Professor's pro-tip for anyone with college-age kids: Tell your kids go to class. It's really that simple. If you show up, you'll do okay. You don't have to be smart, you just have to be there. Maybe stay off your phones for 50 minutes. Just listen. You'll absorb something. I have data to prove it.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.

It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

Wishing all our friends, followers, and well-wishers a peaceful and relaxing few days ahead x

Glad to see this: as historian who has been thinking 'Huh? historical invention of adolescence as category? centuries of children being expected to be responsible providing family members?' vs recently coming across advice column re whether 15-year old was capable of managing public transport 1/2

It is about this: because so many people do not give a shit about romance, shit gets tried in romance first. You should pay attention to romance publishing news and care about it, because they will try that shit here first.

"Organ-tuning books in English churches provide notes on a warming climate" "A change of just one degree celsius may alter the pitch of one of these instruments by 0.8 hertz"

People may not realize that this is the birth place of Ethnic Studies and the first Black Studies program. SFSU is a school of historic significance.

we, in the United States, through Trump’s mass deportation scheme, have engaged in abductions and torture for the past year, none of it in secret, much of it attested to in legal documents. there is nothing to expose, only to face.

via The New Yorker, Ellis Rosen cartoon

“The American people need to be assured that never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.” Another quote from 1975 that wrecks me.

Did the annual *White Christmas* rewatch, time to reup this take (which I know I've posted before but bsky seems to have eaten): *White Christmas* is an extended riff on *The Waste Land*. A land no longer productive (of snow) can only be restored when a once-great ruler is restored to honor.

Books are low-key goated when preserving the intellectual + creative birthright of all humanity is the vibe

#CFP - Postgraduate Conference - Challenging Literary and Cultural Practices, Now: Contemporary Approaches to the Humanities. The symposium will take place on 15th January 2026. Abstracts must be submitted by 31st December.

This really is a huge blow. Why can't we design things that are accessible to everyone by default. Oh yes, because it might cost a bit more. 😕 www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Well golly gee, the Office for Students is too busy policing “wokeness” and corporatising universities to actually pay any attention to large-scale fraud. Who’d have thunk it? www.theguardian.com/education/20...

While transplant patients can research to pick and choose doctors and hospitals, they generally have no control over which generic version of critical drug tacrolimus they get from the pharmacy. That can make a difference between life and death.

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

The two young people bagging my groceries yesterday asked me what I thought about AI. "I hate it," one said, "but my professors force me to use it." "In my public health class," the other reported, " all the assignments were AI-based." She went on: "I didn't learn anything at all."

"but it'll save time!" i actually...don't care? lol. the genAI evangelists overestimate how much the people who chose to do research for a living (before chatgpt even existed) value "saving time." i'd rather do research well than do it quickly. i'd rather write an award-winning book than a fast book

If a single scholar of color told me they were using this, I would need to stage an intervention within 48 hours. You will be fired or "not reappointed" when this goes sideways even if your lil friend will be fine.

Before essay mills were banned in 2022, advertising for essay mills were all like ‘students, get help with your ideas’ and *everyone* knew it was bullshit. EVERYONE! And now universities themselves are encouraging students to ‘get help with their ideas’ from ChatGPT - and it’s STILL bullshit!

5) AI is cleary messing up academic bibliographic work, and if this turns out right, i.e. that library page's are temporarily showing every hallucinated content that Google (or others) are offering, then we are truly cooked.

a lot of people are aware that you can factor 2025 = 45² i'm honored to announce the factorization 2026 = (45-i)(45+i)

It will surprise nobody that the cataloguing system that is slopwashing like this turns out to be Primo. (If you're not sure what system your university library uses: have you ever searched for a book and been offered three pages of links to reviews instead? That was Primo too.)

and we also have to acknowledge how much of the scam flies under the cover of "open access"

truly amazing how many different professions there are where everyone’s newest persistent headache is “AI zealots high on their own supply”

The google AI summary of my most famous piece of writing--a thousand word blog post--misunderstands it on a fundamental level. In doing so, it reproduces the way critical yet lazy scholars misunderstood it, by reading the title and filling in what they thought was the most likely meaning.

Yet another of Primo's crimes

Feeling an extra layer of sick about AI being turned loose on my books & articles: violation is not just of my "authorship" but (as an interpretive social scientist) of the people about whom I write. They consented to be written about, but not to their words & experiences feeding these machines

Flesh and blood historians have never once caused electricity prices to go up for millions of people.

S2 of Man on the Inside is the better pitched missing second season of The Chair

Sorrows of young lurkers.

Amazing how many of these papers are about “ethical use of AI in education.” It’s harsh, I know, but I do think if you incorporate a hallucinated reference it should be incredibly damning for you. There should be professional penalties.

Urgent letter from educators to the British government on the welfare of hunger strikers, please sign and share @sheffielducu.bsky.social actionnetwork.org/petitions/op...

i cannot get my university to engage with the question “why do fascists love AI and what do you believe their goals are for universities?”

"In other words, once the four AI tools locked onto a person’s age, race, or gender, those factors would form the backbone of the tissue analysis. In effect, AI would go on to replicate bias resulting from gaps in AI training data."

This is the institutionalization of Turning Point's professor watchlist. It invites mass harassment and declares war on independent ideas. If unlearned sociopaths can influence your teaching through threats, academic freedom is essentially dead.

It’s the entire point. There’s no plan to make this meaningful for students. No plan to use it administratively. Its design and implementation signals its only real intent. It’s best and easiest use case is for systematic harassment and to scare faculty into complying in advance.

RIP

"Freedom to Die"

If you're staff, faculty, grad or undergrad student, alumni, or other community member of any UNC system school, please send Peter Hans a letter opposing the mandatory public release of syllabi. First amendment & academic freedoms aside, this policy could actively endanger instructors of record.

If you are in the literature at all you will sooner or later have some bullshit attributed to you by the word-extruder and we are all going to have to just keep doing "no, that wasn't me" whack-a-mole until the heat death of the universe

some publications do not need to be circulated

Is there a, like, history magazine for kids? Print, mostly correct/not slop?

listened to this while printing a new layer on the neverending screenprints and it's so good I will be listening again when I can sit and take notes. don't concede the future! don't concede our public (and just shared) spaces! don't concede our hands!

that's like, everybody, statistically

As everywhere: carolinapublicpress.org/73953/cultur...

lol

Further down thread it says 170 fac have been given offers (buyouts, retirements). If not enough take them there will be “involuntary separations.” 170! Think of the collective yrs of training, specialization, teaching, the number of students taught, advised, mentored, the wealth of KNOWLEDGE.