One major criticism though: Chris Gratien had included a lot of music recommandations in his book, Zoe's is distinctly short on those so it's impossible to get the full experience during my commutes.

My book came out 3 weeks ago and now you can get it on sale (40% off until this Friday!) Only $18 for my life's work to date! www.ucpress.edu/books/egypts...

Hi everyone! My book, Egypt's Mediterranean, came out with @ucpress.bsky.social on Tuesday 💙💛 It's a new look at how Egypt fit into the political economy of the Ottoman Empire and eastern Mediterranean. Please enjoy the *beautiful* cover art by Mohamed Gohar (@mohamed.gohar on IG)

The rehabilitation of the luddites is a beautiful thing

mind-boggling to me that i still have yet to see a single democrat utter the phrase “every republican president of your lifetime has destroyed the economy and started a war”

What if all those years of life were not just an investment in capital growth but were actually the entire point of all of it, what then.

I made this 19 page list of resources for questioning AI because I was so frustrated by this dynamic, the tipping point for me was an admin saying that people who were questioning the push for AI were being "emotional": docs.google.com/document/d/1...

is it Too On The Nose that the publisher's website for Orwell's 1984 wants you to believe that this is the cover of 1984? (Click to expand, or google it yourself!)

loooove this 💖

on the educator's responsibility to "respond" to AI:

chortling at these AI smart-replies to my student's thesis statement so very proud!

I'm not proud to say that I have been a heavy Spotify user for over a decade, but I *AM* proud to say that I'm finally ditching them (not because of the AI audiobooks, though that's another good reason.) Qobuz is a very good alternative for music, and they pay their artists!

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

Really, really agree with this piece from Huffpo. We don't have to accept the aura of AI inevitability. We can, and should, refuse to engage with it in our classrooms (and elsewhere, but especially in the classroom!)

Fact-Checking Claims About Zohran Mamdani https://theonion.com/fact-checking-claims-about-zohran-mamdani/

yearly reminder to people insisting that we view Christopher Columbus as "a man of his time" that *the people responsible for the Spanish Inquisition* thought Columbus was out of pocket

Happy #caturday from a boy who really really loves his @ranchogordo.bsky.social bean club box 🫘

Some wise advice on your academia.edu account. It's probably time to delete it.

Im glad Dr Tao is speaking up, but this attitude among people; that you can work in STEM and "avoid politics" is...alarming. And has always been wrong.

A Labor Day reminder: today there isn't a single city, metro area, or state in the U.S. where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment. Millions of people with jobs—even multiple jobs—aren't safe from homelessness in this country.

NEW: A major AI copyright legal showdown just took a huge twist today. Facing a class action on behalf of book authors that could've seen it pay over a TRILLION in damages for alleged piracy, Anthropic has agreed to settle instead: www.wired.com/story/anthro...

The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good

A key difference here is that while either can be incorrect, the structure of Wikipedia *creates context* and the structure of LLMs *destroys context* Wikipedia has linked sources and an edit history showing where information came from and who added it when An LLM just generates text

hey what if?!

No one wants to hear this, but it’s true. Either we can value education — not for a select few but for anyone willing to put in the effort — and provide the requisite resources, or we can watch it become a pursuit available only to an elite minority, with everyone else getting a cheap facsimile

Why does Goorge W. Bush looks like a mashup of Mitch McConnell and Bill Gates? Dude doesn't even wear glasses.

Nothing, but nothing, is funnier to me at this moment than these Ph.D.-level charts.

"While the new strategy, known as 'Look Back Before You Act,' has raised concerns among people worried they will have to remember lots of events from long ago, the historians have assured Americans they won’t be required to read all the way through thick books or memorize anything."

"I need ChatGPT to brainstorm" dear human person the whole point of brainstorming is to find new ways or angles when approaching a problem, the "let's regurgitate the complete stolen corpus of human achievement"-machine doesn't help you brainstorm - it stops you from brainstorming.

Gustave Caillebotte, Nasturtiums, 1892

Either colleges produce graduates who have been transformed by 4 years of study in ways that are valuable but hard to quantify, or they produce interchangeable widgets with pieces of paper that say they jumped through a series of hoops, probably with the assistance of chatbots because who wouldn't?

Parents insist their kids go to college to get business degrees. Administrators respond by defunding the humanities and social sciences, while hiring business profs at ~2X what historians get paid. Meanwhile, businesses say over and over that they want to hire humanities and social science majors.

Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.

This is framed as "lessons for the left," but Lander and Mamdani actually offer lessons for the center: Instead of ruthlessly undermining leftist candidates, emphasize shared values and refuse to amplify right-wing attacks. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

I don't want to play Homonym! with Microsoft Word 😒

Microsoft Word: hey, you might have a "word choice error" there, let me underline it for you! Me: ... pretty sure this normal word in my millionth draft is ok MW: by "reign" of this early modern ruler do you perchance mean RAIN?!??! 🫠🥲👑🌧️

I found a google chrome extension that seemingly gets rid of the AI overview when you search on google from desktop. LIFE CHANGING. Cause I was SICK of that shit. chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-...

On the twelfth anniversary of Sisi's coup in Egypt, a clear-eyed and depressing analysis by @abuaardvark.bsky.social

Mamdani does what I've been calling constructive politics: appeals to identity as a building block of solidarity rather than a replacement for it. love to see it

I'm going to be honest here, I think AI is going to do so much damage to the usable internet that even after it's inevitably crashes out, it's going to take years to disentangle from every space it's polluted, like digital asbestos it's gonna be time consuming effort and likely expensive venture.

Zohran: Imagine living in a city where you can afford your rent, your groceries and even a meal at a restaurant now and then without much stress Eric Adams: Imagine a platypus so powerful that it could destroy the city. We need more cops

I hate calling my senator, but looks like I'll be calling my senator as soon as the phones open today. This is really vile and incredibly irresponsible.

Kirsten Gillibrand also (at 13m, and 23m) repeated Islamophobic canards about Zohran Mamdani, including references to him "global jihad", as well as falsely claiming that "intifada" means "kill all Jews" (which it does not).

"Learn to code" was always bad advice, unless you actually like to code. College students have the best chance of professional success if they major in topics that interest them. Today in @startribune.com. Please tell high school students and parents. www.startribune.com/what-should-...

What matters is that Cuomo and all the people who endorsed him are still going to claim they're the rightful heirs to the Democratic Party, how dare young people challenge them, all of that. The difference is they're now just unaffiliated lunatics, banging on the windows. They're not the party.

nyc i just absolutely love you 💙🧡💙😘 so grateful to everyone who knocked on doors and made calls and got excited and voted for good things to happen. people worked hella hard for this. we do deserve good things!

If this has happened to you today, get in touch with us at [email protected]. Read more on our live blog: hellgatenyc.com/hell-gate-ny...

been thinking about this cursèd image a lot this week