This and the discussion about how academics can now just read AI summaries of things really drives home how much these guys always confuse the product for the goal. You don't do a coloring sheet because you want to have a colored sheet at the end!!! The coloring is the point!!!

Excited to release the new minimal-computing Pausanias Reader in Progress: pausanias.opencommentaries.org/about (If you find an empty comment, that's the "in Progress" part) Enormous thanks to @eltonteb.bsky.social and the rest of Digital Periegesis team for their help with named entity linking!

I'm thrilled to report that the Perseus Digital Library has been selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social! Read more about our plans here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...). .

I'm honored to be part of the team alongside @alicatlibrarian.bsky.social, @pnadelofficial.bsky.social, @charlespletcher.org, Lisa Cerrato, Gregory Nagy, Riccardo Strobino, Clifford Wulfman and Ph.D. candidates Sarah Abowitz and Si Wu.

“Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record” is among the HAVI projects awarded by @schmidtsciences.bsky.social. Congratulations to PIs @philologistgrc.bsky.social and @dasmiq.bsky.social!

Who “writes” an LLM-translated work of literature? Even if it isn’t a 1:1 copy, is an AI translation at scale just pure plagiarism? Any middle ground between stealing and creating new resources? (maybe relevant article: www.theguardian.com/books/2024/m... — Venuti probably relevant here too)

This is how news/media got around for most of human history. Sophocles' _Women of Trachis_ provides something of a thought experiment in what happens when the traditional avenue for news delivery becomes unreliable (hint: it ain't good)

I think the belief by the powerful that "people will put up with many things if you are excellent at math" is incredibly revealing in terms of understanding How We Got Here

From today's Chronicle of Higher Ed briefing. I am *never* an advocate of cutting programs. But I am curious to see if there will be the same type of "students aren't majoring in this, so let's cut the program" discourse around computer science as there always is for the arts and humanities.

lol

Here's another bit of conventional wisdom Zohran completely blew away: His speech was at well above a 10th-grade level. It was complex, erudite, punctuated by deep and fluent references. You don't have to condescend to voters with baby talk! Part of re-establishing norms is speaking like an adult.

The <?xml-model?> processing instruction found in many TEI documents—which never advanced past Working Group Note www.w3.org/TR/2012/NOTE... —breaks some XML parsers (Non-standard processing instructions cannot include the string "xml": www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-pi) So why are we still using it?

the power of uh, reading books

Cleaned up the previous sentence embeddings comparisons—cleaner calculation of similarity for tragedies, and now both charts use the same scale (in autumn hues 🍂) It makes sense that tragedies overall are v. similar, but their similarities alone don't explain the lower-right messenger cluster

I might need to update the original plot, but so far it's interesting to note that the messenger similarities don't seem to be a result of consolidation across tragedies, which remain quite distinct (at least from the perspective of sentence embeddings) #dh #ancmedsky

So sentence embeddings of messenger speeches in Attic tragedy show a modest but notable bump in semantic similarity toward the end of the 5th century (see attached image) — generic consolidation, maybe, but why? #ancmedsky #dh

We have been working at Perseus on an initial release of a new browser for the Art and Archaeology collection. You can read more about it here (sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdat...)

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