More of this please

Timelapse video of that turkey roasting…

👀 when it comes to "harassment" and student protest, northwestern has given the trump administration what appears to be a veto over changes in policy: "Northwestern shall not revise or modify these policies and procedures without the consent of the Assistant Attorney General". horrible.

Introducing myself with 5 animals I’ve seen in the wild; here we go: Grizzly Bear Cheetah Humpback Whale Elk Rattlesnake

a “Space Force”, if you will

I'm excited that my story "Witness Trees" is out today from American Literary Review. Partially inspired by the 1989 poisoning of Treaty Oak in Austin (I was in fifth grade when I wrote the tree a get well card), it's been haunting me for a while. I'm so thrilled that ALR has given it a home!

My dog, I’m sure: All you do is look at squares! All day the large glowing square, but sometimes a small glowing square. In the evening, you bang on the hot cube and make treats I can’t have, then stare at a far glowing square, and before bed, the not glowing cube with the flippy parts.

I've been trying to lose weight, but I can't get more than a couple pounds a month. I just don't see how I can lose 135 million pounds by the midterms!

I'm guessing it's time to do a version of this for publishing professionals? Maybe we should start by highlighting that none of this is inevitable? We, you know, have choices, so I'll stay back here, you know, not being on the bleeding edge of... something. jeffreyamos.substack.com/p/what-i-wan...

Beanie Babies. Muppet Babies. Dutch Babies. Trump Babies.

Oh

We've got you 👍

JD Vance claims that diversity weakens unions, as people end up distrusting each other and not organizing. Let me tell you two menswear stories related to this claim. 🧵

Every new story draft I write, I begin by thinking, “Yes, this will be the one I keep at 3k or 4k words.” And inevitably, they sprawl into 7.5k to 8k drafts. I’m doomed to write shorts that no one considers short (any more! I think a 10k short story is a perfectly reasonable length, frankly).

Just grading student papers on a Sunday afternoon, like you do, and lamenting that AI has made it so that more and more of these essays use copious subheadings even if the student didn't use AI to write the piece (entirely possible that they used it to make an outline, I guess.)

It’s like a Douglas Adams story. Billions of dollars spent on a machine that consumes incredible resources. Earth has blown past 4C. Fresh water is gone. But at last it’s done. The makers ask, “How do we solve climate change?” The machine whirs and responds, “You can switch to solar 100 years ago.”

I have yeeted the LMS my uni has paid for and which you were probably thinking helps you teach Forgive me it was surveillant so mid and so broke

“Oh, look, a new Lisa O’Neill song!” I said to myself not realizing I’d be sobbing in my car in a parking lot.

God, I feel this direct to the bottom of my desiccated soul.

this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

"US Comedians gonna say, I, I, I.... will probably play Sun City if they pay me enough."

I've seen some reactions from struggling artists along the lines of 'I give up' and I feel your pain—but please do not. Most people don't want to live in a world where artists are automated away, art production is captured by AI firms. Most people hate this idea. Organize. Build solidarity. Fight.

We’re about to get fiber installed at the house, which means that soon I will have another used router and modem to add to the “box of electronics that might one day prove useful” (tm) in the garage.

Yes, Adobe. I'm going to need that very long document (the syllabus I wrote this summer) summarized for me because my feeble mind is incapable of reading and digesting twelve pages of prose.

I know there are tenured professors out there who breathed a sigh of relief when they saw that the A&M firing happened to a non-tenure-track faculty member. It’s going to come for you too, so maybe this is a good moment to do unto others etc.

Two years after the poets begin training the LLMs, ChatGPT defines itself: A DATA CENTER, THAT IS A BLIND CARAFE AI is a kind of vessel and a pointing. Pointing is a kind of AI with an empty vessel. All this and again, iterative, repetition and a diode pointing to another diode that is a vessel.

We took the paywall down on this one. defector.com/how-the-fuck...

Gov. DeSantis vows to sign proposed bill mandating the reintroduction of smallpox. “God put these infectious diseases on the earth. It is the height of hubris for man to have eradicated them,” he said.

The coverage this morning suggests that, no, people are not realizing how insane this is. Or how dangerous. It’s not just wildly illegal (though it is). It also crosses several lines that even (heretofore very adventurous) prior US counter-narcotics ops didn’t cross. And it can get worse

The reactionary centrists sure seem to be spending a lot of time talking about bluesky if it's really as irrelevant and unpopular as they say.

Murmur: Pilgrimage Reckoning: Rockville Life’s Rich Pageant: Cuyahoga Document: Oddfellows Local 151 Green: You Are The Everything or Hairshirt Out of Time: Half a World Away Automatic: Try Not to Breathe Monster: Let Me In New Adventures: Undertow Up: Sad Professor These will change tomorrow.

Hardly the most pressing thing, but how many Downton Abbey finales are we to be subjected to?

If you saw the clip, watch the whole 12 minutes. This is it. Electeds—everyone around Pritzker is knowingly putting themselves at risk—meeting the moment. It’s not glib, it’s not a meme, it’s clear-eyed, brave, & necessary. www.msnbc.com/deadline-whi...

I’m trying to rid myself of it this year, but it’s hard to untangle. They’re used to assignments populating their calendar, communicating becomes complicated for reasons I can’t fully describe, and the bookstore insists on acquiring digital copies (even when you opt out) that live on Canvas.

Do you think Bezos’s mega yacht has room for his stables? Because if not, that’s a real oversight.

This isn't a list of jobs that A.I. can easily replace. It's a list of jobs that techno fascists don't think are worthwhile or meaningful and that they want to eliminate. They don't want humans to try to make sense of the world, they want us to believe whatever we're told.

Hear me out: How about if we tax the billionaires?

I ungrade. And I make most of my syllabi in InDesign (because I was teaching myself the software and learned quickly that my students used it more readily when it was better designed). So I guess I need some more tats.

Excellent news! I was looking for a solid excuse to cut Canvas out of my classroom entirely.

There are ways of playing an acoustic guitar that invariably trigger the anxieties of going to church camp as a kid.

A new AI interface to close on Adobe Acrobat!? What fun. Adobe Creative Cloud is expensive enough without having to be accosted with this BS every time I open a program.

The CEO of NVIDIA said that? The CEO of the company that makes all the chips for AI? The CEO of the company that makes all the chips for AI says that students should learn how to use AI?

Either legislators are purposely trying to worsen quality of life for Americans or they don't realize how much damage it will cause to defund the CPB. And that's the point. You don't destroy something that Americans have spent decades & billions building w/o VERY GOOD REASON. There is no reason.

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your résumé? English professor: It’s called a caesura.

I’m looking at the NYT’s best films of the 21st century list, and every true list-making nerd should know the cardinal rule: include no more than one work by a single artist. And having any films by Nolan on this list makes the whole thing sus, frankly.

It’s a good thing Congress isn’t alive to see this

Yes. I am right. I am seeing how Chat GPT is ruining students critical thinking and writing skills in real time. It is not the future. It is a tool designed to render the populace helpless, to make people doubt their innate intelligence, and to foster overreliance on technology.

The one useful service the veep has ever provided is collecting a whole bunch of contrarian right wing posters to block in one thread. Just cruised down the list blocking blocking blocking…