It’s the “season of love and giving”…but this year, doesn’t it seem more like a “season of fear and taking”? Like many of you, I’ve been saddened by the human impact of draconian government budget cuts and how angry many housed Americans are at unhoused Americans. 🧵 1 of 9

With this and the Atlantic piece about academic accommodations, seems ominous that elite media's decided the rights of the disabled are the next thing to have a moral panic about.

Interesting. Thanks again @propublica.org

Yeah I only use AI for the fun part right at the beginning where we're kicking ideas around and not worried about budget or expectations. Just the best part of any group creative endeavor, me and my team challenging each other with our most visionary ideas, I'm looking to automate that

Grades are in, transition details finalized; but for one day of meetings I am voluntarily logging on for in January, I am officially on sabbatical!

disgusting

i don’t know why tech guys think they are creative storytellers or whatever but that is actually what my job is and i will never ask the robot for help. the painful process of working out how to tell the story is not a bug. that’s not a problem in need of solving.

Some are saying this is the reason we were teaching essays in the first place!

Bruce Lear: "Parents should certainly monitor what their children read and watch, but they shouldn’t get to choose what we all read and watch. Neither should lawmakers." www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/12/10/b...

scrolling back in my sent box looking for a particular email.... learned I have sent 1,047 emails since Aug 1.

i need an apple products expert. I found my old ipod touch, which i retired when i bought the iphone 4 back in... like 2013. i'm positive it works and want to get it set up for my kid. but i need 1) a cord to charge AND 2) do we still have a way to transfer music files to a device in 2025?

i've been here!

I've heard this 1,000 times a day. I believed it until 2 weeks ago. Then I learned that the 2026 National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Jobs Outlook report found that only 10% of job ads ask for AI skills. Tell your friends.

We’re entering a new era of childhood mortality & disability, & almost no one will care bc they’ll just get used to “the new normal” within a few years. They’ll ignore the harm. How do I know? Because that’s exactly how it went w/COVID, which is the 2nd largest threat to childhood health rn.

We can still design a 1970s body style wagon with wood paneling that runs on a battery, Sean. We design the cars. We can do anything.

As usual, Miriam is on it! and right! And I'm feeling so freakin' smug in the fact, I kind of predicted this exact thing over two years ago in my pleading with usually smart folks in my field to just stop it with their AI inevitability and integration. Hmmm guess I'm not so out of touch after all.

Every use-case people think they "need" and LLM for is actually papering over a different issue. The teacher using ChatGPT to write narrative reports bc the demand is unreasonable & overwhelming *actually* needs more support and/or compensation or a reduction of demand. It's a LABOR issue.

at a certain level of job longevity you start to forget all of the things you are responsible for and then you have a sabbatical scheduled and you have to start offloading all of your tasks and schedule-sending emails and whoo-boy it's a lot!

"Think raw milk is 'traditional'? Think again. For generations, moms boiled milk daily to keep their kids alive. Forgetting that truth disrespects the brutal labor women did to protect their families." www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKDP...

Exactly this. And I often really interrogate structure as I teach .. what is *driving* this constraint? Is it about pedagogy? Or control? I also will explain myself - this deadline is driven by the date grades are due, and I need this many days to do finals graded.

Slightly less tongue-in-cheek points about this: this is why writing studies best practice is to grade writing assignments differently depending on whether their purpose is to demonstrate learning or to demonstrate genre and stylistic mastery

The CCCC Special Committee on Generative AI in College Composition & Writing Studies is pleased to share two docs that have been in the works since this past summer: Academic Integrity, Plagiarism, & Generative AI: Guidelines for Postsecondary Writing Teachers docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Understanding Generative AI: A Primer for College Writers docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Could be true. I started writing circa 1952, still at it, still here. Writing builds resilience by changing your brain, helping you face everyday challenges theconversation.com/writing-buil...

You don’t have to be in j-school or a fancy elite program, plus I’m proof you don’t need to know a lot about sports. we’re hoping to get applicants from all sorts of places

We’re accepting applications for our (paid! remote!) summer internship! professors who follow me please share with any students interested in writing

The @chillsubs Lit Mag Awards are back! There are categories like Career Builder, Hidden Gem, New Writer Friendly, Great Editors, and more! Make your noms here: www.chillsubs.com/best-lit-mag...

I’ve been running around asking tech execs and academics if language was the same as intelligence for over a year now - and, well, it isn’t. @benjaminjriley.bsky.social explains how the bubble is built on ignoring cutting-edge research into the science of thought www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

iwona b horyn, too, but you don’t see me decomposing about it

I am ready to go beyond implication and say after reading the facts here that one of the most recognizable people working in the White House almost certainly had ICE arrest her nephew's mother as a favor to her brother

It’s blowing my mind that schools, universities, public services would run headlong into this. We spent 15 years documenting black boxes. This is a black box in a black hole!

OMGoodness yes. And I am still gobsmacked at how many smart folks say this very thing or similar things like trying to wrap it up in "literacy." HOLD. THE. LINE.

Striking thing about this @npr.org Sunday Story on AI and higher ed is that it takes as an unchallenged assumption the idea that the primary and/or sole purpose of higher ed is to prepare students for the job market, not to be free citizens of a democracy.

The energy required to run machine learning systems is orders of magnitude less than the energy required to run LLM systems. The entire energy gauntlet and data center explosion is only necessary to enable more of the bad stuff.

This distinction is critically important and rarely used by tech journalists. All of the good stuff we’re seeing from AI: medicine discovery, energy demand management, etc. are machine learning + big data. LLMs are for cheating, bad poetry, stealing art, deepfakes, and worsening mental health.

evergreen

This great thread makes a point I've been trying to convey for years. Calling all data-driven prediction or decision software "AI" is a huge gift to LLM hypemen, who want people to believe, incorrectly, that LLM data centers are crucial for solar forecasting or operating buildings and power grids.

AI IS MADE BY HUMANS AND CONTAINS ALL OUR BIASES, HOPE THAT HELPS

It turns out that the folks at Anthropic used two of my books to train their Large Language Models. I've gone and submitted my claim via the class action settlement. If you're an author whose work has been stolen, you should too

This is so stupid. The defunding and discrediting of the humanities is one of the most colossal own goals in human history. What a fuckin waste

Also I think we can all agree GOOD GRACIOUS / ASS IS BODACIOUS is up there with anything Keats or Wordsworth have ever written

These emails really do highlight why rich folk are so impressed by ChatGPT.

Heyyyyyyy we got @roxanegay.bsky.social judging the Memoir Excerpt & Essay contest at CRAFT this year!! Send us your best! Can't wait to read :) www.craftliterary.com/craft-memoir...

Maybe It Will Happen Very Soon

Can someone catch me up on the news of the day? I'm seeing excerpts of emails with J E but also that legislators are being pressured to rescind their votes to release the files so where are the emails coming from???

when you're putting a crew together, but the heist is destroying an oligarch on a spiritual level

Found the tweet that Joyce Carol Oates bodied Elon Musk with and it's so beautiful in its eloquent, simple take down. So much so he's crashing out trying to prove he reads books now. Put this in the Louvre.

some good news: kim davis publicly ate shit, again

There's a "11/9 never forget" campaign out there for the taking

Chuck Schumer has failed us.