Is anyone running oral exams in English Literature courses, and how has it gone for you? I'm now halfway through marking, and it is an utter bloodbath. I can't do this again, or, I need to believe that alternatives to this broken metric are possible.

I mean, surely the reason that there's good conservative art but that MAGA hasn't made any is that pound eliot etc are still fundementally propositional? MAGA adherents don't have anything to propose; they aren't "conservative"; just _being_ in MAGA is doing what artwork would do otherwise

not entirely surprised that the person leading this effort has also been a hard driver of the AHA’s anti-Palestine politics

Simile Vanilli

Marion and I put our Weber hats on at the end of our entry into this market and refused to take them off.

new gasp of horror unlocked students writing "premium" to mean inaccessible

As a people, we are not tremendously gifted at heat. Likewise, something tells me that the norms of UK journalism are ill-adapted to high-density periods of ill-considered swimming. There's something achingly English in a sweet, lame, L. P. Hartley way about "getting into difficulties".

If you don't work in the academy and want to know why academics in the UK are all so bloody miserable -- apart from AI! -- you should really read Collini's piece. It's a service for him to have laid out the structural crisis as clearly and succinctly as he has here. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

A strong irony here is that the descriptive text for this study is itself slop.

Half-term. Kid asks to watch tv, runs off to pee. I move from my marking stack of slop exams to turn it on. Al-Jazeera. I watch a woman crawl along the ground in the dirt and then get blown up. I switch on Pokemon. My kid comes back in. Parenting in 2026.

I think I wish that the university worked the way students think that it works. Where professors can take actions, for instance.

The very best scripts on this module I'm moderating were, I'm fairly sure, written by humans, and it is poignant to think that exciting, subtle, risk-taking, thoughtful and masterly work like this is going to be, quite sensibly, foreclosed, quite soon. 21-yr-olds won't get to do that anymore.

If Anthropic and OpenAI both made corn chips, Anthropic would have a flavour called "French Onion and Soured Cream" while OpenAI would call it "RANCHMAXXXING" in case you wondered how it is going marking these student exams

An absolute thrill-ride from start to finish

For no particular reason, took the boys for an after school picnic at Finchale Priory. Completely alone here for a while except for many hundreds of birds. It's not so bad.

Petrol station forecourts are still manaically discounting this year's crop of appallingly-tempered easter eggs. Unheard of in May

Hey @sainsburys.bsky.social, why on earth are you selling unripened taleggio in a plastic bag, that then has to bravely grow its own rind over four weeks, because it is inedible until then? Do you even know what this cheese is supposed to look and taste like?

While bad fruit is worse than bad versions of many things, merely ok fruit is better most.ok things. And great fruit is better than anything.

This is a lot of fun! The boringness of other people's chat logs is identical to the boringness of their dreams. In both cases they are talking to themselves, and can't understand why we aren't just gutted to have missed it.

I think about this a lot; between 2010 and 2016 I took about 8750 photos in rare books rooms, and I have used about 1000 so far, and they are an invaluable source base and I think about them all the time. If they were all transcribed, somehow, i know i wouldnt.

I can’t believe we’re still doing this. Knight Rider is actually the driver. The car is “Knight Rider’s Monster.”

This is fiction like In Cold Blood is fiction, ie., it isnt

It is 11:40am. This morning I have read through two (2) 10,000 word finalist dissertations that were at least part-composed by LLMs. They both did very well, and there's nothing I can do about it. I give up. I'm going home to clean the kitchen and do the laundry. That at least means something.

7 dollar gas. Well, I guess I'll buy an electric car. Oh those are 60 thousand dollars? Well at least electricity is cheap. Oh the government won't build solar panels because it's "Too transgender"? Well at least wages are going up. Oh the idea of jobs is fake now? Well at least everyone is happ

My pop culture take is that Stephen Colbert has hardened, & a bitter carapace has formed around him, & now he is the deed's creature. I've followed him since 2005 (IYKYK) and he retained a ludic, perverse sensitivity through the first third of TLS. Doing his job, in this world, beat it out of him.

@claudewillan.bsky.social I’m pretty sure counts as my first blurb, but pretty sure this is my first non-academic blurb. And of course it’s DIE, & of course it’s DIE LOADED, where @kierongillen.bsky.social who reminded me of “I will not abandon you” & who frames this sequel via “there are no NPCs”

Today I cleared up a long-standing deep confusion about Levi Strauss; some of his work was revelatory and some bonkers and perverse. TURNS OUT Levi Strauss and Leo Strauss are different people

"I should say, in the spirit of reassurance, that there are no plans to close any department", says the administrator, unreassuringly.

Incredible set just now non stop on 6 music from @laurenlaverne.bsky.social. what a complete pleasure.

For the first time since March 2022 I do not [currently] have any outstanding pieces of writing owed to people I said yes to. (This will change when revisions come back.) Sitting here drinking a very weak G&T and realising just how much anxiety sitting on, and not writing, those chapters caused me

Standing in the kitchen at half past two on a sunny afternoon in-between tasks, idly munching on a stale crust of olive bread, I realised with a start that I had sideslipped into a nightmarish world known only through poems by Mary Oliver

Because all things pass and my kids are growing up, they are into Pokemon now. So we made some cards together this weekend and they had lots of fun doing it. Presenting: Shongalus Rex, The Floggiest Flyer Flop, One Billion Rexodons, Geo-Whose-Ex, and, Bertie

Or! The university will give verbal undertakings to replace if the retirement happens on terms amenable to it, and then just ... not. Or, if someone dies, you might get a fixed term post to replace them "as a favour"

So i made it to today without hearing Schumann Fantasie in C, and im staggered by it. Listening through the first time, it is clearly beloved by pianist composers, bc i hear snippets i know from other things that are actually quoting it. It is ravishing.

Can't believe I am 19 years late to hearing MIRRORED by Battles. Im going to make up for it

One day i will learn not to say things like, dont get yoghurt on the tablecloth, i just laundered it. Perhaps i will learn to stop laundering tablecloths altogether

Everything is catastrophically fucked. But if you have three minutes to spare, do yourself a favour and watch the most charismatic performer who ever lived: youtu.be/-Z0UGGvb4sQ?...

Peggy Lee's Fever. I heard it on my dad's preferred ("smooth") Jazz radio station when I was about eleven. I could not BELIEVE it. My closest referent for it was the Sharky and George theme. I didn't find out what it was until I was eighteen.

Professional milestone! LLM-generated Goodreads spam!

Rylean accounts of effects of LLM use when

Taking PTO for a compulsory wellbeing retreat with a vampire. Hitting your KPIs with a vampire. Leveraging core strengths with a vampire. More of a comment than a question with a vampire.

I often think about @ultan1793.bsky.social complaining to me, 20 years ago, about kids who grew up under Blair who were categorically incapable of thinking through revolutionaries' motivations as matters of principle.

The barbarians are at the gates. The barbarians also own the conglomerate that makes and installs the gates, and they are now inside

An underdiscussed aspect of parenting two ASD kids with diff triggers needs and thresholds is how every moment can ratchet up the permanent sophies choice of regular parenting into staving off crisis

This always lifts my spirits.

I am beginning to see people write like LLMs. There are tics of rhetorical pointing in social and news media slops that are characteristic of these models. I think that this is a deeper problem of human-generated text than we have figured out how to solve, yet.

I would really like some enterprising law firm to make a class suit with every real-life expert, and the estate of every dead one, to burn this product to the ground.

And just like that-- it is March 6th, and I have taught my last proper tutorials of the academic year. No more till September- in many ways the best part of my job. I will miss the ferocious mental and emotional exercise of teaching.

The wild thing about people over 40 is everyone is processing grief most of the time and never mentions it

i'd like to propose a new outlook "status", like a chartreuse colour, that would indicate, "this person /thinks/ they're caught up on urgent emails, but if they aren't, a gentle ping would actually alleviate their anxiety"