the time now. I keep having to recalibrate my baseline disposition to cover up so much anger, like emotional weight taring for daily functioning.
I slept a bit better at night when I didn’t know how much empirical evidence there was for voters being, uh, not very good at voting (vibes, not policies or politics or y’know ideology)
Truly one of my least favorite findings, normatively
Reading Hogfather and the last “Susan” I found this compelling was Pensieve and I haven’t read Narnia in more than a decade. Discworld, as usual, a joy in terrible times
senseless & horrific cruelty towards children.
did I tell you about my dissertation scarf?? I am making a tunesian crochet scarf with colors determined by which kind of dissertation task, if any, I did in a day (e.g. qualitative/interview-related, quant, writing, reading/synthesis...)
like, hundreds of children are suffering and are being exposed to infectious disease outbreaks in concentration camps *right now*. that has to matter more than presidential sounding words
A stack of 3 books: 1. The Politics of Numbers (editors-Alonso and Starr) 2. How Data Works: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms 3. Data Paradoxes: the politics of intensified data sourcing in contemporary healthcare
Today’s reading (definitely not finishing full books, call it an introduction extravaganza)
