And while I am pro-open-source-AI, I have to admit that individually customized language models are not going to, um, *increase* the coherence of the fabric of reality.

My latest (50th!) weekly round-up of reading and listening recommendations, taking in colonialism and conflict in the Middle East, professional football, and the relationship between American film and politics. 🧵 #menasky #polisky #filmsky #skystorians🗃️ #envhist #litsky

Ich habe mir kurz die Mühe gemacht die jüngere Geschichte der politischen Morde in den USA anzuschauen. Zwischen 2005 und 2025 gab es 371 solcher Morde. 93% davon wurden von Tätern mit einem rechten oder rechtsextremen Motiv verübt. Quelle: Anti Defamation League.

“Oneiric technology” is the perfect distinction for describing everything from nanotech to ‘AI’. These are not technologies of the actual world, of physics and math and biology, but technologies of dream-stuff, of imagined sciences, materials, and logics that do not inhabit our real world

I am not sure what on earth the saturated field of JA biography may have been doing if not looking at her in the context of her society, family, friends…?

"Blocking Sci-Hub and Libgen thus acts as a mechanism of capital accumulation at the expense of India’s academic commons — reinforcing class hierarchies." indianexpress.com/article/opin...

Just seen this - a find with all sorts of elegant implications for Nashe. Bravo, Joseph Black. Lovely to see TN, who projects an air of brilliant improv, rechecking sources and writing corrections in his neatest handwriting. www.folger.edu/blogs/collat...

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

<<stage whisper>> It was never about jobs.

It's starting to get physically painful for me to watch a technology that could have been produced ethically and with an incredible command of a specific skill set that's useful to people but instead became a tech bro talking point be sold to us as the catch-all technological savior.

Green building Gibbon, MN

My colleague Prof Marianne Hirsch has shared a letter she sent Columbia’s Acting President Claire Shipman about the dangerous measures the university is taking as part of its “agreement” with Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. open.substack.com/pub/riseupco...

My recent lecture for @rarebookschool.bsky.social can now be found on their YouTube channel youtu.be/ElvNacFyoWQ.

Winning elections will only be the beginning of a long struggle.

"A key legacy of illiberalism turns out to be a series of institutional traps... Inaction leaves the damage unrepaired and demobilizes supporters, while effective action may involve capitulation to the illiberal playbook."

According to POLITICO reporter @kyledcheney.bsky.social, a federal judge has blocked the cancellation of NEH awards by DOGE.

This is a laundry list of rhetorical strategies to defend the adoption of a given technology for the purposes of advancing an ideology & economic regime: inevitability, unquestioning praise of “innovation,” buy-in from concerned stakeholders, assurances that partnership is not capitulation. 1/n

On teacher's union sipping the AI Kool-aid … This is a mf thread 🗣🧵🔥

educators HELPED design the curriculum?! helped whom? This is not just complete BS, but open admission of what RW is promoting.

Perfection. Find more here: mamdanitimes.com

Something really important about organizations’ decisions to adopt AI tools which people need to understand is this: it often comes down to a room of a handful of people who are simply uninformed and think it’s just a new norm they’ll be left behind on if they don’t find a use for it in their work.

The first-sale doctrine allows libraries to share books they own *on paper* much more freely than digital copies—which can be encumbered by time limits & riders about what ppl are allowed to do w/ them. So the intellectual commons we had from the 15c-20c is not guaranteed to continue much longer.+

Loss of info. Makes sense if you only cite relatively recent US / UK / global conglomerate publishers. Makes your citations much less useful if you often cite publications from the “rest of the world.” Those applauding are the first group. Those upset are the second.

The general consensus forming around this very correct sentiment is that students' use of AI is encouraged by the transactional nature of higher ed. The systemic issue is that college educators, for the most part, aren't the ones who have made education transactional. So how can we fix this system?

Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.

Vienna has created public spaces all over the nicest parts of the city, investing in free infrastructure. In the U.S., these places would be privatized or commercialized. Such a visible difference in approach to community and equality.

I have a non-frivolous footnote to Dibdin as a source of information. From here, it is all downhill.

Yellow door Kent, IL

Still thinking about this post. The broader point, which should resonate way beyond the specific issue of "peer review," is that human disagreement is not friction and waste. It's a load-bearing, functional part of social and intellectual systems.

What can we know about Second World Literature—the world literary system of Cold War Eastern Europe? Part I. of a series.

This is very useful.

There is hope—even for us. Not sure what Kafka would have thought about it, but I am at least pleased:

Welcome to the 9th Material Text Seminar - a workshop with Peter J. Grund: "Space, spacing, and pace, and the fictional representation of speech" on May 28th. This is a zoom event, and all are welcome! Sign up here: konsta.utu.fi/Default.aspx....

Love this. In his “I Agree” installation Dima Yarovinsky-Yahel took the content from terms of service statements for companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder and printed them out on A4 paper with a standard font size for legal contracts to demonstrate the length of these agreements.

Delighted to say that my article, "The Shakspaires of Trinity Lane: A Possible Shakespeare Life-Record" is now fully published and open-access! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

So I've got this article which should be coming out in the journal _Shakespeare_ any moment now, but in the meantime - Briefly, it's about a C17 letter preserved in the binding waste of a book now in Hereford Cathedral.

Praxis.

A good time to start pondering the long-term future of books “owned” by libraries only as digital copies. Sure, most of them are frankly ephemeral in an intellectual sense, still… (I was always into clay tablets btw.)

The National Humanities Alliance is collecting information on canceled NEH grants to share with congressional leaders. This is legit fact finding in support of competent lobbying. If you've had your grant canceled, do let them know. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Chris’s story is the story of the many ways in which the NEH supported students, teachers, scholars across the country. How incredibly valuable it was, in spite of the always way too limited amount of funding available. Closing it is a clear case of vandalism.

He's taxing tea. Tea. What could go wrong?

Another indispensable if yet speculative take on what DOGE is really up to with its “AI First” agenda. I pushed in this direction in my #USofAI talk, including the same obsession with Login-dot-gov: drive.google.com/file/d/1O2qk...

my grocery store has a massive trade deficit with me. I buy from them every week and they never buy anything from me. in order to correct this injustice, I’m going to self-impose a sales tax on groceries so that I can’t buy as many.

Moreover, a lot of these are extremely fragile states in democratic transition (Bangladesh) and economic crisis (Sri Lanka, Laos, Tunisia, Pakistan). In addition to pushing them further toward China's orbit, this could tip some of them over into fiscal and debt crises with regional implications.

Dead people telling the President to pursue a trade war with an uninhabited island is real George III territory

Powerful and smart essay by @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social about who benefits and who bullshits when institutions demand adjustment to the presence of AI in research.

If US academia is about to become analogous with the German of circa 1933—what is now the US of that time? What is the plausible target of the new intellectual migration? Asking for a friend…

Hey there, we're the Bibliographical Society of America, aka The BSA. We're new here on BlueSky! Give us a follow to keep up with info about our programs for researchers & bibliophiles across the professional & disciplinary spectra.