Please do this if you did not long ago. Delete everything. Agree to nothing. The people who run this going concern despise academics, are likely very illiquid right now, & will show now compunction about selling all your data, as their revised user agreement makes clear.

Pablo Torre: “Everybody is treating my reporting like a true crime podcast.” Also Pablo Torre: “Don’t turn over that page in front of you. We’re going to answer that question - ‘Is there a smoking gun?!?’ - right after this break.”

Kyle Reese: I’m from the future. AI has taken over. Sarah Connor: How are you gonna stop it? Kyle: Can you teach me to make a Zine? Sarah: Like with comics & songs & stuff? Kyle: That’ll do it. Sarah: You can kill the superintelligent robot with Zines. Kyle: Oh yeah. It’s actually pretty mid.

Nutrition science is super-confusing and a magnet for scammers and influencers So I find this crotchety, skeptical little newsletter a relief. It doesn’t take ads and explains the latest actual science very clearly ✨

The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. The entire bottom 50% of America is worth just $4.2 trillion. Our problem isn't a lack of resources. Our problem is ever-expanding inequality.

“A libel suit simply brings the plaintiff before a vast newspaper court to be tried before the law tries him, and reviled and ridiculed without mercy.” - Mark Twain

“Franklin’s virtues were contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys forever – boys who might otherwise have been happy.” - Mark Twain

It has been brought to my attention that not everyone knows about Ben Franklin's virtue-tracking app

in education, creative industries, caring professions, and LABOR ORGANIZING, people are doing things, there's a movement against-a-i.com www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-luddit...

I fucking love printing. That is all.

I should add: it is nontrivial, but far from impossible, to map the diverging use cases in which the tolerance for conditional token generation is acceptable (“go get’em tiger” emotional support) vs the stakes of factuality hallucinations are too high (medical advice). OpenAI et al. just don’t.

Counterpoint: The person who wrote this obviously reads a lot, but manages to say a bunch of wildly inaccurate, hyperbolic, & paranoid things. Literacy is in peril, but we require better accounting of its history, its production, & what imperils it.

This is a tougher question than you might think. What are your strategies for tracking new & forthcoming books in your field and/or discipline?

JUST found out @jeffreyinsko.bsky.social, WHO I AM CURRENTLY PLANNING AN ENERGY STUDIES SYMPOSIUM WITH, has been given Burton V Barnes Award for Academic Excellence by Sierra Club Jeff did not tell me. Or post about it. Because Jeff is a Hoosier GenXer Jeff probably asked the Sierras to reconsider

You’ll be shocked to hear that their recommendation is not limiting the circumstances in which AI is deployed, but rather accepting the inevitability it will occasionally have catastrophic effects.

@jeffreyinsko.bsky.social just this afternoon took home an award the @sierraclub.org named for another Michigan environmentalist, Burton V. Barnes. If you haven’t read Insko’ relentless work on pipelines and especially @enbridge.bsky.social here’s your daily quota: open.substack.com/pub/thecurre...

This is good content.

JUST found out @jeffreyinsko.bsky.social, WHO I AM CURRENTLY PLANNING AN ENERGY STUDIES SYMPOSIUM WITH, has been given Burton V Barnes Award for Academic Excellence by Sierra Club Jeff did not tell me. Or post about it. Because Jeff is a Hoosier GenXer Jeff probably asked the Sierras to reconsider

I wrote about why I don't like the environment.

“The real existential threat isn’t AI—it’s the powerful people building it.” — @adambecker.bsky.social For a simple debunking of bizarro AI politics, read this now (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

👇👇👇🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

On Wednesday evening, I’m going to be giving a talk on the “Right to Teach and Learn” at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. If you’re nearby (Dallas), it’d be great to see you there. www.austincollege.edu/news/~board/...

The most recent installment of Night People, his midnight to 6AM jazz set on WKHY. He doesn’t patronize the audience by telling them why these tracks go together. He saves that for me.

This was a joke, but Silver literally has a post today in which he twists his way around to suggesting one of the parties responsible for getting Kimmel suspended is Bluesky.

So, my current working theory is that this incredible gift, that I am obsessing over, came from someone at the actual printer. There are a few minor printer’s errors in the text which make me think is was never amongst the stock that went to retailers. I love everything about it.

I promised myself 2025 would be a year of print. I obvs haven’t been pure. It’s not easy. I’m overriding the app locks on my phone to make this skeet. But I cannot recommend it highly enough. Printing presses are deliberate democracy. Subscribe to periodicals. Buy books. Literate yo self.

oooOOOooo

Probably goes without saying, but I do not hold all of academe accountable for things political scientists do.

stimulating conversation with blake oetting from january just finally came out in november mag! www.novembermag.com/content/anna...

Popped back in here to plug @christinegrillo.bsky.social’s new and, like, astonishingly good single-millennial civil-war novel the same week @mattseybold.bsky.social’s bonus coda ep drops. Your assigned weekend reading and listening!

Updating my TwainGram.

Bloomsbury published today some tidbit of my forthcoming book taco. You can read here! www.bloomsbury.com/us/discover/...

At the end of 3 weeks in my AmLit survey, I have perfect attendance. It’s one class, with a dozen students, so anecdotal at best. But a shocking departure from the norm since 2020. Combined with pretty strong attendance in my other classes, it has been a strong source of much-needed hope.

Dropped a surprise epilogue yesterday. It captures many of the themes of “A Tale of Today.” Sectarian conflicts, professional rivalries, periodization claims, the conversion of theory & praxis. While also attempting to offer a slow media release valve to crisis thinking.

My most-read stuff lives downstream of posts by people with the wattage of @mattseybold.bsky.social apparently. #TrollLife

This book is riotous. I just snuck away so I could read more. What a gift, whoever you are!

"You are already an insider-outsider to the problem of fascism. We all are..We're all at the MAGA rally right now." - @jeffsharlet.bsky.social

I’m really excited about this, but going into it, I want to ask teaching ppl on here: what are the ways that AI has been forced into your teaching life in a new way this fall? I will not share any specifics during this public conversation, just want to be able to talk about where we are now.

Maybe we’d still have a first amendment if fewer people on Bluesky muted Nate Silver & Ezra Klein. Guess we’ll never know.

Terrific thread. I’m honored to be a part of this event tomorrow. Planning to pick up on many of these themes. Will try to raise some questions about Du Bois’s “counter-revolution of property” thesis in an age of end-times fascism. Streaming: csrea.link/DuBoisZoom

The Eastern Europeans, all day, every day.

“Human nature being what it is, I suppose we must expect to drift into monarchy by & by. We have not ceased to be human beings by becoming Americans. But I believe that if we obstruct these encroachments and steadily resist them, monarchy can be postponed for a good while yet.” - Mark Twain

Who. Did. This!?!

We will see if the ideology is running the market or the market is running the ideology in just a few…

The Ellisons own the news. Who owns the Ellisons?

Jeff is right. And Jeff has been right for a long time. 😔

"You are already an insider-outsider to the problem of fascism. We all are..We're all at the MAGA rally right now." - @jeffsharlet.bsky.social

Extremely important to foreground that this is not only about faculty IP. Think hard about what students have divulged to you - health diagnoses, immigration status, political affiliations - either via private messages or personal essays. How many of those confessions are warehoused on Canvas?

I would definitely encourage educators to find a new LMS and move away from Canvas surveiling and stealing your work. Now that they have AI built into the LMS it's even worse.