It was a three-man team that took the Grok hardpoint that day, and two of us were just there to guard the poet.Whistler was a sonnet slinger fresh from the Guatemalan meter wars, still waking up with the taste of a bloody metonym on his tongue.

Wow! Jesse Welles performed his song “Join ICE” on the Colbert Show last night. 🏆

KPop Demon Hunters is obviously this year's standout work of art about hope and perseverance while living under constant assault from the forces of darkness, but I have to say that Hazbin Hotel is also worth a watch if you've been dragging your feet on that one.

Every "Hunger Games" title sounds like a Celestial Seasonings blend from Castlevania.

"Look, things happen. And what happens at Camp Crystal Lake should stay at Camp Crystal Lake. We can’t hold everyone accountable for every little thing they’ve ever done."

Way to make it painfully obvious that Summers and Harvard consider teaching to be boring drudgery. They're suspending him from his "real job," the work he actually cares about, but still making him keep up with the scutwork of lecturing, grading, and office hours.

I've spent most of a decade studying how grading policies impact students' ability to self-regulate and learn, particularly in higher ed, and this is an extremely incisive distillation of the real stakes of the issue.

"I have no idea what grades mean or how assessment works, but I've got strong opinions about both." Barro is hardly the only person to fail this test, sadly.

My framed poster with the full text of A Midsummer Night's Dream and a well-thumbed paperback of @sgj.bsky.social's My Heart is a Chainsaw, because running off to seek your heart's desire in the dark woods is the only correct life choice.

Jeffrey Epstein reading the first 100 pages of Lolita and stopping: "Holy shit this sounds great! Everything's gonna work out!"

I don't want politicians who stay *technically* within the lines, I want politicians who stay *WELL* within the lines. If you have to argue the letter of the law, the age of consent in that state, "but she lied!!!" it's already too late. Clearly not fit to hold power or get my vote.

I haven't been to NYC since before the pandemic but I would make IMMEDIATE plans to walk the length of Manhattan and sample all the new goat meat stands.

Posting this at the moment of planetary equinox. We will now enter the darkness together. Here's looking forward to the next six months.

The crossing guard at my daughter's school is a huge fan of the Bills and of James Cook specifically, and one of the highlights of my week this time of year is him yelling his thoughts about the game across the road to me while he directs traffic during morning drop off.

"Don't shoot people for talking" and "don't fire people for talking" are different degrees of the same principle. And no, it's not a principle that Kirk or his allies ever meaningfully defended.

LEAKED: Netflix executive algorithm for greenlighting a sequel to KPop Demon Hunters. Grab some d10s or draw a card.

Slightly diminish a book A Spring Equinox Night's Dream

Fuck this shit. Disappearing 70+ people who were engaged in making highly dangerous granola bars. Abolish ICE. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/n...

If anyone in the field has thoughts on this and what’s currently happening with IMLS, would love to get a sense of what people are thinking about/feeling on the ground: Signal rstauff.20 or message here

Heading to the playground today to find out who we still talk with and who's getting demoted to an awkward nod in the parking lot 1-2 times a quarter. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/our...

Why yes, this IS exactly what it's like working in IT the week before the school year starts back up and trying to help faculty set up their Blackboard courses and tool integrations.

Slightly diminish a band: Nearsighted Guardian

I'm dying laughing at the mechanic and the nice-looking lady on the other side of the waiting room clearly thinks I've lost it and is moving her baby's carrier further away from me. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hon...

Laugh Rule

I know at least two museums in my small city have had grants they were depending on cancelled by DOGE, and I assume that the rest of them have too but it just hasn't been reported in the local press yet. theonion.com/interactive-...

The question isn’t whether people like my daughter have something to offer. It’s whether society is finally ready to stop measuring value with the wrong scale. Autism doesn’t destroy families. Ignorance does. Isolation does. Shame does.

Even libraries on other continents (well, near other continents) know that Dr. Hayden is a brilliant leader and that this is a hilariously tragic own-goal on the part of our entire nation.

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

The Cardinals were overwhelmingly focused on rebuilding their defense during the draft, so this subsequent selection of free agent Leo XIV, most recently from Chicago, is a bit of a curveball; will be interesting to see how he fits into their new scheme.

LOTR: The Four Towers

The current trend of asking AI image generators to exactly recreate a picture over dozens of iterations, and the generator invariably turning a realistic human figure into one of the ship passengers from Wall-E, feels like something we'll look back on as a missed warning.

Alex articulates it much better than I could - the parts that are easy to quantify (and tie to performance/compensation measures) are sped up, but the total time and effort investment to produce a result of similar quality remains flat.

Reminder that words matter. You can’t “deport” a US citizen. You might be kidnapping, disappearing, exiling, expelling, illegally removing, etc., but you’re not “deporting” a US citizen.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

It can't be said enough times that the vision of "meritocracy" that Elon Musk* and the wider right wing tech bro sphere are most familiar with is the (famously toxic) competitive scene around League of Legends. *known cheater/fake gamer

Local journalism is still alive! Excellent reporting on infuriating developments. Sheriff's deputies are making arrests for driving while brown and ICE agents are conveniently nearby to provide translation services for non-English speakers! www.syracuse.com/news/2025/04...

All the Trump-boosting finance bros right now:

Fucking finally. It's testing season, so I spent all week being mad at NYSED for its absurd overreliance on high-stakes testing for... basically everything, but I'm happy to pivot for the weekend and cheer this statement on. No promises about Monday. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/u...

Not currently an on-the-ground librarian myself, but I visit a couple of my city and county library branches weekly, and am concerned about what the death of IMLS (and basically all other federal funding for social services) means for the future of libraries.

This exciting resolution from Rutgers University Senate is exactly the kind of model I think higher ed needs: a mutual defense pact of, in this case, Big 10 schools. They call for member institutions to create a joint defense fund and make resources available to any member institution under attack.

Found out in the semi-annual all campus ITS meeting that my team will be launching an AI tutor-bot building tool at faculty in the near future, so now I'm going to spend the next few months adding "(into the sun)" to a whole lot of documentation.

The irony of the attack on MESAAS at Columbia is that the US gov’t more or less *created* area studies during the Cold War to produce knowledge and intelligence workers to help *them.* It was a way of moving most R&D out of the gov’t and into universities. +

This sounds terrible, but luckily I'm assured that our federal government will become a hyper-efficient dream factory just as soon as we finish firing all the social scientists, so I'm sure this won't keep happening. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

In a new piece in Science, AERA Past President William Tate makes the case that efforts to dismantle the Department of Ed threaten the strategic data collection, information repository, & research infrastructure essential for informing investments in U.S. education. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This morning (3/20) goons from DOGE descended on the Institute of Museum and Library Services to shut it down. According to witnesses, DHS agents were acting as security, to bully the 70 or so civil servants on site to administer grants to museums and libraries.

The opening theme song for Ada Twist, Scientist is an absolutely infectious bop and I think I speak for all parents of young children in saying that the composer should be prosecuted in The Hague. youtu.be/0rnXfXkpDDM?...

AERA has just learned that all restricted-use NCES data licenses will be cancelled, possibly as early as March 20. We urgently request that all AERA members and others in the research community with restricted-use licenses take these two actions: www.aera.net/Research-Pol...

This pulls the plug on federal programs for thousands of special needs kids and massively decreases accountability for any state that chooses to quietly discontinue state-level supports for poor, disabled, or otherwise disadvantaged students. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/u...

The US Department of Education has basically two functions: 1. Distributing Title I funding to high-poverty school districts 2. Collecting and publishing assessment statistics and related data at the national level That's it. www.npr.org/2025/03/05/n...