No Kings protest in College Station, TX. Texas A&M showed up. Somewhere around two thousand people showed up. #NoKings.

As we move toward our fall subscription drive, we hope you’ll consider supporting us in part bc we are an independent media company.

No, crosswords are not as vital as journalism. But yes, all content that we consume matters, and it should be as free as possible from corporate control.

Inspired by @seanmcarroll.bsky.social I’ve decided to make threads about my courses this semester. This thread is about the relativity course. Since today was day six, I have some catching up to do.

Inspired by a recent thread by Sean Carroll, I’m going to try posting about the classes I’m teaching. We are two full weeks into the semester so I have a bit of catchup to do.

This semester I am teaching a graduate course on semiclassical analysis and our undergraduate relativity course.

So I’ve just watched two episodes of murderbot and I think Sabrina Wu might have been an even better lead

On a cheerful note, I’m getting to reread the Ivy and Bean series to my second kid and somehow they are even more delightful than I remembered

Small potatoes but the NYT strike means my 1950 day crossword streak ends.

Seeing my dad’s photo on the daycare ofrenda messes me up a little each day. I think I’m glad it will be down on Monday.

I think I messed up by letting my oldest daughter watch Harris’s speech. She is really into the idea of Harris but I think did not appreciate or understand the stakes of the election and now is fretting about how awful our Texas government is. I am glad she cares but I feel awful about it.

I voted! More people at early voting on campus than I’ve seen any year other than 2020.

I just read Monstrous by Sarah Myer and it is incredible. It is maybe the most moving graphic novel that I’ve read since The Best We Could Do. In addition to everything it is, it also provides a terrifying window into what a hellhole middle school in the late 90 was.

I missed the blue alert because I turned off emergency notifications after a spate of blue alerts last year. Now I turn them on only when we expect interesting weather. Instead I slept poorly for standard reasons!

Whe my sister and I decided that my dad’s remains should be interred in the national cemetery in Killeen, we got some pushback from one of his brothers.

Now I have. It’s horrifying. I tried to tell my older kid that I went through this for the first time and she absolutely didn’t understand what the big deal was. We have failed these kids so thoroughly. If we make our kids go through this everybody should have to.

It is fortunate that the alarm was pressed accidentally and so we were cleared after about 10 minutes. I am old enough that I never had to do this at school. I knew intellectually that my kids were used to this experience but I had never experienced it.

I’m sorry but I feel like I need to scream into a void. When I dropped my younger kid off at daycare today I got caught up in a “stay safe” drill and had to shelter silently in the classroom bathroom with the kids.

A Friday night in spring? Waiting for the NSF grant rejection email blast.