I wonder if I’ll ever stop being angry all of the time.

If you can't write a grad school application on your own, you absolutely should not go to grad school. That's actually a good sign that it's not for you. There are other things you can do with your life.

Man, I love teaching rhetoric. And I love this discipline. There are some days when I feel really down about academia, but when I’m back in the classroom teaching rhetoric, it reminds me what I’m doing here, and it feels really wonderful.

(Also interested in traditional theory, pedagogy/writing, etc. -- I just want to make sure that we have a representative mix of scholarship to share with RSQ!)

Hey #teamrhetoric: I'm part of a team submitting a proposal to RSQ for a special issue on conspiracy theories. If you're doing work on conspiracy rhetoric outside of the US or using a feminist/queer/trans or BIPOC lens, I want to know about it! Please reach out or share with a friend!

In social movement studies, we talk about how marches and protests expand the threshold of acceptable risk so that people take more and bigger social risks IN PUBLIC, EN MASSE. This is extremely important for the bourgeois white folks holding signs and building social rapport.

Student media rules. They are lapping a lot of the spineless media orgs this year and showing how solidarity is the way.

Yes and… I still can’t believe that major and local newspapers haven’t taken to a pay per article model. I am drowning in subscriptions and I cannot afford a subscription to every single media outlet, especially if I’m only reading one or two articles per year if that.

I think businesses asking people to rate every single experience has furthered this damage. We shouldn't have this many opinions about this many things, and we certainly shouldn't expect other busy people to care if we do.

If I see you posting AI slop, it's an instant block. Even if you think it's cute or says a lot about society. If you are purporting that some AI slop is real news, I will report you for misinformation, and then block you. Sloppers should be marginalised.

Yes, and… It is so BEYOND frustrating that I have to waste my own time scouring literally every image and piece of text I see. We should be able to start with a baseline of trust for credible sources, and the AI companies have taken that away from us.

it’s said all the time but I think we should continue to hammer home how insane it is that we got dead-eyed bros trying to sell us robots that will free us from the supposedly cruel burden of “creative careers” instead of the actual cruel burden of “doing menial household chores”

nothing like watching a presentation about ed tech tools to radicalize you against them

“I’ll kill you in front of your students.” This is just one of the death threats that has driven @mark-bray.bsky.social to try and flee the US. But at the airport last night, after checking in and clearing security, his booking mysteriously disappeared www.wired.com/story/mark-b...

My entire career summed up in one post:

Giant, giant shout out to @rhetrickery.bsky.social for the rice vs. pasta vs. potatoes op-ed lesson idea…my students had a great time (we ended up in a duel between rice and pasta), and they were surprisingly better behaved than a room full of rhetoric professors and grad students 😆

I would agree with this on principle, but after spending a LOT of time reading maga posts & squatting in right wing comments sections, I think there’s a lot of folks who will cheer for this. Also, there’s no democratic messaging that will change anyone’s mind b/c they’re not listening.

After spending weeks reading the comments sections of right wing accounts on Facebook (as well as the many now-MAHA acquaintances I have from my Paleo diet days), I am really sad to see liberals and progressives still arguing about newspaper headlines and messaging, like that even matters anymore.

Would anyone with a zeteo subscription be willing to help an educator out? I need access to an article for a lesson on terministic screens, but I can't afford to pay for more subscriptions just for one piece of content...

I know that this isn’t a new thought, but: reading other people’s textbooks and structuring the “story” of my syllabus against their ideas has made me SO aware of the rhetoric of pedagogy. It’s fascinating to think through how I want to tell the story of rhetoric in my own class

I use my email inbox as my to-do list and I got it below 25 emails tonight. I was at 80 at the start of the week . Please clap.

I tell my rhetoric students that invention and arrangement are just as important and just as much part of rhetoric as delivery—you aren’t doing the work if you’re skipping the part where you cast around for ideas and figure out the right order to put them in!

Hey #teamrhetoric and #academicsky, is there anyone doing work on the specific moment(s) social media shifted from being about sharing/connecting to teaching/selling? I have some disconnected thoughts about our current rhetorical moment but I wanted to see if there was already work out there…

I don't know that we were meant to live our lives steeping in this many people's anxiety

FRIENDS. I need you to STOP SHARING UNVERIFIED INFORMATION, *even* if it makes you feel better or fits the narrative you think/want to be true. This is a bipartisan message and applies to more than one thing.

Your email finds me deeply burned out and disassociating.

Saw a TikTok of a young woman asking, “When did beauty become so unattainable?” Oh, babygirl. Welcome. ❤️

I am starting to panic about having to go in to teach tomorrow. Between the firings in Texas and everything else today, even being in California at an incredible private Jesuit school doesn’t feel safe. I feel like I can’t breathe.

Lot of people yelling at me for saying celebrating assassination is no way to struggle against fascism. I’m not asking you to mourn Kirk, a fascist. I’m asking you to respect yourself. There is no righteous form of murder. Takes more courage to fight for democracy than to embrace fascism’s methods.

I know that this is going to seem like an insane statement, but I really think that we need to shut the Internet off now. I don’t think anything gets fixed, while we still have the ability to use this tool that has so broken our brains and so broken our society

Watching people who claim to care about all human rights become ghouls in real time is an experience. I get that there is nuance in this situation, but if your first reaction is to cheer for the death of someone you oppose, you’re no better than the opposition.

I started reading Casey Lewis' newsletter to better understand the culture my students are immersed in/care about (esp. from a consumer standpoint, since I have one foot in strategic communication), & I have never felt so old and out of the loop. Who are these people, and why are they on my lawn?

an article asking whether it's feminist to use AI? i will get right around to reading that, but first, would you join me in the cellar for a moment? i have a lovely new cask of sherry of dubious origin i'd like your opinion on

Everything so bad, but there is a little dog sleeping on my lap.

This is the dumbest fucking shit I've ever read and people who talk like this need to go touch grass. LLM tools only have real case uses in very limited areas when the people using them are actual experts in their fields and can check it carefully for its bullshit. So, not students.

Being a graduate TA was incredibly hard because I had to balance learning how to learn with learning how to teach, but I would not trade those skills for anything. I cannot imagine being an assistant professor right now without all of those years of teaching under my belt.

TIL that Moms for America, Moms for Liberty, and Parents Defending Education have signed the White House's pledge to America's youth to invest in AI education, which further clarifies how this AI education initiative is a political project and whose vision of education is being prioritized.

A terf on Facebook who posted something false just got rebuked by someone who said that snopes called her claim demonstrably false. She responded “snopes is not a good source to fact check.” The meteor cannot come for us fast enough.

Fascism is so deeply embedded in American culture and social reality that it reflects itself in ways people don’t fully grasp yet.

I find it fascinating that even hardcore ChatGPT fans seem to be turning on it in recent weeks

One of the things that drives me up the wall is when people say students “need to learn how to use AI” to succeed in the workplace. It is EXTREMELY EASY to use a chatbot. That’s the whole point of it! You do not need training to type in the box! What are you even TALKING about?? +

there is no question in my mind that rfk jr is the most dangerous person in this administration and that his eugenicist ideology threatens the lives of millions of people www.advocate.com/politics/dem...

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

Remember how if a kid choked on a little plastic toy they used to stop selling the toy

I wrote an entire book on AI and suicide, and I can tell you that humans absolutely will build guardrails to prevent self-harm when pressured to do so. Google search certain terminology, and the suicide hotline pops up. Code is not autonomous. We can hold AI companies to the same standards.

Don’t threaten me with a good time

For a story: looking to talk to Gen Z workers in different fields about how/if you’re pushing back against the “everything-is-an-emergency” approach to work. If you feel you can’t take this approach (because of your field, disproportionate pressure, etc) would also love to talk. Email/Signal in bio!

Every time I feel discouraged about the value of my work in the midst of all of this, I remember that if education did not matter, they would not be attacking it so hard. If humanities and the sciences did not matter, they would not be attacking it so hard.