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Joe Pater

@joe-pater.bsky.social
410 followers 225 following 322 posts

Linguist and musician blogs.umass.edu/pater soundcloud.com/les-derailleurs

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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
We’ve been doing this since the pandemic in Northampton MA and it’s been great. Should be a no brainer for the Dems.
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Prem Thakker ツ @premthakker.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
New: Macklemore says Robert Kraft — who owns Gillette Stadium, where Macklemore & Ed Sheeran were to perform later this month — called Sheeran. Kraft rallied other owners together behind an ultimatum for Sheeran: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you won't be allowed in our venues.

I'm not sure how to start this. So I'm going to speak from the heart and share the truth. Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from The Loop tour.
But before I get into it, I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.

The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don't lose sight of that.

Ed is my friend. I've known him for 13 years. We've shared late nights, studio sessions and stages. He has this infectious magic about him that I've grown to love. I consider him a brother. And because of that, we've had some difficult conversations this past week. The type of talks rooted in love and respect for one another that still end in a place of fundamental disagreement. Nothing I'm writing here is out of spite or because I want to tear down his character. But as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can't change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.

Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other
stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.

Ed was in …What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I'm sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, "Free Palestine" becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that's why this time it became so important to silence me.

And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying "Free Palestine" gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn't protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.

I hope this isn't the end of my relationship with Ed.
Thirteen years of friendship doesn't disappear because of one painful disagreement. I hope we both continue listening, studying what is happening in Palestine and wrestling with what neutrality means in a moment like this. My door will always be open to continuing that conversation.

When my brother Omar was doing the subtitles for the video I posted from MetLife, I thanked him. He told me there's a phrase in Arabic:
لا شكر على واجب
"La shukra ala wajeb." There is no thanks for a duty.
That stayed with me. Because that's what this has become for me and millions of others around the world. A duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human.

Who is winning the internet, who is getting canceled, who gets to play the stadium and who doesn't, all of it becomes so small when held against what we are actually witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank. An entire people be…
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
The Fields medalists’ statement is a must read even if you haven’t been following the OpenAI math controversy. mathandai.org
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Always liked this album, had never seen this video. Chris Spedding with a Flying V!
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
This is just wonderful popular science writing, and fascinating for anyone interested in cognition of any type! @samanthsubramanian.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...
theguardian.com
‘This is dangerous’: slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence
The long read: Scientists are battling over whether supposedly simple organisms should be considered ‘intelligent’. The outcome could reshape our understanding of the natural world – and our own place...
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Take a listen to the demo - what an amazing voice.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 06/09/2026
We know how to teach books in the age of AI: small classes, close reading, research-engaged learning (which is how you ’let students see you struggle’). The issue is nobody will hire and pay the requisite # of faculty to offer this.
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 04/09/2026
Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money. 1/
Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Conjuror,' a painting depicting a medieval con artist playing a shell game for an audience of astonished peasant rubes. The image has been altered: the conman now has Jeff Bezos's grinning head, and the mouths of all the peasants have been replaced with inverted Amazon 'Smile' logos, so they are now frowning.

Image:
Steve Jurvestson (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeff_Bezos%27_iconic_laugh_crop.jpg

CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 04/09/2026
Update: the dialect map quiz thing going around is a cheap knockoff of the good one, which is here: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk (Published 2024)
What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
I don’t know what it is about the lake renaming that’s particularly gotten under my skin, but it’s great to have this Bode piece to articulate that anger at tech complicity. karlbode.com/never-forget...
karlbode.com
Never Forget How Eagerly Apple And Google Coddled Fascism
The US slide into autocracy has been enabled at every step by pathetic tech executives that enthusiastically embraced a complete lack of ethics.
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Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
It's an odd choice that the MAGA/MAHA Administration has made: to destroy the US research enterprise & to cede research leadership to other countries, including Canada & China It only makes sense to me when I realize that MAGA & MAHA see knowledge, facts & data as a threat to their conspiracy BS
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Eoin Higgins @eoinhiggins.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Democrats should be expected to condemn this bigoted shit, not Piker
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Will Oremus @willoremus.com · 26/08/2026
randomly giving out genuine compliments is such an easy way to make the world a little nicer, i'm always surprised more people haven't figured that out and have a ton of respect for those who have
Screenshot of tweet by Eminem. Text of Eminem's post reads: 

I'm sorry we never got a chance to meet, but getting this note from Dolly really had a an impact on me. She definitely didn't have to take the time to do it.  Even for a kid who mostly listened to rap music, she was an icon. A superstar in every sense. Rest easy Dolly. And thank you for the kind words.

Attached is an image of a classy and generous letter Dolly Parton sent to Eminem after missing a chance to meet him at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 24/08/2026
The real "administrative bloat" in education is the money that schools are being forced to fork over to tech vendors that can just keep jacking up their prices year after year, because it would cost even more to rebuild the systems and retrain the people that were built/trained on that tech.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 22/08/2026
Cofnas was not doing the thing he was hired to do. Academic freedom does not cover ”not doing your job.”
Your employment contract (article 1) and the va cy for which you were recruited (ref. LWC define your research mandate as a study of 'the
future of liberalism'
', specifically focusing on liberalism as a political doctrine emphasizing individual freedom and equality. The projects you publicly and repeatedly associate with your
affiliation at Ghent University, most notably your 'Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution' which advocates for racial barriers and segregation, fall entirely outside the scope of your official research
mandate.
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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
CNN: “.. 10 Trump-endorsed candidates have now lost this primary season -- including 6 in the last two weeks and 3 on Tuesday alone. .. Those 10 losses are as much as Trump suffered in 2018, 2020 and 2024 combined.” @cnn.com
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Jen Taub @jentaub.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
“A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.” ysph.yale.edu/news-article...
ysph.yale.edu
Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects
A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it
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Dave Bidini @davebidini.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Heroic rock legacy band replaces their late heroic rock legacy drummer with a slightly built younger German woman, Anika Niles. These are choices that men can and should make. Bravo to RUSH for not taking the predictable route.
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Raises the interesting seeming paradox that AI can be useful in individual users’ hands, but is useless in increasing corporate efficiency or productivity. www.thenerve.news/p/cory-docto...
thenerve.news
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful. So employees just play along with the fiction to keep their jobs, writes our t...
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Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 05/08/2026
If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future. The @theguardian.com just published an amazing piece about my book, "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy." Coming August 18! www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...
theguardian.com
‘If we don’t fight back, we don’t have a future’: the journalist taking on the ‘tech fascists’ of Silicon Valley
As Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their peers have grown richer and more influential, Gil Durán argues they have all but abandoned democracy – and found the perfect government to enable them
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
So beautiful. You have seven minutes for this.
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kobayashi ḫamṭu @mattboot.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
completely agree, the infinite flexibility of phrasal verbs is the greatest thing about this language
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
The LRB site is back up. This is definitely worth reading in full. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
lrb.co.uk
Emily Wilson · An Uncomplicated Man
As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my...
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Centrists always present these takes as savvy "harsh truths" for the left, but they're the most pathetic kind of ignorant, cowardly self-soothing. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
theguardian.com
Boss of startup hacked by rogue OpenAI agent urges ‘radical transparency’ in investigation
Artificial intelligence firm should provide $100m for cyber defences, says Hugging Face CEO
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Big congratulations to @mattgoldrick.bsky.social on this very well deserved honor!
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Saturday morning vocal comping!
Six tracks of audio displayed as waveforms, with bits of each one highlighted to show which parts are unmuted.
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
I haven’t gotten deep into this debate, but a lot of what Odgers is saying rings true to me here. And a really well done article conveying the complexities of the issue. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...
theguardian.com
The social media ban sceptic: are we getting it wrong on kids, tech and mental health?
Psychologist Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years. She fears the current debate around smartphones obscures some of the biggest issues facing teenagers – from the impact of...
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
This sums it up so well.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 24/06/2026
The goal of viewpoint diversity is to introduce into the study of culture non-peer reviewed views and indeed discredited views simply for political balance on the most narrowly conceived terms of partisan politics. It is an approach even AEI rejects in science but wants to apply to humanities.
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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 23/06/2026
you'd think the planet's first trillionaire hijacking a $42.5 billion taxpayer infrastructure program to grab massive chunks of money for substandard satellite broadband he already planned to deploy would have been a bigger news story for outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times
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Phillips OBrien @phillipspobrien.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Just a friendly reminder. If the US had taken only a small fraction of the money and military equipment it has squandered fighting and losing to Iran, and instead helped Ukraine, the Middle East would be more stable and Russia would be facing defeat.
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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
getting rid of grades entirely would be much more effective at curbing surreptitious use of genAI than any amount of surveillance, would do vastly less harm to the pedagogical relationship at the heart of education, and wouldn't be another massive economic windfall for the creepiest people you know
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
And it wound up being historical. Just wow.
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Mekons in a small club followed by the most exciting half of basketball I’ve ever seen. 4 seconds left and anyone could win…
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
This is very sad news. Probably my all time favorite jazz guitarist. Seeing him in Toronto in the late 1980s was mind blowing. Those records will be spinning today…
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Semantics of Natural Languages @semnatlangs.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
We're thrilled to announce the launch of Semantics of Natural Languages, a new diamond open access journal - the scholar-owned and -led successor to Natural Language Semantics, published with OLH under the auspices of LingOA. snl-journal.org The Editors Amy Rose Deal, Clemens Mayr, Florian Schwarz
openlibhums.org
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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
I'm telling you: if you like someone's book or article, straight up email them that. It'll make their day. There are not enough compliments in academia.
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Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News @froomkin.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Note to media: police arresting peaceful protesters singing “give peace a chance” is not protesters “clashing” with police. It’s the state violating the First Amendment rights of people upset that human beings who did nothing illegal are being held without due process and being fed maggots.
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Paul @pawlbologna.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
Ed Markey tears into Seth Moulton: "Massachusetts deserves better than a senator who scapegoats trans kids." The crowd goes fucking wild.
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
What's this a plot of? Wrong answers only! If you want the right answer, check out the Lee et al. paper near the top of websites.umass.edu/pater/papers/.
A plot with axes going from -10 to 10, light yellow to dark blue gradations, and a bright red  line going from (-10,-10) to oscillate around 0 on the x-axis as the value on the y-axis slowly increases, eventually ending in the area where both x and y are positive.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 29/05/2026
Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Correlation is not causation, correlation is not causation... The people being interviewed mostly know this, but they of course had to use this grabby headline.
tpr.org
Study finds voting can help you live longer
Voting is typically associated with politics and civil engagement, but a new study finds evidence that voting helps older people live longer.
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
This was a nice surprise! The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries has purchased this item in response to your recent Interlibrary Loan request:      Loan Title: The Emergence and Development of American English
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Cambridge University Press - Linguistics @cambup-linguistics.cambridge.org · 24/04/2026
The Emergence and Development of American English by William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. Based on data from the Linguistic Atlas Project, this book tells the story of American English from a linguistic standpoint. 📚 cup.org/41QndtU
The Emergence and Development of American English by William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Thanks for sharing this @asheeshks.org - it's the best Hampshire history/tribute I've read. Learning a lot - and I'm a local!
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Joe Pater @joe-pater.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
What a great meta-conversation we can now have about whether “Rock Music” is in fact rock music. As an old rocker, I say it is, and it’s f’ing brilliant. @bowiesongs.bsky.social, @ch-narayan.bsky.social, @erdanton.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/music/2026/m...
theguardian.com
Charli xcx: Rock Music review – is she really pivoting from pop? Don’t be so sure …
The lyrics may argue the dancefloor is dead, but this funny, wilfully plasticky new single isn’t the total about-turn from Brat that fans expected
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joysters5.bsky.social @joysters5.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
List of 9 websites where you can download unlimited books for free: 1. gutenberg .org 2. standardebooks .org 3. manybooks .net 4. openlibrary .org 5. bookboon .com 6. freecomputerbooks .com 7. internetarchive .org 8. digilibraries .com 9. librivox .org
Poster of free downloadable video books sites
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Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
This isn’t a scientific debate. This is government censorship. This is Lysenkoism, as @gregggonsalves.bsky.social pointed out last year. And this will not end well. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...
washingtonpost.com
CDC won’t publish report showing covid shots cut likelihood of hospital visits
The report, which had cleared the agency’s scientific-review process, had been delayed. It now won’t be published at all, people familiar with the decision told The Post.
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