“[O]nce we see censorship for what it is, it’s our responsibility to get that across to the American people.”

What I love about this is the underlying idea that even when something may not be my/our “fault,” I/we still owe efforts towards the remedy. It’s a deeply community-centered stance.

It would appear I am now a columnist at Inside Higher Ed. My first piece focuses on McCarthyism, censorship, and our current moment in higher education. This is an essay I started nearly 6 months ago so I'm glad to finally share it with y'all.

www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Yesterday was my last day with NEH. All the best to my fellow union members who were also involuntarily separated. All the best to those who were required to stay — keep the 🔥 burning. Join, support, start a union ✊

Increasingly my mental model of corporate LLMs and how they are being used is a less interesting version of I Am Sitting in a Room

Scott is right — my numbers ignore this distribution to make things simpler. By my calculations, most people would get back much more than they actually put in.

Is this trickle down economics? 💁‍♂️🦋

In FY2024, NEH received $207 million in appropriations — its highest ever. Here's a graph of its funding trajectory over the agency's existence. In talks of efficiency, however, we should account for the real value of those dollars...

Well worth a think: cumulative per capita contributions to #NEH funding vs. the incredible #humanities impact we bring to all 56 states/jurisdictions that we've been posting about here.

NEH staff are responsible stewards of #taxpayer $$, and the benefits for the American public are incalculable.

NEH is funded by the loose change in your sofa.

As an elder millennial, I could trade my lifetime of tax contributions to the NEH for one month of Netflix and have just enough left over to get some avocado toast if I split it with two other people

With most of my NEH colleagues, I was RIF'ed last week. It has been an honor to work with so many talented and dedicated public servants as the agency's first (and for now, last) data scientist. Here's some incidental and public software, code, and data that came about as part of that work:

Currently running to test and it does take a minute, so probably don't wait to last minute if you want the whole thing...

Also remembering I originally wrote this out of anger at the 2013 shutdown. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Higher Ed friends: if you need IPEDS and fear losing access with a government shutdown, here's a script I wrote that will let you download the entire thing (or select files) github.com/btskinner/do...