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ericklinenberg.bsky.social
Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowlege at NYU. New book: *2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.*
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Go ahead, convince me their goal is not to make Americans suffer (or die).

Your billionaire president says a recession will be good for you. His henchman, the world's richest man, has decided you're not entitled to phone support if there's a problem with your Social Security payments. (Oh, he's also gutting the Social Security staff.) Oligarch populism, here we go.

Chilling report from Brown University. Administration advises all foreign students, staff, and faculty to postpone or reconsider (ie cancel) international travel, due to federal government's crackdown on universities. Brown also warns against *domestic travel* -since it's unclear what ICE will do.

The country, not just the Voice.

As @abdulelsayed.bsky.social put it: Republicans keep insisting that the COVID pandemic wasn't real. Democrats keep insisting that the COVID crisis is over. In fact, the US is still suffering from long COVID, as both a medical disease and a social condition. And the virus is far from done.

"What we are witnessing is not just an attack on academia or a set of fiscal reforms or a painful political rebalancing. It is an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist. We may not yet know its full cost, but we will feel its consequences for decades" 🔥 from @meghanor.bsky.social

Yesterday, in @nytimes.com, an editor accused academics of suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome: "Most students are going about their days, classes are being held..." Today we learn that a foreign student w/ no university sanctions or charges fled as ICE chased her out. Like normal, you know?

One columnist, a professional pundit, is living in a paranoid delusion. The other, a sociologist, is living in America.

Do you value your library? Trump just ordered the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the key source of federal support for libraries. Libraries are vital social infrastructure, the foundations of an open, democratic society. Gutting them means gutting our own communities.

Weekend thought experiment: Let’s say they win. They destroy the American research universities. They gut medical science. They close the libraries. They ban the books. Then what happens? Who are we? What comes next?

There's a reason they want to end US climate research & destroy our data. It's that, at this point, the facts & their implications are undeniable. So instead of learning & changing, they want us to ignore & pretend. We're in fantasy land. But it's a small world, after all. The water is coming.

We Were Wrong About What Happened to America in 2020. Republicans insist the pandemic didn't happen. Democrats insist we move on. But Americans are still stuck in 2020. We're angry, distrustful, divided. Alone and abandoned. Solidarity is scarce. Five years later, it's time for a reckoning.

The government being led by a South African who makes Nazi salutes and a president who caters to and praises white supremacists is hellbent on destroying the most Jewish Ivy League school, in the name of…protecting Jews from antisemitism.

The best way to keep COVID down is not to count it. You can’t have global warming if you don’t let NOAA measure climate trends and delete their data. You can’t have an avian flu pandemic if you don’t let the CDC release data on how the virus spreads or how many people catch it, get sick and die.

I don’t think anyone has ever loved sociology more than Michael Burawoy. I know that no one has ever loved their students more, or done so much to bring them together into the kind of community every scholar wants. His death is a devastating loss for scholars and students everywhere. RIP.

Paperbacks! Just in time for the fifth anniversary, and still so much to learn. @penguinrandomhouse.bsky.social @vintagebooks.bsky.social

Disasters speed up and make visible conditions that are always present but difficult to see.

Huge night here at NYU. An undergrad trying to fix their grade accidentally discovered how to email 11,000 instructors on a secret group email list, unifying the faculty like no one before. I have hundreds of email replies in my inbox. And apparently Onions, the puppy, has just been granted tenure.

Public libraries are not ordained by God or granted to citizens as a birthright. They were won through social movements. They are sustained by states and societies that value freedom, openness, and democratic culture. Today the very idea of the library is under attack. It's up to us to defend them.

Efficiency is the enemy of social life.