We babysat my niece’s rats for part of the holiday and Conundrum got extra clingy.

I’m having a lovely time with family lately, and who’s to say whether that’s because or in spite of my laptop and phone both dying and me having to wait on replacements. (Which I should have next week.)

Wild that I never got offered a tenure track job. True, I never went on the job market, but surely if it wasn’t for the left I’d have been hired in a snap.

Hoping to raise obscene amounts of money with my start up MnkyzPah. We’re building the monkey’s paw from the classic horror short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” It will be great to finally fulfill the author’s vision of getting exactly what you want just by asking!

there should be a movie where a woman from a small town begrudgingly goes to the big city for the holidays and falls in love at first sight with ethiopian food

The California Academy of Sciences has announced a Celebration of Life for Claude, San Francisco’s beloved albino alligator: www.calacademy.org/events/speci...

My debut novel MAGGIE THE DREAD hits shelves on July 7, 2026, courtesy of Little Bee Books and Simon & Schuster, and is now available for pre-order! www.simonandschuster.com/books/Maggie...

“Eggheads” is such an old timey insult. Our president is battling Adlai Stevenson.

This is something i have wanted to write about for a while. The PR around the term AI defining it as LLMs has obscured all of the technologies like Machine Learning that were called AI not that long ago and actually have changed numerous production processes.

Here's another way the intentional PR conflation of the term AI with all ML is undermining academic work: I'm collab'ing on an archive management project that involves developing an ML tool to analyze texts. The answer to asks for funding/resources has often been, "Just use chatgpt/copilot/etc.!"

The thing about the narrative that AI is a tool to add to the toolbox…you don’t actually have to steal and destroy someone’s existing tools to get them to adopt a new one if it’s actually useful.

I’m so sick of the arrogant ignorant people poisoning human knowledge assuming that experts don’t know their own fields. People who do the work are telling you what you’re suggesting is anathema to their needs and you’re like “The 200 historians in my mentions are wrong about what history is.”

To add to this excellent thread, when you are reading something, you are reading in the context of everything else you’ve read and thought. That’s what allows you to make connections and draw out what is important to you. That’s what an LLMs context window will always lack.

I’m currently stuck in a very frustrating Ehlers-Danlos loop where my muscles are very painful and stiff, but movement just seems to make them stiffer. This is presumably because a joint is out of place, but I don’t know which one and my PT exercises haven’t put it back.

But I want to note again that even if an LLM summarizes a work *accurately* (and that’s far from a guarantee), summary is an intentional act that is only useful when it is done intentionally.

Not a historian but like to research. The AI might summarize what I'm looking for, but it doesn't find what I'm *not* looking for. The book on the shelf next to the one I wanted. The insight in chapter 6 based on the quote I needed from chapter 4.

Can’t stop grinning while I’m watching this, amazing

Please help Anas and Ahmad. Winter is here, it's harder than ever to get by, and everyone should have food, shelter, and safety.

The whole point of being an academic is that you need to be willing to spend three days creating a 700-word footnote that you will later delete. And you need to LIKE IT.

LinkedIn sent me an infuriating year-end prediction that "AI whispering" will be the hot new liberal arts major, and even as it pisses me off, I don't buy it. I can definitely see universities offering it, but I can't imagine a lot of students will want to major in it, even if they're into AI.

People we CANNOT be using AI for citations AT ALL. This includes teaching students to use AI for citations!

I think one of the reasons why people don't take the study of the humanities seriously is they think being a history buff = being a historian and reading a lot = being a literature scholar because there's still so little public understanding of what methodologies in those fields actually look like

I don’t like this “top movie when you were ten” meme but that’s maybe because mine is Rain Man, a movie accidentally responsible for so much popular misunderstanding of autistic people.

I love Fela Kuti's music (my apple music wrap said exactly that) but specifically in THIS moment, his music feels important. The DHS/ICE "Zombies" coming to our cities leaving Sorrow, Tears, and Blood (dem regular trade mark,) while Elon Musk the International Thief Thief makes off with our money.

The late, great Fela Kuti is known as the "Black President" for his role as both a musical and a political leader. Now he has become the first African artist to get this Grammy honor. n.pr/4oXdpat

I had several, but one that stands out is a speech class in community college. I learned a lot from the other students’ speeches as well as the teacher. I took it so I could transfer to a CSU if I wanted to but I ended up having a great time altogether.

Henry Cuellar, the guy Trump recently pardoned for accepting bribes from other countries to influence U.S. policy. That guy.

Just now, a national trans healthcare felony ban for youth has passed the US House, with 10 year prison terms. 3 Dems crossed party lines to vote to jail providers. 4 GOP crossed party lines to vote against. It is not expected to pass the Senate, where Dems hold filibuster power. Story to come.

Happy 80th Birthday to Ernie Hudson, whose many acting credits include HOLD IT, THIS GUY IS 80? WHAT????

And there's no way recruiters would be taking this approach if there was a real risk of white candidates reacting by saying, "Whoa hey that's racist" and creating reputational consequences for the recruiter. They seem pretty secure in the assumption that this is what many whites *want* to hear.

It also speaks volumes that I've seen many anecdotes of white people *getting* this kind of message, but virtually no stories of people *pushing back* on it. This seems like an obviously, wildly racist message, but a lot of white professionals seem to nod and say "yeah that sounds right"

The fact that it at least anecdotally seems to be a semi-regular practice to tell white people a minority got the job in order to soften the blow of rejection really should put the elite woke panic into perspective.

The proliferation of fake citations in real scholarship reveals a critical flaw in how we “produce knowledge.” No matter how valid a claim is or not, once introduced into the literature, it can persists and spread like an invasive rhizome. This isn’t new, but the audacity of AI makes it apparent.

My son picked Shin Godzilla to watch last night and it was really good, but I wish we’d watched it before Godzilla Minus One.

🧵

A hedge fund manager can buy you a city council seat, but he cant buy you the ability to conceal your multiple blatant ethics violations! Guess the old saying is true - you can lead a clown to water but you can't make him competent 😔

Kelly and John are wonderful hosts and I had so much fun last year talking with them about Dickens and Christmas!

Please help Mostafa and his family if you’re able!

DEADLINE EXTENDED! Submit by February 1st.

Canter’s staff shaped the deli into what it is today: a place where a stranger is treated like a regular, and a regular is treated like family. Here we speak with three employees with a combined 133 years working at the Fairfax landmark. The full story: lataco.com/canters-deli... By Lauren Bethke

Once, when my kids were little, some older cousins asked if they could watch a movie together and advertised it to me with “There’s no sex, only violence!” (Disney’s Atlantis, btw) and this feels identical.

It's sort of impossible to really capture what Alice Wong meant to so many people (myself included) but @soleilho.com wrote something beautiful, and we gathered up a few touching memories from other folks that speak to what a brilliant star she was. Love you forever, Alice.

I’m sharing a Palestinian account every day and today is Mohammed. Mohammed is just 18 years old. His family were farmers but their land and home have been destroyed. Mohammed has chronic migraines but is responsible for helping his whole family of including his little nephew Joud who is only 2.

Being an asthmatic child was quite an adventure

Steve isn’t here anymore, but he always posted this picture on Hanukkah so I thought we could carry on his tradition and remember him.

I'm very aware of how higher ed's bound up w/ class reproduction but distinguishing faculty from 'the middle class and the poor' is bananas given what most actual college instructors are paid. Also 'faculty lounge'?! I can't even reliably to get the university where I work to buy me a book!

Here's something I wish these fools would think about: What does it mean to be in the faculty lounge in 2025? Really. What does that mean?

Please help Amal and Alma. They need help and care, especially as we enter the winter months.

Reading is magical because sometimes you read a truly original sentence.