How can you be against AI when it says stuff like this

if only a wealthy donor would endow a fund to supply classrooms with chalk and dry erase markers...

fantastic headline 10/10

word of the day: eierlegende Wollmilchsau

Ingres, Portrait of the Countess of Tournon (1812)

olaf stapledon's graph of a two hundred billion year time scale for his novel Last and First Men (1930)

non-academic at dinner last night: "wow, so what made you care about something so much that you felt you needed to write an entire book about it?"

White House says no one will be fired over the Signal scandal because no one involved was trying to cure cancer.

I thought this "welcome to Turkey, we invented bread!" promo on Turkish Airlines had to be hyperbole, but I stand corrected

Chicago should thank me for booking a trip to Sicily this week, thereby ensuring that it would be warmer in Chicago than in Sicily

My doctor told me that my eye condition “was written about in Ancient Greece,” which is arguably the least useful information a doctor has ever given me

i feel like I should be paid five cents every time I have to do two-factor authentication

It’s actually very funny that Severance uses college teaching to stand in for work-life balance in the backstory

can an experienced cat owner explain to me how it is possible for my cat to shed his weight in fur on a daily basis?

let's bring back book titles with five "et ceteras" in them

it's definitely just a matter of time before Google shuts down Google Books, right?

William Stanely Jevons, May 1866: "Of course one must be criticised and abused a little. The more one's name is named now, the better for my professorship appointment."

“I am not going to get sucked into that drama” I say to myself as I get sucked into that drama

citing my physical copy of the OED like a luddite because I can't stand having URLs in my footnotes

shoutout to my friend who instead of asking "what is your book about?" asked "it is annoying if I ask what your book is about?"

one thing I think chicagoans don't understand is that in other parts of the country you often have to worry about using too much water

Our extremely on-brand Valentine’s Day activity is going to hear Schoenberg and Wagner at CSO

For some reason, getting up at 5am seems fine but getting up at 4:55am feels inhumane

fun fact: every Thomas Hardy novel describes at least one sunset

Does anyone have recommendations for things to do and eat in Palermo?

despite my best efforts, I continue to write about the ninteenth century

in case you need another thing to worry about, my sister who works for NOAA just said "if Elon fires us, there won't be anyone to tell the Colorado River dam operators how much water to release when the snow melts"

i think i've set a record with my library fines

Please, NYT cooking…not gochujang snickerdoodles…I can’t take it anymore…

finding an piece of writing irritating and trying to figure out why is honestly where a lot of the best thinking comes from

George Eliot on AI (1879): "the planet may be filled with [inorganic] beings who...will execute changes as...complicated as those of human language...without sensitive impression: there may be...mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence"

writing this piece about how Ruskin actually explains the phenomenon of Weird fiction is maybe the most Victorianist thing I've ever done

omg IT'S THE PHONES

We should have anticipated that AI models would become the "fastest depreciating asset in human history" purely from the fact that the university of chicago purchased one

He regularly shows up at 7pm to demand I stop working

Darwin to Hooker, 1865: "how funny men's minds are! he says he is chiefly converted [to my views in Origin of Species] because my books make the Birth of Christ, Redemption by Grace, etc., plain to him!"

it's amazing (& kind of alarming!) how three or four courses you take as an undergrad/grad student can shape your intellectual trajectory for the next twenty years

it's kind of funny that Verso, of all presses, is so worried about piracy that they won't sell PDFs of their books. I guess they know their audience?

I love a table of contents that is also a poem

Someone wants me to stop working

"the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus" is so dramatic. (Robert Louis Stevenson, "Pulvis et Umbra")

just apologized to someone that I hadn't read their email yet when in fact I had already read and responded to the email

Unfortunately it’s true that if you wake up at 5am every morning and write, you do make progress on your writing project

new Allan Hollinghurst novel is ... not good :(

just imagine if your name were "Cloudesley Brereton"

28 degrees is “too cold” for the inauguration; meanwhile Chicago gays are walking around in bike shorts and sweatshirts with their iced coffees

Reveries of World History: From Earth's Nebulous Origin to its Final Ruin, or, The Romance of a Star

found a one-sentence horror movie in an 1879 psychology manual: "such unfortunate individuals are sane only when confined in an asylum"

So brave of Top Banker to put his name to this quote

I’m increasingly of the opinion that “student centered learning” is just “consumer centered learning” in disguise