Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work. "B+ is a perfectly respectable grade ... Sorry, grades are non-negotiable ... The grade that you have is the grade that you earned ... How about you make an appointment with me after semester break?"

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harbourless immensities.

Someone made "AI" videos of my late grandmother and I was pissed. Leaving aside that it was a bad likeness, it implied that I couldn't face loss and needed to be shielded from the most basic facts of being alive. Better would be to save the water and energy and just tell me she's on a farm upstate.

Me designing a class on Marx's "Capital": Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!! Me teaching the chapters about money: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

Eat your heart out, "Middlemarch," you've got nothing on this banger.

"chomsky fri dinner" 😑

Nevermind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: Oceanography The Monstrous Feminine in Horror Cinema Intro to Yiddish Shakespeare's History Plays Faust

The Dept. of Appearing to Take Things Rather Seriously While Wearing a Navy Sport Coat and No Tie is actively searching for a Dean of Comfortably Ordering Wine in a DC Steakhouse Where Denny Hastert Used to Sit Right Over There. The position will pay $580,000. The history department is abolished

don’t let chatgpt in the shire

"Moby-Dick" is basically about Ishmael's complicated suicide attempt, and in the end he's the only one to survive. 🐳

(The Pequod 🐋 has lost its wooden cask life-buoy, and the carpenter is converting an unused coffin as replacement) "Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further?"

🐋

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.” I feel you, Melville

to make a documentary after Melania is barbaric

He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.

And that horny book should be, of course, Moby-Dick. 🐳

A colleague and her students organized a "Moby-Dick" readathon. We'll be spending the weekend dorking out. 🐳

@bundestag.de "Künstliche Intelligenz" ist Scheiße. -Alexander Phillips, PhD

A colleague is organizing a Moby-Dick readathon on campus this weekend. I'm assigned "Etymologies" and "The Grand Armada," I'm so stoked. 🐳

Historian Thomas Nipperdey on Kaiser Wilhelm II: "... superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, ..."

Droste-Hülshoffs Beschreibung eines Dampfschiffs auf dem Rhein, Brief an ihre Mutter:

I know the standard read on the Borg is American anxieties about communism, but I always saw them as the distorted mirror image of the Federation's utopian technophilia.

Share a tv show that raised you.

Thank you!

All I can think about as I read "Dracula." (Repost with typo corrected)

"A fish, but umbilical cords, bro, even *I* don't know what a whale is."

At least the fake Twain quote about the coldest winter being a summer in San Francisco is funny. Misattributing witticims to him is one thing, treating him as a fake quote garbage can is something else.

We tend to think of things happening in the present as the endpoint of stuff that's been percolating for decades, but it's also the beginning of new things: These are formative events that nobody living through them will forget, and we have no idea what seeds are being sown for the future.

Is compensatory tree planting ever not smoke and mirrors? I recently stumbled into one such grove in a local park and felt like I was in some sort of sad, arboreal ghetto. www.hindustantimes.com/cities/delhi...

Reminded my undeclared first years that if they earnestly believed their choice of major would insulate them from the vicissitudes of capitalism, they should talk to anyone who got a computer science degree in the last five years.

Me, driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.

Should have been Nis-Momme Stockmann's "Der Fuchs" after I saw that he thanked himself in the acknowledgments, but alas, I'd paid almost 30 Euro for the hardcover. #LitWiss

Benjamin's argument about fascism as the aestheticizing of political life has made way more sense to me in the last ten years than it ever did before. Even after coming to political consciousness under the "war on terror."

The Star Trek to Moby-Dick pipeline.

I outsourced my brain to a prediction machine. Make some words to plug the hole where my inner life used to be.

Backwards that Delhi metro tells people not to ride if they're inebriated. Drunk driving is a serious problem here. People should take mass transit if and when they are inebriated.

Would be a good day to brew an IPA.

I'd left my X-itter account defunct these last two years, all tweets deleted save for for a link to my book. However at this point, my conscience can't even abide that. After 11 years, it gets the coup de grâce.

Nature is healing - Schafherde erobert Supermarkt und fröhliches Gebäudeverwüsten durch Schafe hat eine lange & edle Tradition⬇️ Ist so sehr Kulturgut, dass es hier in Bern ein Geisterhaus gibt, dass von einer randalierenden Geister(!)-Schafherde heimgesucht wird Alles höchst wichtige #envhist!

Just as all the grad students I know were suddenly into Marx post-2008, it is absolutely unsurprising that my students now are all digging psychoanalysis.

And Berlin is one of the cities where there is still much room for improvement.

One guy tried, unsuccessfully, to blow up a plane with a bomb in his sneakers, and everybody had to take off their shoes at the airport for the next 20 years. Chatbots have a collective body count equal to Richard "The Night Stalker" Ramirez, and they're trying to put them in schools.

enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky

Big shout out to my high school US history teacher who taught Texas 1830-48, the USS Maine, Panama, and the Gulf of Tonkin. When Bush et. al. were beating the war drums against Iraq, I was naïvely surprised that people *didn't* think the US government would fabricate a pretext for war.

"And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life" -Moby-Dick

just so it's clear: this is the exact core function of genAI Fascist government and climate deniers love it because it can produce the aesthetics of knowledge without any actual tendency towards truth. It is automated denialism. Shame on every climate scientist promoting its use (there are lots)

1.) The story chapters in "Moby-Dick." 2.) The 19th century cetology chapters in "Moby-Dick." 🐳

2025 was a banner year for cycling. I did 12,007km, besting my previous record of 10,800 from 2021.