Could I repurpose this for an upcoming Greek midterm? Give students a ChatGPT- or Claude-translated passage (that we have translated in class) and ask them the same question(s)

As an instructor, I'd rather see your fever dream, No Doze-fueled 4AM essays written at an IHOP rather than anything generated by an LLM. Hope this helps

i agree. there's something very dostoyevskian about how the modern sources of terror don't seem to be formally ideological but just seem to be purely postmodern terror, causing terror for the sake of terror

Chris Rufo being an idiot about Leo Strauss:

10/10. Chef's kiss. No notes. 💯

*reading the great books* Yeah, you can see it right here in Sophocles. The point of Antigone was that Creon was too even-keeled. We should get a guy that is only id.

There’s an essay to be written about how the “conservative” movement that’s spent the past 90 years trying to undo the New Deal has embraced the New Deal’a aesthetic as its propaganda genre of choice for promoting its regressive, anti-worker policies.

Sovereign is he who decides the state of exception

“Ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play basketball” 🏀

Any diagnosis of the problem that doesn’t clearly see the “lecturers” doing the grunt work as the *colleagues* whose research careers are already being sacrificed on the altar of Capital isn’t going to identify a path forward for the future of the academic humanities /5

As preparation for the upcoming @dracor.org summit, I've been experimenting with how to visualize a dramatic network over time. Early results from a test case with Euripides' Andromache here: observablehq.com/@pletcher/ne...

Private equity vultures have been circling Philz for a while, I guess, but it doesn't make this news any easier to read. (I have no nice things to say about PE, but I also don't have anything pithy-spicy to add.) missionlocal.org/2025/07/phil...

You kan not run educacioun lyke a businesse. A businesse ys ther to make a profit. Educacioun ys ther to make the future.

Good acidic piece in @jacobinmag.bsky.social jacobin.com/2025/07/ultr...

Faculty need unions like a fish needs water.

First thing they did is take over the Kennedy Center. They canceled Colbert. Superman is a weirdly powerful icon right now, bothering all the right people. Don’t let anyone tell you the arts aren’t crucial.

Good god, so much of this is just straightforwardly false. Incredible amount of bullshit in such a short space.

The narrowing of what we imagine as "the liberal arts" to a subset of humanities subjects (literature, philosophy, art, etc.) should be rejected. The liberal arts in fact embrace *the whole range* of non-pre-professional subjects, including the natural sciences. That's the vision we should defend.

Plucking this from Larry's excellent thread on Douthat's latest nonsense. People like Douthat are incapable of (or refuse) understanding that the humanities are real disciplines with methods and principles. Douthat et al can't imagine these fields as more than outlets for contemporary propaganda.

Matt Walsh's imaginary professor: "good morning student-comrades. today we learn how to bayonet a white Christian capitalist while taking trans hormones" actual average professor: "folks, I am begging you, please do the reading for tomorrow this time. it is five pages"

"Of all these legions of people doing the work to deliver computers capable of browsing the web, only Marc Andreessen and a handful of others (such as Bill Gates) became megarich, while the rest had largely ordinary salaries." www.liberalcurrents.com/marc-andrees...

did lamb and fetterman get freaky fridayed

we are not going to burn down the entire knowledge economy because we developed AGI we are going to burn down the entire knowledge economy because the dipshits in charge think they invented AGI and they’re going to replace real knowledge with hallucinations stupid cyberpunk wins again

The narrative structure of TLOU2 is among the most morally load-bearing elements in video game — dare I say, "artistic"? — history. To change it because MBA-brained HBO execs can't handle complexity cheapens the entire effort. (Plato was right, etc. etc.)

Thread Here’s the thing, and corporate media won’t talk about it because they’re complicit in enabling it, but let’s be clear about something. The people mocking Mamdani for eating with his hands have no issue with white people eating burgers chicken & fries with their hands 1/4

People are making this about trashiness, but it’s really about violence. A UFC fight at the White House to mark our 250th would tidily symbolize the passing of the republic to a brutish state, a bloodthirsty society headed by a fascist movement.

(100% sincere) We need to shut down all business schools and suspend all business degrees until someone figures out what is going on

Recently turned in a deeply researched draft of a book on What AI Actually Is and reader, this is 100% correct

people come up with all kinds of fanciful math to justify billionaires' wealth but imo present political moment demonstrates conclusively that we need to tax billionaires at whatever rate will keep them focused on their own fucking business rather than our Medicaid and pediatric cancer research

You almost have to appreciate just how beautifully this illustrates the gerontocratic nature of American politics: the Ancient Umbrella is imbued with more experience simply because it existed longer.

Been thinking about a corollary a lot: insofar as education teaches aesthetics (and utility is an aesthetic judgment), business education—the dominant undergrad degree in the US—teaches the wrong values, eliding the difference between what is good and what is profitable

we should teach literature in schools as though following a long, complicated narrative is a desirable skill

"Homer’s artificial intelligences function to support those whose lives are *already* easy and they rely and perpetuate cultural patterns of labor exploitation based on physical attributes." His robots–like generative AI–don’t create anything new but can tell us a lot about what already is.

Chris Hayes recently interviewed the author of a book on the AI industry for his podcast (I do not remember her name) and one point she made stuck with me: all the development of the chatbots is based on the benchmarks that interest the people in charge, and they're English-speaking techbros.

“I can tell you many things that sound like convincing language – I could tell you statistics and give you citations.” (Cf. Hesiod, Theogony, 24–28) mail.cyberneticforests.com/democracy-th...

A long long time ago, in a far away galaxy... the US used to tax the rich

Is this true? I.e., that museum curation started to abandon chronological framing “recently” (relative to the late 1990s)?

Anyone else bothered by the extent to which Parks and Rec has proven to be a documentary? (Where is the H2Flow campaign!!??)

Re-encoding the TEI for Smyth is surfacing some fun edge cases. Dare I say that I'm starting to appreciate TEI's flexibility? No, no -- that would be going too far. #TEIFriday

Thinking about the destruction of the NEH: the right is happy for people to study texts and ideas as long as the outcomes of that study is predetermined. This is why the right-wing loves and funds civic leadership institutes on college campuses devoted to the study of 'fundamental' texts and ideas.

Deep red Lancaster County PA. #handsoff #handsoffLanco @aclu @meidastouch.com 🌊💪

I must not be the first person to bring this up But there has never been a more vindicated guy

literacy—in the most basic and more sophisticated senses—is a necessary and insufficient condition for a free society

As I'm drafting an article about some software I wrote, I'm reflecting on the fact that academic DH creates some odd incentives: docs end up living in (often paywalled!) articles rather than alongside code, because documentation doesn't "count" for hiring/promotion in the humanities

"At the same time, his administration has elevated candidates with scant qualifications to positions of power across the federal bureaucracy...That this is all being done in the name of “merit-based opportunity,” as Trump’s executive order put it, is patently absurd." slate.com/news-and-pol...

It’s nice to feel proud of (slightly north of) my hometown for doing the right thing for once — good job, Manheim

The week Mahmoud Khalil became a political prisoner of the regime, I was reading King Lear. I tried to make sense of it for @thenation.com . www.thenation.com/article/soci...

humanities departments aren’t luxuries