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The commitment to operational excellence we’ve all come to expect from AI-driven private equity companies that sell products to unaccountable IT execs in higher education

The American research university has been in serial crisis for 60 years. AI is now upending the whole applecart — but rightly seen, this is an opportunity as much as it is a threat. My latest: open.substack.com/pub/persuasi...

Surprise, surprise! The Vanderbilt report decrying the state of scholarship in the humanities is itself a terrible work of “scholarship“:

“When I assign analysis, (…) I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.”

“The kids want liminal spaces!”

That big boom heard around Boston was like a meteor:

Think Tank Called ‘The Himmler Institute’ Assures Nation This All Legal https://bit.ly/44aNdkq

As Chief Quality Control Officer at Sunmaid, my main responsibility is raisin questions.

The problem as I see it for that Odyssey movie is that Christopher Nolan has no sense of humor and the Odyssey is kind of a black comedy about a guy unable to execute a work commute.

in five years we will learn that "looksmaxxing" was actually just a conspiracy to generate dissertation topics for gender studies graduate students

They'll fix you.

RIP Rex Reed, who wrote this sentence--which has remained stuck in my head for almost twenty years--about the movie Factory Girl:

New from 404 Media: spoke to four people who attended a trade show where senior ICE officials spoke about how much Palantir is supercharging their arrests. List of 20 million people on ICE agents phones now; increased chance of successful arrest from 28 to 80% www.404media.co/ice-agents-h...

On a special episode of On TAP, Helen Shaw, chief theatre critic for The New York Times, joins us to talk about theatre criticism, journalism, and pedagogy. Click through to listen, or subscribe in your favorite podcasting app... www.ontappod.com/home/2026/5/...

Not to worry everyone, I have a plan to fix Canvas.

"Killing student writing outside the classroom means an enormous reduction in the volume of time spent writing, and learning more generally: it is a loss of thousands of hours of reading, thinking, puzzling over problems, writing, revising."

“The current political atmosphere is surely proof that the majority of the general public simply cannot be frightened into climate action by stories of future impacts, no matter how luridly described.” substack.com/app-link/pos...

Next do Massachusetts.

They'll do anything to try to change the story on this guy. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/n...

It's honestly getting to the point where this is so funny I never want it to end. Make KP perpetual FBI director. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04...

I wrote up my response. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/04/ther...

It’s becoming increasingly evident that securing our democracies requires ridding ourselves of the incurably reactionary classes through expropriations and confiscations.

Over on The Other Website this blog post is causing a flutter as analytic and continental philosophers fight each other. I shall try and do a longer reply later, but in essence I think... benthams.substack.com/p/what-conti...

ED 209.

Just a reminder on this Easter Sunday: 1) Attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime. 2) The head of state threatening to commit a war crime is itself a war crime.

Legend

One thing that gets me kicked out of the socialist club is that I fundamentally don't like the ultra aggro polemic style of the classic authors. I even polemicised against it myself here (from: www.liamkofibright.com/uploads/4/8/...)

Put these students in charge! Resist the corruption of higher education by business idiots.

Real talk

Strong recommendation to teaching faculty to just say no to this stuff, even if you are AI curious/enthusiastic. This is meant to reduce faculty autonomy and capture human labor with automation. You're selling out your future self and the profession as a whole. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Robbie Avila looks like Jokic* out there! *covered in scratches and bruises

I published this in the Boston Globe in November 2022, right before ChatGPT was released which I didn't know was coming that next week and had no idea this conversation would be where it is three years later.

Keep saying it. There are students who get it.

So did ICE

Solidarity with Emily Tucker and her open letter to students. Tucker writes, "But the great thing is, you don’t have to go along with this, and I urge you not to. You can refuse to use the chatbot. You can tell your professors that you don’t want them to use it or to require you to use it."

Awful. A teenager, dead by suicide in an ICE detention center. There is now a crisis of suicide inside the detention system; I have never seen anything like it. Suicide has happened before, but they were very rare. This is the third or fourth this year.

wrote about an 80s safety video tape directed by Stuart Gordon and starring Andrea Martin as a self-destructive adult child woman 1900hotdog.com/2026/03/lear...

where will we meet now?

No guild navigators and too much Momoa. But I'm hopeful. Foresight is a terrible gift. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_9v...

This is Amy Madigan and Ed Harris refusing to applaud Elia Kazan's honorary Oscar in 1999. During the Blacklist Era, Kazan named names. Good on Amy and Ed.

this 314 day, let us fondly recall the St. Louis Commune, and the general strike of 1877 jacobin.com/2021/07/st-l...

When it’s time for a Fortnite study break

I’m briefly in India. This is a facile observation, but Americans have barely scratched the surface in understanding how the rest of the world is reacting to this war. It’s already an Iraq War-style disaster in the global imagination, underscored by the thuggishness and caprice of the Trump approach

You're our product...

Speaking of the public sentiment on AI — look at that complete lack of trust in both parties (and the industry) on the topic… What else polls like this? www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...

Every year about this time, we must rail against the clock lords, who have stolen a piece of our very life!

Pentagon use of AI reportedly responsible for the deaths of over 100 school children. A moral monstrosity.