People are also ignoring very real very gay people from the NFL lol. Who are out!

our emotional & practical survival over the next year is going to depend on us developing the emotional depth to say "hahaha fuck yeah, shit has gotten so bad that even [terrible person] is trying to save themselves" without being like "so they're not terrible anymore, maybe?"

If you think writing a prompt is some intense, artistic, creative endeavor, then honestly it probably is your best move not to attempt your own poetry or essays or fiction, or to conduct your own research. Hell, you probably shouldn't even attempt your own emails. They probably bore everyone.

I find the idea that you need to know “how to use” AI tools really funny, as if it isn’t incredibly easy to type in prompts and the marketing these tools is that literally anyone can do it

I mean jfc CNN just *sat down and interviewed* a group of Christian nationalist leaders who want to repeal women’s right to vote! open.substack.com/pub/jessica/...

I think my most heterosexual opinion is that you need one shared investment (rent, a bill, an animal, etc.) that you must both contribute to before you can call each other a “partner”

If nothing else, this phenomenon is heightening the visibility of those who use citation simply as a signaling apparatus and not for the purposes of leading readers to the source of their claims or the thinking with which they are engaging.

And please also, AGAIN, never forget that they are inherently unethical to use because no one gave permission for their research or writing to be used in it. It is all stolen, and if you're using the plagiarism machine, please keep that in mind.

if you’re an academic who uses AI to crank out research, you should have to give up your position to one of the more worthy candidates who didn’t get a TT job

anyone who believes and/or promotes the use of chatbots/ AI “companions” for therapy either chooses to ignore evidence that these bots can actually exacerbate mental health issues or is speaking from a place of ignorance dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....

This is one of the reasons I remain horrified by seeing @historians.org suggest "ways to use gAI" that included this:

I teach at a public NC university & I’m not going to tell y’all what conversations we are having in person [you can’t FOIA a conversation] but just know if you don’t see folks in my / our position posting, it doesn’t mean we aren’t concerned and/or planning.

Third hand is also being around things that people have smoked in, or their skin, or even their breath. I stopped smoking to get pregnant. I won’t smoke again until my kid is in college (hopefully never tho). But every day I want to smoke & every day I say okay but I don’t want to give him asthma.

Something I find very insidious which is becoming common, at least in Asheville, is what I would consider middle- to high-range price tags on creative, queer, and healing community.

In this season of gift wrapping a reminder that having excellent fine motor skills is not a virtue!

One thing that absolutely definitely happens for real in the academic job market is that when you do not get a job, the Dean calls you and explains why you didn't get it. This is extra-super true when the explanation is something legally actionable on its face.

Don't talk to journalists about DIY HRT.

I teach in a 30 person English department. All of those people are white. Including the 6 people (including me) hired since 2020.

David Brooks, who wrote in the NYT last month, "The Epstein Story? Count Me Out" is... in the latest Epstein photo dump published by @oversightdemocrats.house.gov. He should absolutely be fired by NYT for this. Major conflict of interest that he didn't disclose.

Yeah, the problem with what I guess I'll call Ezra Klein-style liberalism is that it holds that ideas work like tokens that do not have any inherent moral valence, you can trade them and exchange them and they do not actually say anything about the person holding them

Mainstreaming deep fake porn. What could go wrong.

There's a kind of "support" cis people will give trans people (and queer people more generally) that amounts to: "It's well and good for you people to be the way you are, but not MY kid. My kid is normal and if my kid ever the idea of being anything but normal, it's YOUR fault." Abstract support.

this shit makes me feel like i'm living in a different reality. Ai is trained on images that exist. there are no fucking photographs from ancient rome. all the images it's trained on are from movies and shit. so obviously it produces imitations of those at best. WHY DID ANYONE EXPECT ANYTHING ELSE

No it’s ok we can cut all the area studies programs. We’ll just hire one “global studies“ Prof with a degree in English literature.

"Changes to centers and institutes were initially projected to save $4.8 million." Bill Belichick's annual salary is $10 million.

The Onion, 23 years ago. theonion.com/no-blood-for...

Every now and then another penny drops about like, being able to put down feelings. Like why did I let a person make me feel bad for not being a SAHM when she was a SAHM who threatened her children with physical violence to get them to behave? Bananas!

Really kind of dispiriting to realize how many men in my world see the women and people of color in their lives as thieves and obstacles to their thriving.

social media has created an entirely new kind of [grand]parent who can share images and information about your lives without having to engage with you at all. cutting off the ABILITY to share that information is seen as a cruelty

This story Carl Nassib told on RC's pod about coming out in the NFL cracked me up. His delivery is so good!

I sympathize with our students not knowing what to do about genAI, given that some parts of the university are busy telling them to use it and get certificates in it and demanding they apply it and some of us are begging them to stop destroying themselves and the planet and our minds.

Tech companies are actually pretty explicit about this: The point is to have a device that you can’t escape, one that always has access to you and makes you a constant source of data beyond what a phone does. Surveillance-first devices.

My sense is that the “male loneliness crisis” is not really about addressing men’s emotional needs but rather the relatively newfound absence of having someone to perform domestic labor for you quietly in the background now that there is a longer gap between your mother and your wife doing it

I’m glad to see a lot of people discussing everything wrong with this discourse. I want to add that white women are really benefitting from some of these pushes when like — they often also benefit from white supremacy & patriarchy. Including bisexual white women married to men running queer things.

Back when I did research, just making up data used to be called academic misconduct. Times have changed.

It's not just me. I know of many Black people who land jobs in highly visible or prestigious places and become scapegoats for the resentments of others.

The academic job market is neither meritocratic nor preconditioned. It's a game of chance.

It's reassuring even to assume that there will be a future and that there will be historians in it.

Co-working day with my co-author turned into a play date because of a daycare closure unrelated to either of our children. Being NTT and a parent is also hard!

Cereal costs $11 now.

we're hitting absolutely horrible numbers

This kind of reporting is very important. I’ve also been seeing it for 11 years and have not seen Trump’s businesses or political career damaged at all. At this point it feels like blue wave fodder & not real life.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever received fentanyl from a doctor as part of a medical procedure

I hate that every week there's something stupid like an Everyone Has To Drink Pee Now Bill and the alert sounds to CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES THIS IS NOT A DRILL and you really wish you could just trust them to not go for the pee drinking bill

happy course prep week to all who celebrate

This is what I cannot convince people of who keep telling me I should use AI in the classroom. The only thing it helps students do is skip the things I’m supposed to teach them. Reading is hard! Outlining a paper is hard! Brainstorming is hard! That’s because that’s where the learning happens!

Here's my current big queer request: Does anybody have I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power's Out, by Andrea Gibson, in printed form? I'm trying to find the real formatting but there's so many different layouts online.

Very much this:

I like how the people who defend him always frame his anti-trans views as some kind of common sense political calculation, and then he comes out and says "actually my heart is just full of transphobia."