I know this is tricky territory for me to even comment on as a YA author lmao but genuinely: please focus on real, actual people experiencing harm, not pretend people who by definition can't, and not people who pretend that seeing something they don't like is the same as real actual harm, either

McGraw, Pearson, etc are all trying to push AI into classrooms so that students become dependent on it, never learning to think for themselves, and thus become a captive market for AI crap once they graduate. AI companies are the 21st century version of tobacco companies.

Strange Horizons published our first issue 25 years ago this month! 🎉 Thank you to everyone who has ever read, shared, submitted, donated! We wouldn't be here without you and we hope you'll continue to support us into the future!

I've read and enjoyed a lot of great books but every once in a while, you read one where the language is so beautiful that you find yourself re-reading the same line over and over, like savoring a delicious bite of goodness

This is entirely true on so many levels I don't think I could possibly detail it exhaustively, but you really can't oppose trans people's human rights and still have freedom of expression and bodily autonomy, the idea that people are entitled to self determination goes right out the window....

My poem "the jacarandas are unimpressed by your show of force" is up at @strangehorizons.bsky.social! strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

This is 100% true and is (as a former *speech* kid who didn't do debate in part Because of this) both the greatest strength and greatest weakness of competitive debate. Competitive debate is an educational exercise in *argumentation,* not a way of coming to a conclusion about anything

So when someone is showing signs of starting to think more deeply about something, or reconsider, or even (!) change their mind entirely, for heavens sake, don’t yell or laugh at them. Be quiet. Let them think. Listen. Give them a CHANCE.

The point of college is not to enter with a set of beliefs and stick to them, defending them in debates. Students learn to question received wisdom, understand multiple perspectives, and value evidence, guided by expertise. In fact, that's what many attacking higher ed actually object to. Thread.

A great thread and this is so true (as a writing instructor and litererary scholar in training); generative discussion in the classroom may involve dissent and disagreement, but is almost never "debate" between fully-formed already-held opinions, rather it is the slow development of ideas

I get called radical because I want affordable housing and rational, compassionate immigration policy and gun reform that helps keep kids safe. Radicals like me are never going to kill people for our ideology because that’s literally not our ideology.

I think it's terrible that Gen Z and Gen Alpha continue to live in a world where K-12 and college campus shootings are a normal part of life and that's all they've ever known and I think we should arrange things so that any kind of school or university shooting is impossible

my issue of Threepenny is here! here’s my poem “Present Tense,” I would love for you to give it a read! “I know this so loudly I don’t hear, at first, my father’s silence.”

I recently published what I consider one of my best poems in one of the best and most difficult to get into journals in the country! bsky.app/profile/todd...

i don't mean to come off as rude but we cannot sustain ourselves on outrage and anger forever. i think it's even more important now to post about other things too. even if it gets less engagement. you never know who will find it cool and interesting.

you cannot be disparaged by your own words... people cannot attack you with your own ideas if ones words are repeated and they are viewed unfavorably that is not a reflection of the one who repeats it is a reflection of the author

I don't know ANYTHING about tarot, much less about whatever the five of swords is, and even still I fell in LOVE with today's poem from Annie Bolger "They haven’t got nearly as many swords as I do. Just one apiece, where I’ve got three..." https://www.havehashad.com/pbiqf

There's a clear difference between what people are writing or thinking about what they're reading, and what the cultural institutions do, and it's really interesting to trace the differences and see where patterns of meaning emerge. This is basically the whole project of me rereading the BAF books.

I have multiple times recently been complimented on how my poems approach being sentimental but are never actually sentimental, and while I have a lot of thoughts on this, my advice for someone who wants to try it is to remember love is weird and to center startlement and not feeling

I wrote about how I am not buying the narrative that the anthropic AI settlement is good for authors: defector.com/if-the-thiev...

🌟Shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction🌟 In North Continent Ribbon, Ursula Whitcher weaves a complex picture of the planet Nakharat, showing how the politics of power plays out through the lives of individuals, & how collective resistance evolves within intimate relationships.

Anyway, as ever, tapping the Toni Morrison sign again.

This line of thinking is making the rounds among AI boosters and the correct response is “well bless your heart”

being trans is not a negative outcome and neither is being autistic

If you have to be a IP licensing income stream (and let's be honest here, we do) you need to be your OWN damn IP licensing income stream I've been thinking of making a game out of the ARCHITECTS OF MEMORY world and I can do that because I own those rights Keep as many rights as you can

I sincerely hope Newsom's weird fans and liberals at large are starting to understand why you can't budge a single solitary inch on a single solitary issue for a single solitary marginalized group.

And when they declare trans people mentally ill the next step will be to broaden it to queer people at large b/c since when have differences between ppl in any marginalized community ever existed for evil people. Again: cis queers of all colors have to repudiate this. None of us are exceptions.

you gotta read—& gotta SEE—AMAZING new nat raum today! I.i am A. writing 1. an ars poetica i. in which i bury you, ii. in which i close the widest point of the wound myself, 2. a farewell. https://www.havehashad.com/t727h

🎧 New Critical Friends for your listening devices! This month, Sneha Pathak and @tansyg.bsky.social talk to me about texts often dismissed as too slight to review - books, films, genres with which we might be accused of merely passing time. How should critics approach this sort of work? And why?

This was very exciting to me when I saw it as well! I think it's a really fascinating book and hopefully even hitting the longlist represents some exciting word-of-mouth energy for its weird experimental approach to decolonial thinking, genre, and mediality.

Cute, but it overlooks the fact that Kristy would be the one leading the unionisation drive (and, arguably, the BSC was already a collective bargaining unit).

i am almost 40 and i literally do not have any point in my life where the right wing has not been doing moral panics about imaginary child abuse while institutionally working to enable real abuse of real children. if it's not the satanic panic it's fucking pronouns.

Destroy this myth. Please share if you have visited and researched in a library this past year! RT And give a shout out to your favorite library you have ever visited.

my read on this is that SF as a genre isn't organized around a canon anymore. 1) there's just a lot of books out there 2) there's so much genre blending it's hard to nail down "pure SF" 3) a lot of it has crossed over into the mainstream. it looks a lot like death, but I read it more as biodiversity

So I disagree with the conclusion of this thread, BUT I will say that something I deeply appreciate about SF readers/critics/academics is that they are deeply attuned to publishing + the material realities of the book in a way other literary genres are not.

Literally shut OpenAI down right now. Just pull the fucking plug. #AbolishAi

Before transitioning I was a respectability-politics lesbian. Even post-transition my career, my manner of dress, and my work is very palatable to the mainstream. Because of that I think it's particularly important to talk about why I reject respectability politics and you should too. Short 🧵

I absolutely do not wish to have any more opinions about GRRM but I am of the opinion that we need not take mediocre clickbait too seriously

“As for ‘Write what you know, ‘ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things.“ - Ursula K. Le Guin

I'm sorry!

if I can't have mass markets can we at least talk about digest size? like, as a nice happy medium? (I really do wonder what might happen if the big pubs offered bookstores a better discount rate on mmpbs but made them nonreturnable.)

When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

I don't think the primary value of art is in delivering messages or changing minds, but that the act of creation is itself fundamental to what it means to be human. Art is only ever as pointless as living is pointless.

Hey, as a librarian I need to tell you: Our funding depends on usage. So go ahead and check out that book even if you don't think you'll finish it. No one will know. Check out that DVD even though you might not like it. Get ambitious in your quest for knowledge.

My personal opinion is that everyone should be alarmist about everything the conservative movement is saying and planning and attempting right now. Be extremely alarmist about fascism. Be very alarmed about White Christian Nationalism. It is an absolutely appropriate reaction.

Well I know what I'll be calling my senators about this week, apparently.

First they declare porn illegal. Then they redefine anything they don’t like as porn. It doesn’t matter what you personally think of porn, policing people’s right to access information and media is wrong, and deciding “I think it’s icky and my opinion is more important than your rights” is Bad.