Why are the interiors of suitcases fitted with crisscross straps serving no apparent function other than to protrude outside when you're trying to close the zipper? Wrong answers only.

My colleague got into Trump's sprawling family detention camp, which is full of toddlers, kids, & teens. - Kids have cut themselves or talked about suicide -There's worms & mold in food -300 kids have been held for 30+ days, far longer court settlement allows www.propublica.org/article/life...

Today's topic: local ICE sightings.

I know this must have been obvious for ages to all of my peers, but I have just had the epiphany that the reason for the odious (and performative) "cybersecurity" training that is constantly being inflicted on higher ed employees is that it must be a requirement of external vendor contracts. +

👋

Spoken like someone who has never just *sat* with the cosmic harmonies of Bawitdaba da bang da dang diggy

Wow. Lip synching ain’t what it used to be.

Out: Touching grass In: *Seeing* grass (in Eastern US)

This classified is from the Ann Arbor Sun, 1973. An essay writing (and computer programming!) service promising fast relief from “the verbal constipation of synthetic education.” In other words, the transactional model has been with us for a long time and students are smart enough to know it.

Oh. I see the writers have brought back the “going after Olympic athletes” B-plot. Tiresome. Are they running out of fresh material?

When Republicans do it / When Democrats do it

When most people think of AI in education they probably don't think of scientific journals old enough to exist online as black and white photocopies. Here's a cover from the first volume of the Journal of AI in Education 1989/90. It contains a really signficant paper...

Unlike most sports events, I typically look forward to and follow the Olympics. This year I got nothin’. Sorry athletes, I know you worked hard for this.

part of me still can't believe the East Wing was completely destroyed and there have been no negative consequences or reports on whether items inside were properly archived or not

But he KNOWS exactly why. Stop phrasing things as rhetorical questions and TELL the people what’s happening, and why.

Just look at what the woke radical Marxist socialists Democrats have done

How incredible is it that with all of this (waves arms) it would still appear that the sole acceptable mainstream media criterion for determining that the President of the United States is a racist would be the discovery of an audio/visual recording of him pronouncing the n-word.

my new ice cream scoop and I are about to vibe code some cookies 'n cream

this is so funny, god bless louise lucas, Hero of the Commonwealth

It’s weird how the White House can just blame a “staffer” for the racist post as if just any low level flunky can pretend to be the President of the United States at any random time.

Just now learning that books for the American armed services in WW2 were printed landscape format.

Cat going full Alex Honnold on the bookcase

"As AI trans­forms academic labor, much more is at stake than the terms & conditions of our employment. At stake is the very integrity of the teaching & learning process & the notion that all humanity—not just a few individuals—should benefit from the production of knowledge at our universities."

This is the move that will ensure that synthetic images will overtake authentic human-captured photographs on the internet. We are about to see a wide-scale AI slop rendition of reality. When the evidentiary is destroyed, so is trust.

BREAKING: 4 students at the University of Minnesota are currently chained to Morrill Hall, demanding that their school end all cooperations with ICE and establish itself as a sanctuary campus.

On a zoom session with a colleague who has been on the ground in Minneapolis as a credentialed journalist. Sharing their photos, video, and experiences. Just incredible courage and organization.

No matter what side of the AI debate you’re on, on this I think we can all agree.

I direct this program, and soon I will be hiring!

Wash DC AI/DH/E-LIT folks, the always worthwhile @hannesbajohr.de is coming to town via @lillianyvonne.bsky.social, and I will be in conversation at my old gig. Next Thursday.

“It seems our university leaders cannot even say that it is wrong to murder a former student in broad daylight because some people might disagree,” geography professor Kate Derickson

Genuinely concerned about the potential for political violence in VA in the coming days and weeks. The rhetoric coming from the right there is white hot.

Thesis: tech bro anxiety over Moltbook is really tech bro anxiety over Calude Code.

Welp

“I am a digital humanist, and I say you have to know how to vibe code.”

Just explained vibe coding to Jerome McGann over lunch so I think my work is done.

With their institutional bases in shambles, it’s somehow weirdly comforting to log on and discover that English departments are still good for an old fashioned stay-in-your-lane slaparound.

Jfc Lee Ranaldo is 70yo

I’m a little disappointed by some of the responses to this (not Matt’s, which I take to be plain wit). But there is obviously a long tradition of studying low culture, mass culture, kitsch, & etc., and we ignore this latest aesthetic category at our peril. To pretend otherwise is anti-intellectual.

In less than a week the Kennedy Center has effectively closed and our local DC paper has been gutted, both by billionaires. I don’t think immigrants are our problem in this country.

Quick, snap writing assignments, everyone!

Have reached the moment of peak class preparation, where my brain is as full as it will ever be and everything from now to actual class time is the degradation.

Can we please get past the idea that Bezos was some sort of bibliophile. Books were the ideal product units for testing the Amazon concept, nothing more.

Whatever you think of the Washington Post at this moment, here's a chance to support the dedicated, hard-working journalists who were just laid off. If you have the means, your donation is most welcome. If you don't, a kind thought and maybe spreading the word to others is support enough 💙

My ongoing PSA to the menu planners of the world: It’s okay for sweet and savory to remain different things. Not every sweet has to be spiked with pepper. Not every savory has to be honey-drizzled. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER

There are huge slabs of something, presumably snowcrete, landing on the roof of my building somehow, and I want my mommy.

A staggering statement from former Washington Post editor Marty Baron: "This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations."

Only a lay person’s perspective, but these strike me as some reasonable concerns that at the very least deserve study and mitigation.

Evergreen.

Kind of like a country.

Living just outside of DC for the past 2 1/2 decades I’d sometimes thought that if I wasn’t doing what I was doing as an academic I would want to work for the Washington Post. Not because I actually knew anything of the gritty day by day of journalism. Because of the allure, the luster, the legacy.+