With data centers expected to become the largest source of electricity demand in the Pacific Northwest, Washington legislators are pressing ahead with a bill aimed at protecting the grid and offsetting potential hikes for utility ratepayers. washingtonstatestandard.com/2026/02/11/h...

I study the history of writing programs and English departments and I can assure you that this country has correlated teaching with surveillance for almost two decades. The desire to surveil educators is an American obsession. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Everyone needs to start pushing back on the dismantling of higher ed & the creation of full blown athletic corporations at universities that take public funds & student fees to pay athletes who are now trying to come back to college to get $ after failing in the pros cardinalnews.org/2026/02/10/d...

I love that all of us in academia are working on at least 4+ papers all the time.

It's wild that the media still doesn't understand that Epstein was a pimp for all the world leaders. This really isn't hard. That's what he was.

AI perpetuates misconceptions abt writing labor and quality writing. Quality writing is seen as quickly produced and that couldn't be further from the truth. They don't want to pay or deal with real authors, but they want high quality art. Doesn't work that way.

Every time I have to attend a Microsoft Teams meeting, I lose 3 days off of my life. Being in a video meeting on Teams is like smoking one pack of filter-less cigarettes.

It's always the people who have no idea how teaching and learning work that demand grades for assessment instead of formative assessment. kansasreflector.com/2026/02/06/u...

I'm on a gen ed cat team as the WPA and was trying to explain and define discourse. The reaction was tense. I've never seen so many definitions for this term. The definitions collapse every kind of text, writing, and verbal discussion into one term. It's kind of wild.

This is the wildest story about a film I've ever read. They made a movie with lions and the lions mauled everyone. www.stage32.com/blog/survivi...

Every department meeting takes approximately 6 days off of my life. 1 department meeting is like smoking two packs of cigarettes. Something like that.

Teaching a rhetoric of disinformation class & we open the course w Pennycook's survey on receptivity to pseudo bullshit. Everyone takes the survey. Then we start discussions. I teach a writing in the sciences class & we take the pseudo scientific bullshit survey. gordonpennycook.com/wp-content/u...

I open every class I teach now with a model of how to email professionally. Not sure why no one knows how to email anymore but I fixed the problem. It took half of one class period. This is how we email. That's it. Students will thank you.

The problem with this new movement is two fold. It's eugenics because it allows the least vulnerable to die. They will hide research and evidence that this new law is terrible and leads to death. They now control how disease research is narrativized and funded.

I'm particularly interested in what this could mean for digital scholarship and webtexts where the design and navigation are part of the argument.

If Biden said the same thing about guns and Pretti as the autocratic administration, the base would have burned the country down.

I've been in multiple meetings where faculty used AI to make suggestions for something the group should be brainstorming. Seems harmless, but now the suggestions need vetting that wastes time. The suggestions weren't even insightful. But here we are. ChatGPT is on the team now & demands attention.

There are people pushing AI onto schools with a fire hose and demanding kids to write in cursive. It's wild how cursive represents literacy & intellect and using AI outsources literacy and intellect.

If anyone likes working with webtexts and doing digital rhetoric stuff, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is hiring assistant editors. kairos.technorhetoric.net/30.2/logging...

They can't tell people to stop complaining abt a fake immigration crisis or they'll kill everyone. That's the rhetoric of autocracy. Also, this guy literally took money for a bribe and got away with it.

This is why having too many students in writing classes and asking faculty to teach too many writing classes is a terrible idea. Assessing student writing is deep work and can only be done well for a few hours a day. Then your brain has nothing left for your research and service.

Person with zero background in journalism claims we're toast unless we turn CBS into a massive disinformation network for legacy media and the autocrats. What a clown show. apnews.com/article/cbs-...

Oh boy. CBS is going to provide a platform for a bunch of ghouls who got cancelled. Watch for it. It's coming.

The made up crisis of grade inflation. God help us if too many students have A's. www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

Does anyone manage a directed self placement for composition and have a college in the high school population? If so, what do you do?

Wow! This read-along of the NYT moment-by-moment leading to the murder of Alex Pretti should shake everyone awake. He was a Good Samaritan. Agents fired at least ten shots in roughly five seconds. DHS and Pam Bondi claim Pretti approached them armed and intent on a “massacre.”

It's really hard to teach the value of reading, writing, and revising to shape thinking when the federal government tells everyone that it doesn't matter. Me: Writing is very important. Students: then why does the federal government use ChatGPT to write laws and policies? Me: sigh

I think people are so overwhelmed by everything going on in the world and with AI hype that they are missing the environmental impacts. AI implementation should be halted for its water and energy consumption alone. That's not even counting the plagiarism and stealing these companies are doing.

My friend Sara posted this about the superb care her father received from with Alex Pretti Absolutely heartbreaking

What's so disheartening is Pretti could have been any of us & the response I've seen from people I know has me convinced that if it were me or someone they knew well, it wouldn't matter or change their mind. They would just frame me (or you) as a criminal, even if they know me. That's terrifying.

Alex Pretti was an American hero. He saved lives. He protected people. He cared deeply about his community, unlike the murderous thugs who killed him. The very last thing he did was try to help a woman who had been pepper-sprayed and violently shoved to the ground by ICE. 1/

And if it comes down to video evidence in a trial, the government will file motions to use still frames to manipulate the narrative like they did with King.

ICE is murdering people because it knows DHS will lie and make up a defense for its agents no matter what the videos show or what the agents said. It's a license to kill.

Cartesian Dualism is literally the absolute worst ideology ever; it's like a weed you can never get rid of. Totally rots the brain.

I hope all the people in higher ed who are just smashing everything because they can get away with it get what they deserve when all of this is over.

If this were true, then numerous programs and departments outside the humanities should be shut down for not being monetizable. Higher ed is not about profiting. It's not a business. It's about offering an education that is broad & diverse. Expanding knowledge. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

After everything they've said about higher eds value, after everything they've done to defund it, after all the lies, enrollment is still up. This admin & media are lying about the value of college. People want it. And they want it for cheap. They don't want ICE. www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

People who claimed to value democracy & progression at a university are now taking advantage of the moment (breaking laws and getting away with it) to strip away academic freedom and consolidate power. It's wild to see all of them imitate each other's anti-democracy play book.

Hey fellow AI haters. Is AI taking your job? It's taken art jobs away from me and is making my spreadsheet job worse. Tell our Attorney General all about it! Also, hi Nick. Glad to see a fellow Steilacoom Sentinel doing good.

Someone came on campus with measles. WTF. It's definitely getting closer to a national outbreak.

New issue of Kairos: Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is live!!! Please share widely. kairos.technorhetoric.net

Syllabus for teaching about disinformation from Bergstrom and West at the University of Washington callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html

They got rid of the Department of Education and killed ACA subsidies so they can finance ICE's $28 billion budget to terrorize Americans in blue states for fun. None of this makes anything great.

Same thing with MTG and all the others who fall out of favor with the admin. They are right there cheering on all the hate and retribution until they are on the other end of it.

He wants to give Greenland citizens a bunch of $$ to take over their country but he's also garnishing wages from Americans for school loans. Make it make sense.

They claim Cosmetology doesn't meet an income threshold and I'm here to tell you that's the biggest crock of shit I've heard this year. The year is still young. I know many stylists who make way over 6 figures. Like many of them. They work really hard and the love it. www.opb.org/article/2026...

Even Leonardo Da Vinci wouldn't share his design of a submarine with the government because he knew they wanted to use it to hurt people. Ethics and tech have always been a thing. We need more of it.

I grew up with a pathological liar and it was pretty traumatic and annoying, but that experience pales in comparison to the 24/7 lying that is this country. It's maddening. Maintaining sanity is almost impossible.

Ancient funerals led to the very first forms of phonetics. The need to verbalize the names of the dead led to writing names on objects, mostly art objects. This is from Schmandt-Besserat's work. She's amazing.