Time for our annual viewing of the academia-themed Just in Time for Christmas, in which she gets cold called by the “Dean of Yale,” who wants to publish her dissertation because it will be a bestseller and offers a flyout for a job she didn’t apply for, and mystical William Shatner shakes things up.

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Somebody scraped & shared every song on Spotify, with metadata — a boon for research into music and algorithms, but also, inevitably, what the training data is going to be for every AI music company in 2026. annas-archive.li/blog/backing...

Someone ought to write about how AI has replaced the labor academic wives used to do (which was really just all of it) Here’s Milton Friedman thanking his wife for, well, writing Capitalism and Freedom:

not that the present economic picture is rosy, but i do think that popular culture — and specifically nostalgia bait television — is a big part of the reason that our public memory of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s seems to miss the real economic pain that marked each of those decades.

Because every time something is labeled “vibes”, I go look and it’s just Marxism.

Someone is going to have the write the thing about how “vibe” has become a substitute for meaningful theory in a world where the theory is so clear — grift and power — but we collectively refuse if because it isn’t sophisticated enough to generate make work for empiricists.

New conspiracy theory just dropped: What if peer review, committee meetings, strategic plans, promotion & tenure processes, and letter-writing requests are all part of a secret plot to keep smart, creative, active minds from thinking and writing the big ideas that would *really* change the world?

"If you search for Jayilor on Spotify, you’ll find that it has covered all of the King Gizzard songs that are still available to stream on Spotify — and that, in fact, when you stream King Gizzard on Spotify today, you are unwittingly streaming Jayilor." Spotify's doppelgänger problem:

Here's the full Summers email, btw.

Is Taylor Swift the new FW Taylor? No. She's the new Jonathan Swift, which is worse. Here's why only Veblen can help us. I reviewed the latest album in order to get it out of my system. tgpbennett.wordpress.com/2025/11/12/p...

I for one will welcome our Chinese overlords #Beerjacket #China #Tsingtao

40 years ago we’d have congressional hearings falsely accusing metal bands of putting backwards messages in their songs that told kids to kill themselves & now we have a planet-killing chatbot that’s all like “bet you won’t commit suicide chickenshit bitch” & the government is like here’s $5 billion

1.This is not the only known example we know of ChatGPT cheering on a vulnerable young person to die by suicide, this time it is a recent Texas A&M grad 2. Every single university that has invited OpenAI into our midst should be asked to account for their choices. www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...

a man was just found not guilty by jury lollification

Horrific, stupid news from @uniofnottingham.bsky.social — they are closing their music department. Apparently they all found out suddently in a meeting yesterday. It is one of the best music departments in the country — solidarity with my colleagues and their students www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Oh my GOD. The song that Rudy Giuliani used in his anti-Zohran post is fucking AI-generated. It's a song called "September 11, 2001" and it's from some AI slop factory called The Experience. You need to hear how bad this song is. music.apple.com/cz/album/sep...

LOL spending more money then you would've been taxed is next level nuts. I want Mamdani to tax them into another PLANET.

woke up thinking about the TBN intro where they went around the world and every continent got what felt like slightly racist intro music www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_w_...

centrists will tell you to your face that we all need to abandon identity issues, and focus on kitchen table issues instead and yet when a leftist candidate runs a generational campaign based on kitchen table issues, it's the centrists weaponizing identity politics to smear the leftist.

Starmer to have an ai powered toilet sphinx posted at every public loo you must answer their riddles three before you know where you can pee

This photo of Robert Bloch is the most writer photo to have ever writer photo’d. It is Pure Writer Photo.

“Someone” cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second. We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’

NVIDIA and OpenAi: Concerns that their “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.“ @bloomberg.com $NVDA 👀 www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

I'm so pleased to finally have this book in my hot little hands! You, too, can have this feeling—for 30% off!—with code AUFLY30 at global.oup.com/academic. Want to try before you buy? You can read the Intro for free at this link (available until October 30): academic.oup.com/book/60725/c...

Trump’s going to use the tariffs to bail out the farmers who can’t sell their crops because of the tariffs, huh?

People think they’re taking down a rich intellectual sinecure but they’re mostly terrorizing committed public servants who make $58,000 a year after 15 years of experience at a school that has to budget creatively so students can access textbooks.

lol, wrong almost half the time

Either real-time bidding data or app SDK data is being bought and used by ICE to seize people from the streets. If you didn’t believe that the adtech stack is a human rights concern, I’m not sure what more evidence you need. www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

NOOOOOOOOO! NOT PHILIP FAIRCLOTH-MUTTON!!!!!!

I think the Trump admin assumed no one would try to find out who the people on the boats they blew up really were

Blue cities should tear up the roads in front of ICE facilities and then start decades of community engagement and input sessions to rebuild them. Let's harness our core competencies.

Just published open access @jcultecon.bsky.social. On the aestheticisation of money in hip-hop; a cultural logic since generalised. Its also a theorisation of mediations of political economy and cultural form operating across scales of time and space www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

So, closing 1% of total US/ Canada stores, but nearly 10% of union stores. Some mathematicians would consider this evidence of union busting.

You guys do yourself a favor and look at what Eric Adams wore to Rosh Hashanah services at the Sephardic Lebanese Congregation

LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #LiveAI

When people say "We used to drink raw milk from our own cow and it was fine," That's... usually not the case! In families w their own cow, the mom usually boiled it before using. We just forgot bc that's a boring chore that mom did. And who pays attention to that? youtu.be/vKDPast9WFk

I love how someone called the new White House gold aesthetic as "Saddamcore".

Here’s the link to file a claim www.lieffcabraser.com/anthropic-au...