I'm so glad The Pitt is back to take my mind off Heated Rivalry for an hour.

As a Dawn, I approve and co-sign this plan.

Hate freeloaders who join in the New Year's Eve countdown for the last 10 seconds. I've been doing this all year. Where were you back in May

Sometimes I still miss the Fail Whale.

I asked Chat GPT to give me a Wrapped-style summary of my year. It said my “overall vibe” for 2025 was “Resilient, and extremely tired of being resilient.” Rude, but accurate.

This is especially hilarious since I mostly use Spotify to listen to random classical music while working. But hey, sure.

I really need to find a home with a coat bath. What a quality of life improvement that would be!

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

After years of studying disinfo and wading around in various online toxic waste zones, nothing has made me despair more about the current state of media literacy than the discourse surrounding this album release.

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

"Authors revealed today that Anthropic agreed to... destroy all copies of the books the AI company pirated to train its artificial intelligence models." Burning books doesn't erase their memory or impact on people who've already read them. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

I'm walking into the supermarket after work as a young woman is exiting. When she sees me, she stops. I am wondering whether I know her & should recognize her in the wild. She interrupts my thoughts: "Your outfit is SO CUTE!" I thank her. "OMG slay!" She mimes a camera click. It feels like a win.

I brought up Becca Bloom in class today, and NONE of the students (all women) knew who she was. I'm still processing my feelings about this.

I really love a good monsoon storm. #desertliving

This is one of the most beautiful things I have witnessed, the craft here is impeccable.

there's an episode of The Simpsons where Marge tries to get a violent cartoon pulled from the airwaves, only to discover that the people backing her aren't going to stop at just the art that *she* doesn't like, and that supporting artistic freedom means accepting discomfort. It aired in 1990.

Same!

Student journalists really are out there doing the work.

A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.

I wish more aspiring academics really appreciated this aspect, that academia is dialogical. You have to be able to extemporaneously defend your ideas and discuss them in great detail, orally. You have to know it well enough to have it at your fingertips.

Grocerymaxxing will be the next big trend.

I am no constitutional scholar, but I can't help but feel that "the President gets to dictate what every university can teach and what every television station should broadcast" is closer to what the founding fathers were worried about when it comes to free speech than trigger warnings on syllabi.

I am in my 10th hour of editing my book manuscript - my eyes are blurry - I'm losing focus. And so, I bring you these quotes from W.E.B. Du Bois' "Black Reconstruction in America" (1935) I have also been thinking about all day:

So much going on in this text, which was written — we could also say "lived" — by NPR's media reporter. The most important in my view are these words from a former CEO of NPR, Vivian Schiller. "Any evidence-based news organization that reports critically is going to be accused of left-wing bias."

If you're still confused about the Gen Z stare, Dash can demonstrate it for you.

I genuinely love travel. I mean not all the waiting around or cramped airline seats or other indignities, but the actual part where you get to experience new places, people, foods, languages, etc. But man do I miss my cats when I'm away from home.

“I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was,” Sahil Lavingia told NPR's Juana Summers.

I stopped for groceries on the way home from an excursion with my summer program that kept me away from the news all day. On a whim, I grabbed a bottle of wine, just to have some on hand. Boy was that a good decision today, as it turns out. Rosé incoming.

America needs more muckraking local journalism.

Very legitimate text received this morning, better pay this fine via the perfectly above-board link provided.

UnSpun rewind for me this week*: Cherrypicking and how it affects what you think about things like protests. Plus, you can't change someone's mind, but you can help create conditions where they do it themselves. Check out UnSpun here or where you pod. bit.ly/UnSpunPod *Weirdly busy for summer!

A federal program to protect US cities against extreme heat has just evaporated

The un-United States of America

Your favorite stylish cat's favorite stylish cat.

Cookie has now taken to posing for the robot vacuum, to make sure it gets her best side. (Spoiler: all sides are her best side.)

I think the final indicator that I am, in fact, officially old is that I find the whole Labubu thing utterly baffling.

“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.” - Anaïs Godard

I think in part the higher education funding crisis and the LLM-teaching crisis actually strike at the same problem, which is that education doesn't work without a broad, society-wide sense that the *actual content* of education - not the credential - is valuable.

GRADES ARE IN! Whew. It's been years since I last taught a big undergraduate class; I'd forgotten what an extreme sport it can be.

In Pope Leo’s first address to the media, he called for the release of imprisoned journalists worldwide. CPJ’s prison census documented its second-highest number of journalists behind bars with a global total of at least 361 journalists incarcerated on Dec. 1, 2024. www.reuters.com/world/europe...

Cookie was just going about her business when the SurveillanceVac snapped this photo.

Love this. In his “I Agree” installation Dima Yarovinsky-Yahel took the content from terms of service statements for companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder and printed them out on A4 paper with a standard font size for legal contracts to demonstrate the length of these agreements.

Walz: If you say you love freedom but you don't believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love is not freedom, it is privilege.

Dealership called me last week to ask about upgrading my 2021 Camry Hybrid. I had a routine maintenance appt booked on Saturday, so I said I was open to chatting even though I love my car & am not looking. The pitch: trim level two steps down, ugly colors, $2000 down and a higher monthly payment.

The robot vacuum captured Dash looking demure. (Reader, she is not demure. This photo is propaganda.)

Robot vacuum photo of Cookie guarding the laundry basket.

This morning during the "deep relaxation" cooldown at barre class, the music was an instrumental version of Sarah McLachlan's Full of Grace. I'm sorry, but no Buffy fan can fully relax during this song. At least I didn't start reflexively sobbing, though, so that was a win!

Where do we file this petition? I mean, this is also what I wanted from The Good Place. We couldn't get it then, but maybe we've advanced enough as a television-making society that The Pitt can make our dreams come true.