I strongly suspect that the target demographic of "I give up, AI is great" essays by middle-aged faculty are their elders, comfortable enough in retirement to consider AI a toy, or the ranks of administrators, which the authors may want to join.

Nathan's "Action Without Hope" really is a great book, and one committed to the values of critical thinking and scholarship despite the temptation (around us all the time) to solutionist cliche. I learned from it, argued with it, admire it.

My first postdoc was within Historical Studies at the New School; the attached article explains that, as faculty are induced to leave or fired, this department will be replaced by something far more politically suspicious, its funders undisclosed:

Checking my genetic risk factors in deep time; oncology recapitulates phylogeny.

Astronaut artists: Painting, quilting, and playing Bowie aboard the International Space Station I especially loved hearing about how watercoloring works without gravity! www.ctpublic.org/show/audacio...

When I was an undergrad my mom told me I had to write a thesis "so you'll have juvenilia one day." The below is not from undergrad, but rather a review essay about the literature on public intellectuals, written late in grad school: read.dukeupress.edu/the-minnesot...

Oh, what's that, David Brooks, is "something big happening on campus"? Is it you? Do you "seem to be a verb" as Buckminster Fuller once put it? Are you feeling all full of Buckyballs, dreaming of New Haven?

I’ve yet to see a grad speech where the speaker says “don’t you think it’s bullshit that higher ed has been turned into mere job training & now they’re shoving something down your throats that will make your jobs worse, take them, & immiserate u forever? Let’s end vocationalization!” Waiting for it!

Every time someone I respect and admire asks "have you seen what AI can do? Have you played with it?" I feel like Wesley Crusher being chased around the Enterprise with a headset in STNG S5 E6, "The Game."

Pitch: a series of career seminars given by people whose careers are irrevocably f*cked, just to balance out all the talks that might as well be "how I picked my winning lottery numbers".

Indeed, there's a good argument against academics in secure jobs writing trade books at all.

I'm at the MIT president decrying the denial of funding for basic scientific research/I'm at MIT closing three libraries to manage their shortfall/I'm at the combination -

I don't know how many people are losing their jobs in MIT's closure of 3 of its libraries, but that's the part of the story that saddens and angers me the most.

no-one does unboxing videos like @jedediahberry.bsky.social

If you can’t take me at my worst (”great idea! An ice cream shop called The Creamatorium”) you can’t have me at my best (genuinely snappy dresser)

hyperlocal food news: Clover Food Labs, originally a felafel truck near MIT, will soon close all its locations. It was a great truck, many years ago, and then it became a chain my family enjoyed and I generally did not enjoy. But 15 years ago you got an affordable lunch and coffee and it was nice.

there's a category of thing that may be wonderful but whose name generates, in me, an immediate reaction akin to a fern suddenly curling in on itself when touched, and I think "Yiddish Sound Bath" is one of them.

“Go the F-ck to Sleep” has found its sequel, “Go the F-ck to College” so I look forward to completing the trilogy with “Don’t Go the F-ck to Grad School”

I remember the Kaya Toast from Street too - it was a really perfect dish, and they kept running it even after the restaurant became Mudhen (?) Tavern. I have tried to recreate it, not with much success.

the University of Chicago having announced its intention to increase the size of its undergraduate body, other schools follow suit; Swarthmore, for example, will only admit students at least seven feet in height, giants barely accommodated by a Quaker meeting hall.

A wise friend, retired from teaching the history of science, observed a big confusion in teaching: "the higher you are, the more you teach Heidegger; the lower you are, the more you teach writing." This correlation of status with theory, elevated over general education, has deepened our trouble.

I also think it is low on the priority list for many academics, for whom the “broadening of an elite” (as Strauss put it) is too pernicious and troubling a goal. “Access? But will they cite my work?”

One problem - among many - is that we lack rich and positive pictures of both intellectual freedom and general education, and mostly focus on their absence or breakage. That’s part of the abandonment to which Ted refers.

couldn't remember who wrote Homo Ludens for a long time. This is what they call Huizinga's Uncertainty Principle.

[we’re in the kitchen, I’m gesturing at a vent above the stove] you see, the house was built in the vingtième siecle

[me complimenting your hospitality] “Speaking as a lifelong parasite, you’re a terrific host.”

writing about intellectual history without politics being your ultimate horizon of concern

listening to ambient music is its own reward, but hearing the words ”walrus-ghost’s sophomore release” is a delightful bonus.

In my guise as a food writer trained in intellectual history I love to offer anecdotes to the decadence of the professorial class.

[welcoming you to my bakery] you: what’s in the box? Me: pain.

At least two family friends have a bathroom wallpapered in New Yorker covers, and it sort of expresses its place in my family's social milieu: aspirational, disparaged, part of the furniture, all at once. Touchstone and flagstone.

idk about you but i am tired of all these government baal outs

A lot of contemporary crimes against the human soul come down to our use of the word "content."

Indie Bookstores with Masking & Covid Policies in 2026 www.whoevenreads.com/indie-bookst...

somehow this morning I slipped into the phrase "Thin Blue Ant" as in a line of solidarity among globetrotting branding consultants wearing selvedge denim, a solidarity almost comically unbelievable.

feeling increasingly good about the fact that I barely cite work published in the twenty-first century.

refusing to use google translate on Polish-language articles about Olga Tokarczuk using AI to write novels just to feel extra pure.

So it's our pal Jonathan Richman's birthday today and he's 75 and it's getting warmer outside so let's hear "That Summer Feeling," because it's never too soon to get nostalgic about what's to come. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zmy...

I realize everyone gets mad about nepotism, but take heart, it doesn’t always work! If it always worked I’d have had a way easier career path as an academic.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover, and Gro-

Hire an expert in nineteenth-century German philosophy, and you get _eternal returns_.

I usually write about either food and drink, or intellectual history (broadly writ) and I rarely propose overarching links, but increasingly I think that I observe, and try to understand, experts in practice, be they flipping burgers or arguing for the existence of god. That, then, is my expertise.

Creating lists, like of the best restaurants, is an important part of service journalism, which is part of what food critics provide. And some things are better than other things (controversial opinion!) but guess what, this "better" almost never matters when it comes to making you happy.

it is a little known rule, but when spousal hires divorce they must retract all scholarly publications made after the moment of hire, as it was their marriage that underwrote the legitimacy of the work they conducted under its aegis.

Important to consider that the way certain disciplines work is by encouraging undergraduates to create new knowledge as a matter of course, whereas other disciplines are designed to teach specific orthodoxy.

Hmm, hmm, contemplating “Umeboshivik Tendency” as a cocktail pop up name

Seattle friends, Ada's Books is closing adasbooks.com/adas-closing

oh man, just heard that Ada's Technical Bookshop in Seattle is closing. I only went a couple of times, but I liked the idea that something like that - combination cafe and sci/tech and speculative fiction bookshop - could exist, for a while.

just so; this is about the health of schools and not about the prestige economy of higher ed

in this richly detailed essay, @bakaari.bsky.social explores the ironies of the pursuit of statehood in her hard-to-visit home, Somaliland: www.bostonreview.net/articles/sov...