The "average American millennial man" is disinterested in politics. What are we even talking about here?

It really sucks to realize that Bernie Sanders would have made a terrible president, because despite having a lot of integrity himself, he is an abysmal judge of character. Just fuckup after fuckup with the candidates who only get traction from his endorsement. His appointees would have been awful.

Incredible what a great Rorschach test the Platner tattoo is. Almost no one I have respect for is defending it and almost everyone I think is a dishonest hack is coming up with excuses. Like, cutting across ideology even!

I'm at the point in the semester where I'm reading Terry Pratchett and posting too much online. Five weeks to go!

I strongly believe that one of the keys to keep some grip on reality while being too online is to NEVER ARGUE WITH ANYONE ONLINE. It's the arguing that drives you to say insane things that you then have to incorporate into your worldview.

I always find it fascinating how rich people can't understand a privileged person supporting policies that help average people. They seem to just assume it's some sort of scam. Has mamdani ever claimed to be working class himself? Seems self-evident that he has not.

More interested in winning online arguments than winning elections.

I am honestly baffled by the people standing by this guy in an election that is still more than a year away.

"You cannot be explaining your Nazi tattoo and defeat a multi-term incumbent."

I guess the position is, "We just let men have a little bit of fascism... for fun!"

Me 10 years ago: You know people are always calling political opponents Nazis even if they aren’t anything like Nazis, I wish that would stop Monkey‘s paw:

Boy, this country is fucked, from "A Nazi salute is unacceptable" to "What's a Nazi tattoo among friends" in 9 months.

Two post-mortems on the canvas breakdown: 1) We've all become too dependent on LMS's and (more importantly) off-site IT infrastructure. 2) Not a big fan of professors mocking students for not knowing what to do when the entire way they have been trained to interact with us breaks down.

I don't know how many popular history books I've read where I've been largely "fine" with what it was saying... until it hit something I was an expert on. At that point you can't help but wonder if the rest is all simplistic bullshit.

Still down! And on one of the few days where I really, really needed it to be up.

Maybe Canvas will never come back, and we'll all be freed from the LMS tyranny.

my current impression is that at least half of all visible radicals/militants regardless of affiliation are looking for something which provides them morally justified targets to be dicks to

Today we learn that higher ed comes to a screeching halt when Amazon breaks.

Whelp, I guess the work I planned this morning isn't going to happen. Thanks AWS!

i think when lab leadership hear 'left defector' they picture 'angry, fringe uni socialists' but it's mainline libs - teachers, nurses, aspirational couples, recent overworked & underpaid grads & more settled surbirbanites - the **core** of their coalition

If 1863-1876 was possible considering what this country was like in 1861, then a lot more is possible today.

This is rapidly becoming true in academia too. There's firm opposition in the humanities, but I fear we're being overwhelmed by administrators who've already bought the pitch and by our colleagues in technical fields who sincerely think it's something their students need to learn how to use.

This woman is in a nursing program & the entire textbook for her anatomy class is wrong because it was written by a professor who used chatgpt to generate the images & possibly the text. She complained to the prof, then the university— they’ve done NOTHING about it. www.tiktok.com/t/ZTM5T3CxW/

This is also where the "virtue signaling" stuff comes from. they can't imagine a white person could authentically be anti-racist or a man could be an authentic feminist. Therefore, if you're an anti-racist white person or feminist man, you must be doing it for some other reason.

I genuinely looked into it with deep skepticism and discovered that i wasn't skeptical enough. AI is dogshit for everyone who actually knows what they're doing personally and professionally. I'm glad it helps the dipshits I guess.

New review on H-Early-America, Rindfleisch on Dixon, "Republic of Indians: Empires of Indigenous Law in the Early American South," networks.h-net.org/group/review...

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

People should really go watch videos of FDR speeches. That was a performer having a good time while remaining on message.

Whelp, I was just sharing with my colleague that I have learned a new professional skill: the ability to tell something is LLM-generated just by reading it. So that's something. Should I add it to my CV?

So, I guess the assumptions of Anglo-American constitutionalism of the last ~400 years are fully out the window now. www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-f...

English Civil War vibes intensify.

On Commonplace (commonplace.online), we are running a great new article by Ariel Ron on the overblown Eli Whitney legend and the myth of individual inventors in the early republic. So, today we see a portrait of Whitney on this 1820s bank note. Mechanics Bank, New Haven, CT, $5, 182-.🗃️

I've got to say, when this shutdown started, it felt pretty ominous considering the already ongoing usurpation of legislative power by the executive and lack of resistance to it. Why not just go all the way?

We are living through the most consequential shift in the constitutional government of the United States in over a hundred and fifty years and nobody seems to have even noticed yet.

A zebra longwing on our firebush today.

Most of these people are deeply trained, or at least highly educated, in humanities. Knowing isn’t being.

But you shouldn't be too surprised when they say stuff like this: "You were better off being a Black person in Charleston, S.C., in 1850, when they had an operating slave market than being conceived as a Black baby in New York City or Baltimore today."

The fuck?

It's actually good if people do good things even if it's only for social approval.

Higher Ed in 2025 is opening your mailbox to see that your institution has sent you: 1. A Center for Teaching and Learning call to integrate AI into your classroom; and 2. An Office of Academic Integrity email encouraging you to crack down on students who use AI to cheat.

Pretty obvious that the "compact" as well as much else going on right now in higher ed is the oligarchs trying to squash one of the few areas of life that they don't have control.

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

Maybe having three vaccines in one day wasn't the best idea. Just cancelled today's classes!

For my book, my editor but also the reviewers. The first draft was extremely self-indulgent.

"Good people will be deterred from public service if they see a meaningful risk of winding up in jail afterward." Sure, man. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

You can use the code 10VABOOKS to receive 30% off your preorder of Freedom in the Age of Slavery: A History of Free People of Color in Virginia. www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10193/

Isn't the whole tariff thing functionally Charles I's ship money?