I’m working on a column about faculty motivation in the current landscape where -new jobs can be scarce -academic publishing is messy -grants are being axed -merit pay is spotty If you have perspective and experience you’d care to share, please let me know. (1/2)

Yet another moment when I find myself thinking, Are you dead? Cause you look dead. (He is not dead, thankfully.)

i was sitting in a really dull corporate event for hours and hallucinated that somebody coined the portmanteau "innobition" (as in innovation + ambition)

All the President’s Men, Downhill Racer, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, This Property Is Condemned, All Is Lost

The first neo-altweekly? 👀

The most unrealistic thing about the Superman movie is all the characters reading hard copies of daily newspapers.

An unmaker space, if you will.

The data wizards @chronicle.com recently updated our faculty-pay transparency tool to draw on 2025 data. Worth checking out to see how #HigherEd salaries are mediated by local cost of living.

I'll be at Idle Hour in Baltimore on Sept 24th with @leegee.bsky.social for a Selector Series event from @essentialpod.bsky.social. We'll be listening to Think by Lyn Collins, a great album produced by James Brown that opens with the Rosetta Stone of Baltimore club music. dice.fm/event/oewb8m...

Well, that certainly is A Take.

A Baltimore haiku: Silver Ford, hazards blink Beside an oil-dotted space No one at the wheel.

👀

Heraclitus du jour: “Extinguish arrogance before a fire” ὕβριν χρὴ σβεννύναι μᾶλλον ἢ πυρκαϊήν. No, this isn't a subskeet, I don't know what you're talking about.

From Tough Breaks, @alshipley.bsky.social’s revelatory new book about Baltimore club music.

👀

Got to walk through Union Station in DC just now behind a number of National Guard folks and some flavor of uniformed officer zipping around on, like, a Segway trike while I was on my way to buy some socks at the Uniqlo (which has closed since the last time I was through).

This does seem like an oversight.

Al is the man for this job, for sure.

Have you been through, or are currently going through, a leadership training aimed at turning you into a senior academic leader - even a president? I'd like to talk to you for a story I'm doing. Feel free to DM me, or email me [email protected]

Exactly: “Now if you are a novice in cognitive science, you may be puzzled and not know what is so wrong about that ‘definition’ in the screenshot above. This is the crux. For experts it is obvious!” GenAI is only (somewhat) useful for people competent enough in the area to know when it is wrong.

Anas Al-Sharif with his daughter, who will now grow up without her dad.

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

The devaluation of skill, experience, and expertise is a crisis across cultural journalism right now--it's being felt profoundly in theater. It's great that anyone can post a review, but that does not, even in the smallest way, replace what's being thrown away.

I haven’t been hyping my side hustle, but since it’s Saturday, I spoke to Ian Lynch of the mighty avant-trad Irish band Lankum for @essentialpod.bsky.social. A recent life highlight.

An overview of academic program review laws across the country. Lots to be concerned with in addition to cancelled majors & departments closing/merging as academic freedom & student aspirations are truncated in the name of ‘efficiency.’ Great comments from @feleciaelana.bsky.social in the article.

I wrote about a handful of new state laws that make academic-program reviews at public colleges mandatory, an unprecedented shift in relations between institutions and elected officials.

If you are looking for things that are Very Baltimore, this is gonna land pretty high on a current list.

Every song of the summer 2025 conversation has convinced me that there isn't one, which is good, because America doesn't deserve one.

1000x this

I’m at NACUBO. That’s the skeet.

So I have now heard two renowned people pronounce “biopic” so that it rhymes with “Olympic”—emphasis on the last syllable. I’ve always pronounced it in accordance with its roots as a portmanteau constructed out of “biography” and “picture,” so emphasis on the first syllable. Did I miss something?

I spent much of my spring interviewing college leaders, professors, and various experts about trust—how to build it, how to maintain it, and how to rebuild it if necessary. This new @chronicle.com report shares what I learned.

This has been making the rounds, but if you haven’t read it, I commend it.

Good morning there’s a new issue of @baltimorebeat.bsky.social out todayyy

Brad is one of the best reporters I’ve ever worked with. I count this as great news.

NEW: I wrote about scientists who have been ghosted by the NIH. The agency has disappeared dozens of grant applications. Not rejected them, but shoved them out of the peer-review pipeline into an administrative no-man’s land. And there’s no clear exit. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

I saw a bunch of items online about Matt Cameron leaving Pearl Jam, which is a development I don’t really care about, and then I saw one asking who should take over the drum throne for the band now. My immediate thought was, “Moe Tucker,” and now I have THAT concept stuck in my head.

Just made the best grilled cheese I’ve ever made. Who says our finest days as a nation are behind us?

Not a big Bible guy, but I think about this bit from Matthew 25 a lot.

The Senate’s version of the BBB hikes the tax on endowment income, but it could have been much worse. Nice to share a byline with @rseltzer.bsky.social.

This exists already. It's called the internet.

What actor’s expression in a movie will stay with you for the rest of your life

X1000

Percy’s trying to help me not think about anything.

I’d get this tattooed on my forehead, but it’s too many words.

🧵

RIP William Langewiesche. One of the best to ever do it.

Impossible to name just one. I feasted on my dad’s books (e.g. Jean Stein’s Edie) and records (e.g. Dylan’s New Morning), and the movies he took me to as a tween weren’t necessarily always good, but they were always vivid (e.g. Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry). He made me the nerd I am.