Vivian Wilson is interviewed in Teen Vogue. She is not a nepo baby — she’s been cut off from the sperm donor, Elon Musk, who contributed in a minimal way to her birth.

Wilson entered the public consciousness because of her father, but not for typical nepo baby reasons. (Before you ask, Wilson says she’s been financially independent from her father since she came out as trans in 2020, so you can stop sending her Venmo requests for thousands of dollars, something she says has happened before.) At the time, she was trying to disconnect herself from Musk, eventually writing in a 2022 petition to legally change her name that she doesn’t “wish to be related to [her] biological father in any way, shape or form.” Though she’d never publicly spoken about Musk before then, her attempt to distance herself from him is what ultimately drew her into the public eye.

“I have a sharp tongue,” Wilson tells Teen Vogue in her second-ever published interview. “When you spend all of COVID [lockdown] in online communities of queer people who are constantly getting into drama and trying to read each other, [you] learn how to make a response very quickly, and you learn how to be funny and snap at someone else in a comedic way…. Getting into fights with other queer teenagers — that’s how you learn how to be quick and witty.” Much like her father, Wilson is extremely online; unlike her father, she’s really good at it.

In my personal experience, this holds up: the gay and trans people I’ve known are all great conversationalists with a wicked sense of humor. She definitely did not inherit that from her terrible father.

I’m sympatico with her politics, and not Musk’s.

TV: Isaacson described your politics as “radical Marxism” in the book. Do you consider yourself a Marxist?
VW: I’m a leftist, not a Marxist. I describe myself by the things that I personally believe in and the things that I feel are pretty common sense, if you think about it for more than two seconds. I believe in [universal basic income]. I believe in free health care. I believe food, shelter, and water are human rights. I believe that wealth inequality is one of the biggest problems of the United States right now, especially of our generation. I feel like workers should be fairly compensated for the work that they do, and I don’t feel like wealth should be hoarded by these mega-billionaires who are the top 1%, who only have their own interests at heart. I’ve met some of these billionaires — they’re not very good people. I don’t think any of them are.

I don’t think that’s an unusual perspective, and I think most Americans would agree with that, if they weren’t poisoned by the lie that those goals are being stolen from them by immigrants and gay/trans people. It’s the position that all Democrats should take, except for the unfortunate fact that that party is led by people seduced by money and power.

A French scientist flew into Houston to attend a conference, and DHS searched his luggage. To their horror, they found…a phone. That contained messages that were disrespectful to Donald Trump, and his policies that are wrecking science. This is now considered criminal activity in America.

During the search, officers rebuked him for messages “which conveyed a hatred toward Trump and could be considered to be terrorism”, the same source claimed. Another source cited by AFP said the officers claimed the messages were “hateful and conspiracy”.

The Telegraph has not seen the content of the messages.

The FBI then opened an investigation into the researcher, but “the charges were abandoned”, according to the second source.

The incident occurred on March 9, and the researcher was sent back to Europe the following day after authorities confiscated his personal and professional equipment.

Gosh, I sure hope no law enforcement officials have read my blog, because I’m second to no one in my hatred and contempt for everyone involved in the current administration.

Fuck Trump, his lapdog Vance, and everyone who voted for him, too.

A sophomore undergraduate student at Brown University named Alex Shieh is trying to get on board the DOGE train by exposing all the waste and fraud going on at his school. He has started a website called Bloat@Brown to catalog all the criminal waste, and he’s desperately spamming Twitter to get Elon Musk’s attention.

He has a methodology that he documents. He’s feeding the list of Brown University employees to an AI he has loaded with an algorithm to identify all the bad actors in the university hierarchy, which seems to be flagging everyone other than Alex Shieh himself, who is a legacy admission, the son of a wealthy alum. This is the entirety of his program.

Bloat@Brown’s algorithm scrapes publicly available internet sources for each employee and role (brown.edu pages, articles, LinkedIn pages, job postings, etc.) and searches our database for co-workers with similar roles—similar to how a human would conduct internet research. These online sources are passed to an LLM, which makes its judgments solely based on the retrieved sources.

His program sorts through all the positions at Brown, sorting them into three categories: illegal jobs, redundant jobs, and bullshit jobs. I’m relieved that we don’t have a similar naive young student here at UMM passing judgement on me.

Here’s how he defines “illegal jobs”.

DEI: Does the role involve diversity, equity, and inclusion, which may violate the Civil Rights Act following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard?

Antisemitism: Has the employee publicly voiced antisemitic ideas, which the Trump Administration asserts is a violation of the Civil Rights Act?

You can tell his mind has been poisoned by conservatives. They all think that any role that allows a non-white person, or non-male person, is criminal. Also, you know that he’s going to label opposition to murdering Palestinians as anti-semitism.

His “redundancy” is similarly gooey.

Automation: Can the role be automated using current technology?

Overlap: Is the employee assigned to responsibilities that could otherwise be completed by other employees with overlapping responsibilities?

I’d be in trouble here. Our biology discipline employs 9 faculty — what a waste! All you need is one biologist, right? I’m sure Mr Shieh is fully aware of the breadth of biology and knows exactly how many people you need to teach it.

The real fun begins when he starts describing “bullshit jobs”. He has probably never worked in a real job in his life, but he knows which ones are unnecessary, because he read a book once.

“Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” is a 2018 book by David Graeber that describes five types of useless jobs.

Flunkie: Does the role exist primarily to make one’s boss feel more important (e.g., receptionists, assistants, etc.)?

Goon: Is the employee’s primary responsibility to fight or deceive others on behalf of the university (e.g., litigators, PR specialists, marketers, etc.)?

Duct Taper: Is the employee’s primary responsibility to make temporary fixes to systems that could be permanently streamlined (e.g., data entry, IT maintenance staff, etc.)?

Box Ticker: Is the employee’s primary responsibility to create superfluous outputs (e.g., memo writers, newsletter writers, etc.)?

Taskmaster: Is the employee a manager whose primary responsibility is to assign unnecessary tasks to their subordinates (e.g., middle management)?

Cool. So all receptionists and secretaries and assistants do is fluff the ego of the boss? Good to know. Personally, I’ve found the staff indispensable — they keep all the records, they know where stuff is, they track deadlines, they organize everything. My university would fall apart without them. At Brown, though, I guess the college president handles all the details; the faculty are all independent and don’t get reminders of all the work outside teaching and research that they’re expected to do.

I guess recruiting and PR at Brown is done by “goons” running around, lying about the university, and fighting prospective students. Every Fall a new crop of freshmen are hog-tied and dumped into the dorms. Yeah, let’s get rid of those guys.

Can he get any more patronizing? Maintenance staff are just “duct tapers”; why not set up university IT right from the very beginning, so you don’t need someone to patch it and maintain it? Also, no one needs “data”, let alone someone to “enter” it.

There is something called institutional memory, and it’s preserved by all those memos and documents that someone has to write, and that get sent around to all of us. That’s the glue that makes a university an institution with a purpose and a body of procedures to keep it running.

I guess we need to get rid of all middle management, it doesn’t do anything. All we need is a president who tells us what to do, and then the faculty who do the teaching and research, and anything in between is superfluous. Wait, who is doing the accounting to make sure I get a paycheck? Who is maintaining the buildings and infrastructure? Who turns on the heat in the winter? You mean I have to do all that now, because Alex Shieh thinks it would be more efficient?

Every university has a few entitled students — I was once told by a student that I needed to run down to the prep room to get some reagents for him right now because he “pays my salary” — but Alex Shieh takes that to a whole new level. I think maybe part of his education ought to be spending some time serving as a flunkie, a goon, taping ducts and ticking boxes. But he doesn’t have to because he’s apparently a rich privileged child of a rich privileged mommy and daddy.

There’s a fun discussion of Alex Shieh on Bluesky. He’s been following Musk’s lead and writing to the employees of Brown University and demanding that they justify their job, and getting some replies.

Oh, that poor little boy is getting dragged.