“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” Victor Hugo, born on this day in 1802

what even is the fucking point

“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.” W. E. B. Du Bois, born on this day in 1868

Now THAT's a headline. "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents" fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

"To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life." ~ T.S. Eliot Belle Tout Lighthouse (1939) 🎨 Eric Ravilious

“AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data. Today, you don’t see AI in the employment data, productivity data, or inflation data.” AI is TechGrift. Can we say ‘Theranos’, everybody?

OpenAI ”acknowledged in its own research that LLMs will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.” You can’t trust chatbots.

“If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than AI. Authoritarian leaders & tech oligarchs are deploying AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity.”

The study points to using libraries and visiting museums as bringing these enormous brain health benefits ... who would have thought? Well, librarians and museum folk for a start ... www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

stupid strategy,, when university administrators are doing it for free!

So disappointed with the New Yorker Anthropic piece. No critical probing or context, just gullible parroting of a self-serving corporate marketing pitch. This needed a hard Chotinering

"Assetization of academic content (and assetization in HE more broadly) constructs students and staff as a new kind of economic actor – an ‘assetizen’...with diminished educational and social rights as assetization becomes a governance principle in higher education.”

A compelling answer to the question of what we can do with our study of Shakespeare and the humanities.

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

Grief has a point, even as gut wrenching and consuming as it feels. I cannot think of anything unhealthier for me right now, as I grapple with my mother's loss, than engaging with a chabot of her--neither human nor real in any meaningful way. Not to mention, she would haunt me if I tried this.

Artists have always loved to sketch! Sketch of a sparrow from Egypt dated c. 1479–1458 BC. Some 3,500 years ago in Egypt, artists used flakes of limestone as sketchpads! MMA excavations 1922-23, Deir el-Bahri. 📷 The Met www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti... #Archaeology

Important education message: "independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it." A few profit and the most vulnerable pay www.economist.com/united-state...

taps sign

"Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice and seek honorably to know and speak the truth are the only builders of a better life." John Galsworthy, who died on this day in 1933

“A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

Sure, it was the model that was ‘reckless.’

This was an absolutely fascinating piece to research. Do not trust the answers AI chatbots glibly offer you -- they're not necessarily lies, but they *can* and *are* being manipulated.

With news today about a surge in gas-fired power generation for data centers and AI, here's an occasional reminder that I maintain Against AI and Its Environmental Harms, an open library with journalism, peer-reviewed research, and other media for teaching: pad.riseup.net/p/Against_AI...

Oh...

Many have asked what we should do and it's hard to know. But this approach is not the way out of this.

imagine if all that money had gone to teachers instead

Permission Denied.

🎈Happy Birthday Dolly Parton!🎈 In 1995, Dolly launched Imagination Library. The first order was for ~1,700 books. In 2023, it sent 2MM books 𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵 to children around the world. In its 30 years, her organization has now gifted >300,000,000 books. imaginationlibrary.com #inspiration

"we are on an inevitable path to AGI"

Among all the details of this great watercolour showing the interior of a British museum around the 1780s, is a #Greenland Kayak (in the upper right corner). This collection of Sir Ashton Lever (1729-1788) echoes the #earlymodern Wunderkammer and adds a colonial interest of the world. #skystorians

"genAI" doens't "learn" (tech execs' term) since it has no brains. Instead, it stores and regurgitates - PLAGIARISM.... "many AI developers use a more technically accurate term when talking about these models: lossy compression."

"Any school adopting these [tutorbot] applications tacitly accepts that learning can largely be reduced to a narrow range of behavioral responses and tacitly rejects more complex child-centered understandings of learning."

This is a stunning resource, beautifully presented - congratulations to Ros Smith Kathy Acheson and their team emwmlibrary.com

She Is an Icon of Finnish Art. Now Modernist Helene Schjerfbeck Takes a Global Stage by Annikka Olsen news.artnet.com/art-world/sh... More about Helene Schjerfbeck: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helene_... #art #history #womeninart

What are you doing in the writing classroom this semester? theimportantwork.substack.com/p/write-for-...

This #findsfriday, we are sharing with you one of three leather shoes that were found in Avebury in 2025, concealed in a wall of a house. Wiltshire Council's Conservation & Museums Advisory Service then worked to conserve the shoes for our collection, creating bespoke mounts to stabilise the shoes.

Drew Bent, the education lead at Anthropic: "'We’re at a point now where we need to make sure that these things are backed by outcomes and figure out what’s working and what’s not working.'" Convenient that *now* is the time for evidence, once these products are released and pushed into schools.

Happy New Year! 🎉 Walking into 2026 like Victor Laszlo ... 🗃️ #HATM www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOli...

“I'm up to my ears in unwritten words.” J. D. Salinger, born on this day in 1919

New Year's Eve, and 125 years old today is 'The Darkling Thrush' by Thomas Hardy. (And when I myself read this poem, I often find myself becoming aware of that blessèd Hope from that frail and gaunt thrush ✨️)

they have designed these machines to simulate human agents and they are constantly pitching the idea that these machines really *are* agents, but when one of these machines kills a person they say “you can’t hold them to account, they’re just machines, read the instructions”

So I went to read this article about how AI is taking away jobs and was served the opportunity to bypass the article that was written by a human and instead get the AI summary and that in itself is a story about AI and jobs. www.yahoo.com/news/article...

"The processors in data centers run hot and need to be cooled, so big tech companies are pulling from municipal water supplies to make that happen—and aren’t always disclosing how much water they’re using. Local wells are running dry or seem unsafe to drink from."

Linen jacket by Agnes Richter, a seamstress who was incarcerated in an Austrian asylum during the late 1800′s and who embroidered her life story onto the jacket as an attempt to express her identity #WomensArt

It's "jolabokaflod" for me! Thanks!

Meticulously Sculpted Books by Brian Dettmer Explore the Inner Workings of Information www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/12/bria...

Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-portrait, 1912 #womensart

“The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.” John Steinbeck