iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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The New York Times @nytimes.com · 06/10/2026

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com A win for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil is looking unlikely ahead of the Oct. 25 presidential runoff, but “the long-run patterns of how ordinary Brazilians participate in public life should worry small-d democrats even more,” Elizabeth McKenna writes.

nyti.ms

Opinion | Brazil’s Problem Is Bigger Than Bolsonaro

Brazil is fertile ground for authoritarian politics, no matter who wins this election.

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Eric Rittinger @ericrittinger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

We're hiring! Looking for a visiting assistant professor specializing in the politics of the Middle East, to start fall 2027. Salisbury University is part of the university system of Maryland. For more information and to apply: marylandconnect.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/SU_Car...

marylandconnect.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

Visiting Assistant Professor - Political Science

Job Posting: JR102201 Visiting Assistant Professor - Political Science (Open) Department: Political Science Department, JM Position Type: Non-Regular Fixed Term (Fixed Term) Open Date: 09-24-2026 Clos...

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Eric Rittinger @ericrittinger.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

marylandconnect.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

Visiting Assistant Professor - Political Science

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The Great Pumpkin Papers 🎃🎃🎃 @professormusgrave.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Dear editors, there are too many international relations now. Please remove three. PS I am not a crank

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Nann2Plutocrats @nann2plutocrats.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Just wrapped up the panel on Fostering Student Engagement at the 83rd Annual MPSA Conference! 🎉 Such a rich conversation — grateful for the thoughtful colleagues and ideas shared. Lots to bring back to the classroom. #MPSA2025 #PoliticalScience #HigherEd

Flyer for MPSA panel Fostering Student Engagement, with image of panelist

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Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news · 09/02/2026

If you didn’t catch the significance of the exploding transformers in Bad Bunny’s halftime show, I gotcha. Here’s one of a bunch of pieces I wrote from/on Puerto Rico about the crisis—and Trump’s role in it. slate.com/news-and-pol...

slate.com

Washington’s Corruption Has Created Another Humanitarian Crisis in Puerto Rico

The island’s earthquakes are its latest man-made disaster.

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Senator Chris Van Hollen @vanhollen.senate.gov · 18/12/2025

Wednesday morning, 7 ICE agents in Salisbury, MD, smashed in windows & violently dragged a mother out of her car while she was dropping her daughter off at elementary school. These abusive tactics are absolutely unacceptable. www.baltimoresun.com/2025/12/17/s...

baltimoresun.com

ICE operation near Salisbury school sparks outrage, questions

Witnesses say an apparent ICE raid near a Salisbury elementary school involved smashed car windows and terrified neighbors.

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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 28/08/2025

I think people really struggle w partially consolidated authoritarianism, either understating our problem or understating our power It's like we're in a liminal fascist space. And not recognizing how far gone we are or thinking we're simply too far gone are both grave errors we can't afford to make

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Eric Rittinger @ericrittinger.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Just in case anyone forgot which sphere we get to influence

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Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Were Aime Césaire alive to conduct a structural analysis of the advancing militarization of American law enforcement since 9/11, I suspect he would have understood DHS as a template for how Imperial Boomerangs operate in the 21st century. Me for @zeteo.com on LA, and what led to it.

zeteo.com

The Imperial Boomerang Lands in Los Angeles

As police and the National Guard escalate against anti-ICE protesters, the Department of Homeland Security bridges US violence abroad and US violence at home.

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Osita Nwanevu @ositanwanevu.com · 07/05/2025

Don't have anything new to say about AI here. One thing I will say is that higher ed has long been broken. If elites had spent more time thinking through the point of education and how well we really do it than stoking woke panic, maybe we wouldn't be staring at this abyss. nymag.com/intelligence...

Sarah, a freshman at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, said she first used ChatGPT to cheat during the spring semester of her final year of high school. (Sarah’s name, like those of other current students in this article, has been changed for privacy.) After getting acquainted with the chatbot, Sarah used it for all her classes: Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries. “My grades were amazing,” she said. “It changed my life.” Sarah continued to use AI when she started college this past fall. Why wouldn’t she? Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students’ laptops open to ChatGPT. Toward the end of the semester, she began to think she might be dependent on the website. She already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit, where she writes under the username maybeimnotsmart. “I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.”

Teachers have tried AI-proofing assignments, returning to Blue Books or switching to oral exams. Brian Patrick Green, a tech-ethics scholar at Santa Clara University, immediately stopped assigning essays after he tried ChatGPT for the first time. Less than three months later, teaching a course called Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, he figured a low-stakes reading reflection would be safe — surely no one would dare use ChatGPT to write something personal. But one of his students turned in a reflection with robotic language and awkward phrasing that Green knew was AI-generated. A philosophy professor across the country at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.” Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copy-and-pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot. Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.”

Once the chatbot had outlined Wendy’s essay, providing her with a list of topic sentences and bullet points of ideas, all she had to do was fill it in. Wendy delivered a tidy five-page paper at an acceptably tardy 10:17 a.m. When I asked her how she did on the assignment, she said she got a good grade. “I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

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Eric Rittinger @ericrittinger.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Great room for a Security Council simulation btw

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Eric Rittinger @ericrittinger.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Campus life - something for everyone

University signage for a room scheduled to hold a UN simulation and a bible study group

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John Polga-Hecimovich 🧉 @jpolga.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

I'm delighted that Authoritarian Consolidation in Times of Crisis: Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro, the book I co-edited with Raúl Sánchez Urribarrí, has officially been published! It is available at in paperback, hardcover and eBook almost everywhere. See: www.routledge.com/Authoritaria...

routledge.com

Authoritarian Consolidation in Times of Crisis: Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro

Bringing together experts from across the social sciences, this volume examines the consolidation of authoritarianism in Venezuela under the government of Nicolás Maduro. Taking a comparative perspect...

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Adam Przeworski @adamprz.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

I am keeping a diary of daily events, as they unfold open.substack.com/pub/adamprze... It is available to everyone. I am new to Substack, so please let me know if something is wrong with the link or the file.

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Orlando J. Pérez @perez1oj.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Taking back the Canal” would indeed be a violation of treaty, actually two treaties! It would undermine US relations with one of our closest ally in the region & piss off every other country in Latin America! And would be a gift to Chinese pretensions in the region…other than that…a great idea! 🙄

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Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news · 20/01/2025

Reminder that the US didn't lose "38,000 lives" building the Panama Canal, or even the estimated 5,600 who died on America's watch. Almost all who died were underpaid Afro-Caribbean workers living in U.S.-imposed conditions of segregation. Also China doesn't control the canal.

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NPR @npr.org · 24/11/2024

In Legacy of Lies, El Salvador 1981-1984, photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg documents how U.S. foreign policy fueled a violent 13-year civil war in El Salvador.

npr.org

A photographer's devastating documentation of El Salvador's civil war in the 1980s

In Legacy of Lies, El Salvador 1981-1984, photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg documents how U.S. foreign policy fueled a violent 13-year civil war in El Salvador.

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Sam Rosenfeld @samrosenfeld.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Short-term: Lots about November 5 was poli-sci-normal and not a particularly sound impetus for massive intra-Dem recriminations. Long-term: The party's central crisis remains class dealignment and there's no quick or easy way out of it. democracyjournal.org/arguments/th...

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Paul Poast @profpaulpoast.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

If Trump is keen on adopting 19th Century policies, then one that I encourage is a streamlined and open immigration policy. www.worldpoliticsreview.com/immigration-...

worldpoliticsreview.com

The U.S. Should Welcome Immigrants With Open Arms—and Open Borders

The US would reap economic and geopolitical benefits from adopting an “open border” immigration policy.

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Patrick Iber @patrickiber.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

It took me eight years to write something about the Fascism Debate, so let me say this: what is most exasperating is that no one (save Paxton) seems to be willing to change their mind. Well...

dissentmagazine.org

Trump in the Garden - Dissent Magazine

Eight years into the fascism debate, few skeptics seem to be willing to admit that they were wrong.

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Good Authority @goodauth.bsky.social · 20/10/2023

Today in Good Authority, @profsaunders.bsky.social interviews Kelly Greenhill, author of Weapons of Mass Migration, about how states and non-state actors can use mass migration as a tool of war. Greenhill offers context for the current crisis. goodauthority.org/news/how-sho...

goodauthority.org

How should we think about a mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza?

Countries, armed groups, and organizations use mass migration as a tool of war.

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