Back home for Christmas and my friends/family, nearly all of whom work in hospitals/nursing homes are DEEPLY alarmed about AI, LLMs, ChatGPT etc because, in their words, new nurses and aides don't know how to do anything. Normal anti-rookie attitude, or real issue? Has anyone seen studies?

If you’re wondering why your friends in academia are a little on edge right now, it’s because an eighteen-year-old who hasn’t done the reading, doesn’t look at the assignment, and has does no critical thinking skills more complex than “because I think it’s in the Bible” can literally end your career

I suppose there’s a silver lining that i didn’t end up there after I completely and utterly flopped my interview with them in 2019. (My first academic interview ever, I think.) But anyway: yikes. This is a mess

I think this is a really important point. When folks say "no AI" they often don’t mean "I can conceive of no possible use for AI"—they mean "the use cases I’ve been shown do not begin to justify the harms"—that’s not something you respond to by offering another narrow use case

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

Comfort watching Scandal. That show also has an awful, perverted, egomaniacal president but at least he was hot af

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

How do we feel about citing pre-prints in CompRhet? A lot of research on GenAI and LLMs is only available through places like arxiv and conference proceedings, which makes sense in other disciplines but aren't really that useful for ours

This orange motherfucker interrupting the finale of survivor is rage inducing. Yes, this is the worst season of survivor in a decade but still. We don’t play about finale night

you don't need to watch the trump speech unless it is literally your job to watch the trump speech. it is not good for you to watch the trump speech.

i love how poetry is (all at once) overthinking and overfeeling and overlanguaging

I want to say something about numbers and the academic job market without accepting the logic of the market as good or even neutral. But like, this guy was either badly advised or just ignored good advice because there's no way anyone, even superstars, can get a job with only a couple applications.

Been sitting on an R and R for a couple weeks and just realized the only way to fix this article is to separate it into two and publish both 😭😭

During the Survivor finale?!?!?!

Rob Reiner: I'm going to make a coming of age drama, a fantasy adventure story, a romantic comedy, a psychological horror and then a courtroom drama. Us: Across your entire career? Reiner: In a 6 year period. Us: That sounds- Reiner: -Each one will be arguably the best movie in that genre.

You don’t actually have to share whatever nonsense Elon Musk is saying on any given day. You can of course but you don’t have to. The people what want to know what he is up to follow him. The rest of us don’t.

Yoooo this is so badass.

Frankenstein is the story of a STEM dad whose son majors in the humanities

I won’t pretend to understand the intricacies of book selling, but just who did they think was the audience for this??

I mean, Hitler was also Time's man of the year, so.

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I think RFK Jr. and Olivia Nuzzi have ruined sex for me.

One of the many reasons AI can't produce good writing is it can't hate its own writing. It can't think to itself "Maybe I'm illiterate" during the writing process. And that's essential

At Costco eating lunch (I’m very cool) and this woman is juggling three kids. The oldest is demanding explanations for everything, the youngest needs to be hand fed, and the middle one has tried to escape twice. Mom is handling it like an acrobat We don’t give parents enough credit

This piece gets at one of the underlying reasons students turn to LLMs - because they think it makes them sound like they belong in a university setting. It's the same motive that had students overusing the thesaurus pre-ChatGPT. theimportantwork.substack.com/p/chatgpt-an...

I don’t know if non-Catholics appreciate just how progressive some of the church is. My husband did a bio post-doc at a Sisters of Mercy university, and part of his hiring process was an extensive drilling on DEI by a Catholic sister. She said in no uncertain terms that they don’t play about DEI.

as a queer Catholic who's like, in the pews and reading the changing winds, I've often said that "the Francis effect" people talk about really existed outside of Francis the individual Pope (whose words & actions at times deeply sucked!) it's about the way it makes other people change their behavior

I swear "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./ I do not think that they will sing to me" is one of the saddest movements in English poetry

You will be visited by three spirits

I don't know if people who haven't seen this process up close realize truly how much work (and money) it takes to get to this point. I had no idea until my husband applied for US citizenship. It's a long, stressful, complex slog. I'm enraged for these people. The cruelty is unimaginable

Reading a late-in-life book by an older, great and justly beloved poet and I’m wondering how established one must be for editors to just let things fly. Because mama, this book is a mess and someone should’ve stopped it 😭😭

I hadn’t considered this…

Once again sent an email out to all my colleagues with typo

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel.

I'm starting to wonder how much "the male loneliness epidemic" is just straight and bisexual women identifying low-effort, mean, and incompetent men and choosing not to date, marry, and tolerate them anymore

Absolutely not

“We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.” Richard Siken

… and he SERVED ✨

Relying on a prescription from a specialty pharmacy during late capitalism is a particular kind of hell. How'd my pharmacy auto-call me, and when I needed to talk to a human the operator had no clue why they called or have any records of me as a patient

No one is leaving New York City to go to Texas and Florida. Could you imagine lol (no shade to Texas which has a lot of delightful areas)

Hard not to think of politicians embracing AI/defunding the liberal arts when you read this “Thinking is hard, and often frightening; Arendt suggested that people who were “just following orders” welcomed a permission structure that discouraged thought.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/b...

I could go the rest of my career without people worrying about whether giving students with accommodations extra time for assignments is an unfair advantage. In my career, every single project--every single one--I've worked on, someone has asked for more time. It has never caused major problems

Helping a bright, first-gen student apply for grad school and I'm being triggered by how badly written some application instructions are. Like, under the header "Application requirements," what the hell does: "Official Transcripts required (unofficial are acceptable for application review)" mean?

being a budget manager in academia is such a clown show. Why'd someone just today approve a contract I signed and already transferred the money on 8 months ago...

This is my fear. Not that LLMs will make better content, but that we’ll lower our standards enough that we’ll accept slop as good enough. I think it’s already happening

I think if you're legitimately worried about students lying to get an advantage in your class your energy is better spent addressing the ways the structure of schooling deprioritizes learning and creates an adversarial relation between students and instructors

These are good, thoughtful, conceptually-sound guidelines and ideas written by people who actually know what they're talking about, not companies trying to bully you into using their product or clueless admincritters who haven't taught in years

I want all future students to know that I will never teach remotely on what should be a snow day. I refuse. They can't take everything away from us

Your annual reminder... do NOT give to the Salvation Army.