The "major news outlet publish an informed take on higher ed" challenge.

Reading some 18th c reception history and honestly this hits the same.

“It’s so cool that we also worked on this piece in aural skills!” Who do you think made the aural skills course pack?

"Grade inflation is a national problem that experts say reduces the value of grades. If most students get an A, grades become less valuable to employers, grad school admissions officers and students themselves as measures of subject mastery." Okay but what if we just got rid of grades instead?

Regardless of your disciplinary citational ethics/rationales, if you can get a paper through peer review with dozens of hallucinated citations, your citational practice is probably not doing the work you think/claim it is.

Can we please start calling AI-generated citations, AI-supported "nonfiction" writing, etc., what it is? It's fraud.

Actually, AI errors in a book about truth in the age of AI *do* diminish the larger questions that the book raises about truth, trust, and A.I.

Regardless of your disciplinary citational ethics/rationales, if you can get a paper through peer review with dozens of hallucinated citations, your citational practice is probably not doing the work you think/claim it is.

Maybe the real citations were the friends we made along the way.

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

Incredibly agree, I had to move this into a folder so it wouldn't offend my visual sensibilities.

Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian

in my experience (with student essays) hallucinated dois often don’t resolve at all or resolve to entirely different articles — so enforcing adding links and having the editor check each one would be an approach that could work (but obviously not for paper only sources)

IDK, maybe it’s different in other fields but checking references isn’t that hard? In my subfield I will recognize the titles, authors, and dates of at least the 100+ most cited books and papers and it doesn’t take that long to search the unfamiliar ones.

More than once (in our field) I’ve seen a semi-hallucinated citation to a real paper or a real scholar but the LLM changed the name of that scholar from a female name to a male name.

Purcell and Dowland fighting over who gets to set this to a descending chromatic bass line.

Weird not to see real estate expansion projects, chatbot TAs, or ed-tech privatization on this report of what makes university experience valuable to students

hey man the music in here just switched from extradiegetic to diegetic. are you about to embark on an emotional journey. you gotta tell me if your fucking movie is starting dude

Getting Gemini popups every time I paste text into a Google Doc and it's driving me bananas. (1) Why can't I opt out of this?? (2) What message is this sending to our students, who work almost exclusively in Google Docs?

I am so confused when people say they use AI for fact-checking. How do you know that AI is checking your facts correctly?? When the sole purpose of fact-checking is verifying facts, wouldn't hallucinations be a pretty significant problem? Someone please explain what I'm missing here.

Remember when the point of writing something down was to communicate your human thoughts to another human being?

Sir, thys ys an abyss

Love this energy.

In every academic book there is a secret second book hiding in the footnotes. Sometimes it is the first draft that had migrated there to escape the revisions. Sometimes it is the author's tortured secret rebuttal of their own claims, and sometimes it is the incipient form of the their next book.

I'm struck by how extensively COVID transformed our teaching, driving us to develop curricula and pedagogy that heavily rely on LMS tools that it's now too late and too difficult to divest from.

Every faculty member at Blackboard school downloading their gradebook this morning.

They’re gonna close down the predatory learning management system unless we put on the best dang talent show this town has ever seen!!!

Fresco painters:

AI for Bluesky but it's just blocking baseball-related posts from people you follow for other reasons.

My final project is now a video presentation or podcast. In the past, a written paper was also an option but I found those were much more vulnerable to LLM use. Students may still use LLMs but in my experience most spoken presentations are extemporized which helps a lot.

A great post and a great reminder that editors and analysts have unique insight into what LLM-generated writing (or outlining, ideation, etc.) lacks that human writing has in spades.

Say what you will about the humanities, *this* is not happening in our fields.

Ah yes, I frequently think to myself “if only I could have a very competent rom com about myself and Marilyn Monroe that I consume entirely on my own.” Heaven knows I have derived very little pleasure from the communal experience of watching When Harry Met Sally dozens of times.

We got approval to hire a visiting assistant professor of musicology, with an August 2026 start date. It's open, but we especially need someone to teach history of pre-1900 music and American popular musics. Please apply or share!

Great thread -- at the heart of this is a (deliberate?) misunderstanding in admin and tech spaces that teaching and learning is about (expensive, difficult, time-consuming) skill development, not (monetizable, extractable) content delivery.

I don't make the rules or anything but if on Friday, May 1 we happen to be talking about BOTH compound periods and subtonic vs. leading tone, I think I have a responsibility to my students and to the field of music theory to bring in one particular example ...

It happened to me: I watched a Blue Jays game. @brynhughes.net

The worst part about this is how completely inevitable it was after COVID forced faculty to put 100% of our teaching “content” on the institution-managed LMS.

Amazing advice!

Maya Angelou on the joys of being edited

This feels personal. Also perfect. #nuntastic

Has someone finally Listened To Us?

I know professors who put a lot of effort into their final class meeting, striving to bring their course to a close with a culminating insight. Not me. My courses just stop.

good morning colson whitehead, most accomplished of maker workers! "Some people say, “I just use it to brainstorm ideas.” If you don’t know what to paint, or compose, or write, you’re in the wrong job. Art is the business of making up stuff — go make up some stuff." www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...

The shift from a landscape dotted by collective learning to one dotted with data center and distribution warehouses is the most dystopian feature of the present moment

I'm just a girl standing in front of MS Word asking it not to make the default shape blue with a shadow.

I'll add that as an author this makes me despair. What's the point of writing a sustained argument that unfolds across many chapters if presses are increasingly unwilling to package the whole thing together? I might as well start a blog; at least I could cross reference between posts there.

Thrilled my library is only buying digital copies of scholarly books, and that the platforms have wonderful features like: - only download one chapter at a time - limited access to index/bibliography - impossible to read endnotes - read in proprietary software - different pagination from print book

This is so, so well-articulated.

100% my experience with every project I have worked on. I spend years finally figuring out the argument only to discover the overwhelming majority of that argument in notes from half a decade before.