Hunter S. Thompson's obituary of Richard Nixon. Back when some semblance of free speech still existed in the U.S.A.

My U.N. Commission’s Finding: Israel Is Committing Genocide www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/o...

The FT has, among the media, the best incentives to be sensitive to reality.

"I wish we could blame this on muslims or migrants, but turns out it was one of us." what a wild thing to say

Amazing how none of these Charlie Kirk obits care to observe that few people contributed more to the intense polarization and explosion of "cancel culture" we've seen in the past decade. The dude essentially made his name by creating a professor target list and goading his minions to go after them.

Bolsonaro found guilty by Brazil's Supreme Court. Strange that there's more institutional robustness in a fledgling democracy than in one that is celebrating 250 this year.

I had the privilege of reviewing Tyler Stovall's last book for @hfrancewebsite.bsky.social—a monograph that elegantly suggests the progressive potentials of global French studies.

Bolsonaro trial being broadcast live. www.youtube.com/watch?v=felf...

Ok, hear me out, A Lord of the Rings remake, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:

I’ve polled 40 students at my liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest. 60% report that they avoid AI chat bots like the plague. 75% report having a generally or strongly negative opinion about how AI will impact the future.

These people are such losers. Their product's improvements over "hot AI summer" were, at best, trivial. Realistically, it just further reinforced the notion that capabilities have plateaued and there's not really much of a "revolutionary" future for LLMs. So constant hyping before the rug pull.

Something to consider is that one reason "Science" (sic) has lost authority and is under attack is because of a certain kind of hubris and distancing from other fields of human knowledge (as exemplified by the very article in question).

People have, and I can emphasize this enough, fully lost the plot.

i work for microsoft and can say that 1) they are pushing copilot for sure and 2) it is utterly fucking useless. i'm not a coder though

Lol. You know Microsoft is worried it invested a ton of money in the Titanic when its CEO starts desperately content farming to drive hype toward its shit product.

Amazing what ChatGPT 5 can do.

Newsletter: My 16,000 word opus - How To Argue With An AI Booster, a comprehensive guide to arguing with AI boosters, addressing both their bad faith debate style and their specific (and flimsy) arguments as to why generative AI is the future. www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue...

Friends, I'm working on strategies to keep students from uploading texts to ChatGPT (want them to do readings themselves). Seems that if you set a password to open PDF, then ChatGPT can't read it. But then you also need to block printing for them not to create a clean PDF copy. Any other ideas?

What is wrong with people?

During the first three minutes of the first OpenAI podcast, Altman + the host rhapsodized about a father who got tired of talking to his kid about Thomas the Tank Engine so he decided to offload the "annoying" task of interacting with said child to ChatGPT.

On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout. On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar. This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵

Each and every single one of these Gestapo mf'ers needs to get doxxed.

Fellow historians: anyone have access to this review essay and willing to share it? Thanks! academic.oup.com/hwj/article-...

LOLOLOLOL

This is great and if you haven't checked out Nick's "Unflattening" you're really missing out.

Thank you @elsevierconnect.bsky.social, really helpful AI-generated clarification of the term "face"

Wow check out this real picture of Sydney harbour that UTS used on their website trying to attract international students web.archive.org/web/20250616...

I wonder what causes rickets.

"genuine"

Going to do the trite thing and note that if Biden did this, it would have been the top story for days.

I'm going to publish the entirety of an exchange I just had with the press office of the DOJ. I want you to see how they are talking about truth.

So I guess Netanyahu is now in the Madagascar Plan phase of his "not-genocidal" campaign. apnews.com/article/isra...

My book is OpenAccess, and I have very mixed feelings about it. Sure, that means it's more accessible to readers. But it also means that it's vulnerable to just becoming more "data" to be fed into LLM monstrosities—models built through primitive accumulation, models that commercialize the commons.

A PhD is, famously, an original contribution to knowledge. So no, I very much doubt a gen-AI built on copying other people’s texts could write or defend a PhD thesis. If it’s so good, why can’t ChatGPT craft Sam Altman a business model that doesn’t involve begging governments to relax copyright laws

“GPT-5 is the first time that it feels like talking to an expert in any topic — a Ph.D.-level expert,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said.

Smarmy tech bro not very subtle in his efforts at digital infrastructure capture.

I’m increasingly of the mind that there can be no moderate, meet-somewhere-in-the-middle stance on chatbot style AI in educational settings. Rhetoric about “limited” or “reasonable” or “ethical” use is just that, empty rhetoric. The only appropriate (& wise) stance is total opposition and refusal.

LinkedIn has always been defined by high levels of farcical corporate-speak and, well, grift. But these people have really lost the plot.

It takes some serious cognitive dissonance for this kind of weird racist nostalgia.

"GenAI will replace historians." GenAI (in Google Search):

Same vibes.

This study is a conceptual/methodological mess. The IWA definition used for tagging reads:"Research historical or social issues." That's it. So every time a student went to Copilot in lieu of Wikipedia and found the interaction useful, it got added to the "applicability score." Total nonsense.

In light of the Columbia and Brown deals, I’m bumping these slides again about the Nazi takeover of German science, which includes discussion about how they took over academia, in a manner very similar to the Brown and Columbia deals

This sounds like a fascinating way to learn things. I, for instance, am planning encourage my students to debate with ChatGPT what would've happened to European nationalisms if Bismarck had actually been a dolphin who learned to speak German.

Pankaj Mishra skewers America's court intellectuals, mentioning the Harper's letter in Harper's. harpers.org/archive/2025...

I've had a brilliant time at #GCFHSResist - rich, engaging papers and lots of brilliant colleagues. It was all pulled off with a riotous panache as well! Chapeau to the organisers and to Luc and Solveig for being brilliant hosts! Now for a few days off

We love lighter-than-air and history, so we're really excited about the recent release of « Ascending Republic | The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France » by Patrick De Oliveira (@plso.bsky.social‬) just out from @mitpress.bsky.social‪. | 🛩️ 📚 🎈 🥇 | 🔗 mitpress.mit.edu/978026254980...

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