Incredible opportunity, read about it below in Chris's thread

Just now it became clear that our toddler had parsed “freeway” as “three-way” when he asked me if we were going to drive home on the two-way

Orchestra and chorus from my school are performing the Bach Magnificat starting right this minute if that's what would make your evening complete! Livestream:

I signed this, and also:

**NEW POST** LLMs hallucinate, & they hallucinate WORSE on topics we don't already know/write a lot about. This creates a huge accuracy gap. This week I tested ChatGPT on Beethoven & Smyth to show how big this gap is & why it matters. It made up a LOT. leahbroad.substack.com/p/chatgpts-a...

Baseball players, man. Can you imagine: getting 2-hit in the playoffs, having the shortstop from the other team say "wow our pitcher was so good that he made those excellent hitters resemble ME, a famously terrible hitter," and being like "we cannot abide this disrespect we have to fight that guy"

Just a few more days to submit proposals for the Music & Labor Symposium (May 15­–17 at the Friday Harbor Laboratories at the University of Washington)! Details at the link -- please share widely. I'd love to review lots of proposals! (Yes, really!) careers.amsmusicology.org/opportunity/...

This is having children in a nutshell

Anybody workin on a Dune opera? Where are we with that

What a Revolution, huh? Lemon, it's February

Our 2-year-old, in his crib in the pitch dark, maintains a complete minute-to-minute inventory of the 6 or 8 stuffed animals he insists on sleeping with and will sit up and yell for them by name any time any one of them falls out of the crib. This happens nightly.

Since the current golden age of string chamber music is the only topic I have anything pleasant to say about, let me inform you that the Belcea and Ébène Quartets have teamed up on a BRAND-new (2026) recording of best-piece-ever-written-by-a-16-year-old-and-it-isn't-close, Felix Mendelssohn's Octet.

For those of you (esp. Louisville-area folks regardless of UofL connections, or university-affiliated folks anywhere) who kindly expressed interest in this petition effort, here it is—I would warmly welcome your support.

Totally stunning new Debussy quartet from the Belceas, never heard it like this before at all

Totally stunning new Debussy quartet from the Belceas, never heard it like this before at all

An absolute travesty in progress at University of Iowa, using low numbers of majors (no principled reason why this should be the metric) in these departments as cover for politically-motivated gutting

For those of you (esp. Louisville-area folks regardless of UofL connections, or university-affiliated folks anywhere) who kindly expressed interest in this petition effort, here it is—I would warmly welcome your support.

Dr Robert and Good Morning Good Morning are both getting some downballot votes for best songs on their respective albums (w/ admittedly stiff competition)

Will you get a load of the absolute garbage communication we received today from university leadership about the wanton destruction of our community’s treasured childcare center

Not to state the blindingly obvious, but you know who would have hated this with a fury? Albert Einstein.

Happy #LL108! Hope you have a fun rookie season, @lore.house!

Good morning and happy Opening Day for @learnedleague.com LL108. Don't forfeit don't cheat, and FFS, RTFQ.

Look a lot of fruits seem bad if you only know them in their unripe grocery store incarnations. I've seen some people say blackberry?? A blackberry is a delicious fruit, but no good blackberry has ever been packed in a clamshell and shipped across state lines.

Do hockey players get their teeth fixed when they retire or do they just live the rest of their lives like that

I'm not sure I've ever stopped to consider that the human equivalent of baleen whales would be if we could only eat by running full-speed with our mouths open through a cloud of food

It should take only a moment’s introspection for anyone of my generation to fully believe this is true

One of the purest “a stupid person’s idea of the kind of thing a smart person would say” I’ve ever encountered

One of those lessons that I seem to be incapable of learning except by direct experience every year or so is that Spring Training games are actually very boring and the fact that very few of the Giants’ are televised is a blessing in the guise of an annoyance

InsideHigherEd did a little story about our Research 1 institution of higher education putting its acclaimed preschool/childcare center to the torch

"Bedford Borough Council holds no authority over the Council of Nicaea and was not responsible for the creation of the moon 4.53billion years ago."

I'm fine with people being good at one thing, but I'm very offended by the audacity of people who are good at two things

I'm a little bit delighted that one of my classes this morning included the use—in a completely musically meaningful way, I might add—of the expression "the B-double-flat mode of the C-flat acoustic scale"

This is genuinely heartbreaking. My kids went to ELC ~14ish years ago. It was amazing in so many ways, and every time I drive by there I think "of all the bullshit in this world, there's a place where people who don't already have everything can get the best of something."

LRT: the prevalence of "just wanted to do it anyway" among our unaccountable decision-makers is turning out to be the skeleton key to understanding the blighted time we live in

the president of my alma mater canceled all the diversity scholarships bc of this and I showed up at a fancy event he had in Georgetown and got in his face about it and told him this is how it would end up pretty sure he just wanted to do it anyway

Thread…

I have never read Discworld but this is making me think maybe I should?

We've gotten some media coverage of the University of Louisville nuking our childcare, including this LPM piece by a reporter I spoke to on the phone yesterday

What instrument do we think this cat is preparing to play? Is it a … solid-body fretless electric lute? I wonder if that was hard to find in a left-handed model.

My school's announcement of the sudden elimination of its childcare center is certainly interestingly timed to coincide with the open dates for its Campus Climate Survey, which has the following as its (complete!) list of strategic plan elements it intends to assess. I'll have a few things to say.

The unholy-fuss-making parents group has accomplished more in 24 hours than I would have thought possible. Grateful to them and inspired to continue taking part… win or lose.

It is SO GOOD. It clearly belongs in fiction of some kind, I just can't quite place it. Thoughts?

I found this old Facebook post from 2010. I miss THOSE Dodgers. Can we have those Dodgers back?

They are fucking permanently shutting down our daycare. Due to a ✨university budget shortfall✨ (Mind you, we pay for this, it's not like free work-provided daycare or anything.) I am taking this more personally than if they cut my salary by 10 percent.

My brain couldn't come up with the phrase "wash the dishes" so I just told my wife I needed to "do the sink laundry"

Yeah I'm into BDSM. If you mean the Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats

Had to laugh at the reply implying that these aren't reasonable expectations b/c we're all overworked and underfunded. Not clear how that absolves anyone of the responsibility to respect one's audience (by not wasting their time w/ a sloppy talk) and fellow presenters (by not stealing their time)

Even if you fully intend to vote for whoever the Democratic nominee ends up being, there’s a huge difference between doing that quietly in November 2028 and loudly announcing it years in advance with zero conditions attached.

Fundamentally, what I wish these wackos understood is that they are ascribing metaphysical significance to the unit of time defined by 9,192,631,770 vibrations of the cesium-133 atom, which I think would be a much more interesting number to hear them justify.

i can’t stop laughing