i can’t stop watching this vid of dan deacon doing the anthem before the orioles game yesterday it just gets better and better and all the crowd shots are golden

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

No one is “replacing” teachers with AI. People are redistributing money to tech companies for AI and replacing permanent salaried workers with contingent, poorly paid ones whose labor is to patch together the system that is being broken by AI.

brad lander primary chuck schumer

For academics & scholars who've uploaded papers to Academia, this message I received this morning should be of major concern. I'll delete my account, but I assume damage is done & they've already scraped everything of mine. Should stand as a warning about sharing one's work on commercial websites

Happy to share the schedule for our upcoming workshop on #revenge in #China next week at KU Leuven. Looking forward to working with so many great scholars of Chinese #philosophy, literature, law, and history. Gonna be a great time with #伍子胥, #謝小娥, #公羊學, and much more! #sinology

We're so lucky that all states are rational actors

See the problem with genAI "translations" of literature is that they will rob us of the frisson that comes with encountering a perfect beautiful metaphor in the wild. Anyway, please read this. defector.com/toward-a-the...

I used to assign an argumentative essay straight out the gate in my lit survey course. Last year I changed that first assignment to a lengthy paraphrase of an argument that turned on a close reading of a single sentence. Asking them to turn around and challenge their own paraphrase is brilliant.

This gyre is looking awfully wide

yes i am sure

They have made the world living hell for no reason whatsoever. People will ask why this happened in a decade and there will be tremendous effort to make it more complicated than “they were evil, stupid, and bored”

Firing a scattergun into the air to signal to my most beautiful uncle that bud light lime has been restocked at the liquor store. Two return shots mean he heard me, three means he is in distress

I admit that I didn’t have “the only government to show concern over AI is the Vatican” on my 2025 bingo card.

Tell me how well a machine can interpret historical sources for you, and I’ll tell you how mechanical your interpretation of historical sources already is.

Recently stumbled across a syllabus I saved for a “Literature of the Vietnam War” class I took as an undergrad. Folks, we read a novel every week for ten consecutive weeks. Plus supplementary articles! And it was definitely a “go write a paper class.” This was in 2007! Not exactly ages and ages ago.

Just published! 📚 “A General Survey of Song-Poetry (Sanqu) of Yuan China (1260–1368)” by Yishan Zhao and translated by Rui Zhou: a general overview of sanqu as well as a foundation for future research. See more: brill.com/display/titl... #Sanqu #ChinesePoetry #NewBook

Yes. To let students buy and *keep* their course materials.

If you make me president of your university, I will find millions in cost savings by force-quitting shady EdTech contracts, & I will spend it all by giving faculty an annual budget to buy course books for their students.

*US ORDERS HALT TO STUDENT VISA INTERVIEWS: POLITICO

#musicrecfriday: Cash Bently’s Cash Corridos II. Frank Ocean meets Elliot Smith meets Corridos Tumbados (trap ballads from NW Mexico, although Cash Bently is from an El Salvadorian community in Virginia). soundcloud.com/cashbently/t...

Literary Chinese for Concision, Example 1: 七步八叉，真擅萬身之才 "Truly he wields the talent of ten thousand men, [not unlike Cao Zhi, who composed a poem in the time it took him to walk] seven paces, [or Wen Tingyun, for whom writing a poem required only the time necessary to] fold [his] arms eight [times]."

Also caught the reopening of the Shanghai Antique Books Store 上海古籍书店. Really impressive relaunch. It is essentially a new bookstore and they now have *everything*. Cool to be squeezing past people in the aisles of a bookstore that is floor to ceiling texts on premodern China.

In Shanghai for a little talk at Fudan University and got recommended this dictionary by several grad students working on premodern texts that takes you directly to the physical page in the relevant reference work. Incredible tool! www.kaom.net/book_xungu.php

A great read. One of the critiques, which holds true beyond the Early China subfield, is that US/Euro scholars are not reading enough of the often groundbreaking work of their China-based peers. The fatal error in the reviewed works per Smith is partly a result of scholars reading in a bubble.

Some variation on 肠断 (“innards split”) has been the word of choice for emotional agony in Chinese texts for over 2000 years.

Premodern China nerds: do you have a favorite lesser-known reference work or dictionary you find yourself using all the time? Or even one you enjoy browsing to refresh your memory or discover new connections?

New Stories from a Burning House post, on the Qianlong Emperor's cats, who probably didn't exist but were still very good. If you've shared this image, you are required to read the post; I don't make the rules. www.burninghou.se/p/the-empero...

If you’re winding up at AAS and still have room in your luggage, Prologue Bookshop on High Street just down from the convention center has a great selection, including lots of translated fiction. #AAS

Learning a lot about working the night shift in the Hanlin Academy from @siegeweather.bsky.social #AAS2025

Went clothes shopping today and the woman unlocking dressing rooms had to be in her mid 70s. Frail, hands shaking, too much makeup. Tried to make small talk because she seemed terribly lonely. Made me so sad and so angry. Monstrous society we live in that works the elderly to their dying day.

Lovely confirmation that characters from the Zhuangzi continue to walk the earth

I think no person alive more fully embodied what it means to live the life of the mind for me than David Lynch. Thank you for teaching me how to catch the big fish. RIP

OK, but Lee is an extreme outlier in this regard. His is a sad story indeed, because the game lost one of the greatest players ever in his prime. But the vast majority of pros adjusted to the initial shock of Alphago and now quite happily use it as a tool for improving their play.

Bad day to launch my new literary magazine dedicated to the exegesis of the Zhuangzi, Decivilization.

Looking for a holiday gift for an art lover? Here's why you might consider my new Van Gogh book: -Written for a general audience -Gorgeous reproductions of Van Gogh works -Offers completely new insights into this iconic artist -Support an inveterate Bluesky poster! yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

I just want what every man wants, to transform into a cyclone of ravens on Walpurgisnacht as the Wild Hunt drags the unjust to the sea

What is almost too on the nose about this (newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/comp...) about UCLA using an AI-developed course is they've got the cover of the textbook as their picture and it is full of strange nonsense words.

Be a flock of goats 群羊聽經 “flock of goats listen to a sutra” from Illustrated Way of Yongming Yanshou (904-975) 永明道跡 Woodblock print carved in early Edo Japan (1655), a reproduction of a late Ming Chinese print made in Hangzhou, 1606.

Heart grew three sizes browsing Book People’s @bookpeople.bsky.social (new? newish?) “World Literature in Translation” section yesterday. What other indie bookstore’s have a section dedicated to literature in translation? Let’s make a list.

A charming little book. The author spent several years retracing the Tang poet Du Fu’s 杜甫 (712-770) travels across contemporary China, taking 120,000 photos in the process. The text is his diary of visits to sites eerily unchanged and many more lost or changed forever.

Sinologists! Never mind the other post: here is a feed that actually works! Posts tagged with 🀄️📚 should show up automatically, for real this time. Thanks to @rawkitbawl.bsky.social and @852dude.bsky.social for their help!

For the new arrivals: I work on the history of medieval Chinese literature, calligraphy, and material culture. I also teach Mandarin Chinese. Interested in translation, philology, the materiality of writing/reading, and poetics in the ancient world more generally.