Never thought grammar and punctuation were the most important parts of clear, good writing, but recent events are polarizing me in favor of rules

What this reveals is that for most people in charge right now “AI” is less useful as a technology than as a piece of language to shift a conversation in whatever direction they need it to go. In one minute it will propel a new economy; in another it’s the reason for a recession.

who benefits when you cheat yourself? "Students can use AI to replace the previously irreplaceable: studying w friends, learning from professors, + putting their thoughts into writing. The gray area of cheating not the system but themselves." thenewjournalatyale.com/2025/10/insi...

if you have ever taken photos of pigeons that are unique looking would you be willing to share them with me?

It’s sort of clarifying to see him describe this dynamic so directly www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

@bsky.app Friday, Nov 21, 3pm CT: Join @andrewhartman.bsky.social & me for the next Newberry Capitalism seminar. UIC's Penelope Dean will share her new work on capitalism, xerox, and YOU. Comment by @elicook.bsky.social Free registeration for paper and zoom info: www.newberry.org/calendar/pen...

Even in the pre-AI era, I was thinking about how it's maybe not obvious from the student's perspective that "producing kind of crap writing so the next version is a bit less crap" is the whole learning process. Ungrading advocates are probably right, students too fixated on the evaluation

reporting for sibling duty to provide a regular reminder about my brother's global magazine store in pdx. the shop's called chess club, and it's an amazing space. print's back, baby

Can it possibly be the case that no one has written a single volume 1840s-1980s history of the American "office products" industry?! Colleagues, please tell me I'm missing something obvious.

Technical question: around 1912, how many Americans would have known or been able to transcribe Morse Code? How saturated was that knowledge — or, where would I look to get some sense of that? Any ideas very appreciated! I haven’t dug into it yet…

The Ultimate Chicago Thanksgiving Pie Guide 🥧

3/🧵 This generational trend is consistent across every demographic subgroup you can imagine. Non-college Gen Z men? Lower racial resentment than college-educated elder Millennials. The pattern holds across gender, geography, and religion. Young men and women are moving in tandem.

i rescheduled my monday morning office hours bc i didn't think anyone would show up in the snowstorm and currently am holding them outside in the sun because it's 62 degrees outside

chicago! how can faculty make sense of the rapidly shifting economic and epistemic conditions for learning? how should faculty exercise governance and exert expertise over expensive partnerships between universities and technology companies? join us for Theory At The Bargaining Table Dec 4!

Just a real “season finale” feeling to all kinds of news today, isn’t there

Got turned down on a piece about ICE in Chicago for an international news org because they believed I couldn’t be objective about my neighbors getting kidnapped. And well, guilty as charged I guess.

TIL the postwar Frankfurt School, in the personage of Friedrich Pollock, produced a book-length analysis of the automation question as it appeared in the mid-1950s. Thanks @cominsitu.bsky.social

We probably all need this right now: Japanese surrealist Tohukiro Kawai’s saintly cats. 🐈 🐱 www.gyokuei.tokyo/globalstore?...

For the cover of Businessweek’s December issue, I wrote about the reigning queen of America’s strip malls: Ulta Beauty, the country’s biggest beauty retailer (yes, bigger than Sephora) and quietly one of the more fascinating retailers in the country. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

My brilliant friend, Amelia Acker, has a new book out about the history of digital data management. Archiving Machines is available for Open Access download at the MIT website but I bought a copy for my "archive" (what I now self-importantly call my bookshelf): mitpress.mit.edu/978026255324...

excuse me

Well, unfortunately

proud to be an onion subscriber this morning

Giving thanks for the good nerds at the NWS this morning, as I can quickly pull up the latest (0211) detailed condition reports from the overnight team, square them w/transit alerts, and make an informed decision about my commute. They do this for us. They haven't been paid for a month.

where is the snow

Loving today's news that the mysterious "fedora man" outside the Louvre heist was actually a 15-year-old museum visitor who dresses like a 1940s French detective all the time, just because. apnews.com/article/louv...

This connection isn’t articulated often enough.

We are also currently hiring a curatorial fellow to work with the papers of Rosalind Franklin and others in the History of Molecular Biology Collection! This is a 2-year staff position in the archive with a salary of $55k/year and full benefits: www.sciencehistory.org/research/fel...

I'm struck by how many Chicagoans have seemingly felt compelled to write and share reflections on "this is what it feels like in Chicago right now". We know we're going through something awful together and we want the world to understand it. Threading several of these pieces below.

What an amazing essay from the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin. I'll share a few sections in the reply but seriously, read the whole thing. It's all insightful and beautifully written. lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Opening for a tenure-track assistant professor in the history of science, with a preferred focus on water issues: 👇 #HistSTM

Quite a headline.

I was thinking about Zohran’s transition team and today’s anti-feminist piece in the New York Times, and my mother’s book on the first generation of women to work in the city government in New York City. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

In late September, my family and I lost our matriarch, my abuela. I've been a bit all over the place since. My abuela moved to our hometown in the 70s. She loved it even as one of the first Mexican families there. It's been targeted every day by ICE. I wrote about it. buttondown.com/camrodriguez...

I like to think that I personally ruined the workplace.

hi bucktown, if you are missing your sweet little brown cat with a pink collar, they just darted across the 606 and are now hiding behind some bushes. i couldn't get close enough to read the tag on the collar but hopefully the bud gets home safe soon

connect the dots on attacks on education, the AI grifter bubble, and consolidating authoritarianism "I have to believe that we can still push back, that creative people can find the means to defy the ruling class and keep on creating."

the future takes transit

what is a good collective noun for a group of librarians? if there was ever a question for bluesky, this feels like it

Here's another bit of conventional wisdom Zohran completely blew away: His speech was at well above a 10th-grade level. It was complex, erudite, punctuated by deep and fluent references. You don't have to condescend to voters with baby talk! Part of re-establishing norms is speaking like an adult.

it's almost 9pm and i am just sitting down to write a short paper but at least it will be a far earlier bedtime than those i used to have when i worked election nights in journalism

I do have a bit of beef with the critical tech movement in that it largely operates as an academic research movement for advancement of phds to talk about surveillance and labor instead of as a practitioner-led movement to create alternative work pathways for tech workers to do things that dont suck

I am a very good information hound. If it exists, I can usually find it. But sometimes I can't. And when that happens I just write a tiny bit of information in 5-6 form fields, and in a few days it appears in my hands. For free. Libraries! What a concept. What a pinnacle of human achievement.

Teen Vogue took young people seriously. It's impossible to overstate how important, how rare, and how profoundly needed that is.

One thing that's notable to me in this video is that Mamdani is _always_ dressed in a suit and tie. He doesn't pander or talk down or adopt "working class" signifiers, which would likely be read as inauthentic in a second. But that doesn't stop the outpouring of enthusiasm for him.

thank you for all the support; the statement from our union is now live here with some more reporting. now that this is public I can confirm that the majority of today’s layoffs were women of color. there are no longer any Black women working at Teen Vogue.

There's a whole risk studies article waiting to be written on how ceramicists and hobby potters understand risk and safety in the hobby, how they parse safety warnings on commercial products, and how they think about modern vs traditional standards and practices. 🤔

"[Chicago mom] Andrea Soria... overheard her 6-year-old whisper to her dolls: 'We have to be good or ICE will get us.'" apnews.com/article/chic...

Was honored to help @chana.bsky.social edit this deep dive compilation of Curtis Sliwa lore gathered over weeks. There is so much jaw-dropping material, we simply could not bear to make it shorter than 76 slides.

greetings from our household