I always really enjoy reviewing Taylor Swift's work and try to give it a measured read. I think Swift is a serious artist deserving a serious response! So here's my Showgirl review www.npr.org/2025/10/03/n...

Good morning! 🪶

They went back to the woods and looked on the dark paths.

Furlough Friday aka The Life of a Showgirl The winding road leads to the chateau.

Happy Taylor Swift Day to all who celebrate ✨

“framing science as a debate to be won makes it easy to paint established scientists as opponents who must be overcome” An interesting thesis and suggestion of a solution www.nytimes.com/2025/10/03/o... 🎁

“Good scientists…know the cure for their ignorance is to actively & rigorously test their own assertions. That kind of humility is no different from enduring the hardships required to become a champion…boxer, a great rock climber or a master musician. It’s time to make that connection explicit.”🧪🛟

the bedtime thing rips my heart in half. i would not have a fraction of the creativity i possess without my dad not only reading us books but literally making up stories on the spot every night. cannot express how lucky i was and how sad i am for children being raised by chatbots

I just couldn't stop thinking about how weird sperm whale mouths are and yet how perfectly shaped for inserting giant squid into

If like me, you have spent a lot of time in used book and thrift stores, one thing you've probably seen a lot of are books on microwave cookery. I think about contemporary general-purpose AI advocacy in much the same way: trying to push a (useful but in context!) tool well beyond its capabilities.

“research on birth mothers can be extremely hard to come by. Lisa A. Tucker…..told me that when she speaks with Drexel’s research librarians—looking for recent studies on, say, ‘birth mothers & their emotions after relinquishment’—the librarians will often come back & tell her, ‘There’s nothing’.”🧪

If you want to understand open adoption, it makes sense to start with birth parents—yet studies of them are few. 2+ yrs ago, I began talking w/ birth mothers to try to understand what living in an open adoption is like for them, and what rights or options they might have if challenges were to arise.

So it begins. U.S. Army Futures Command and U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command have cased their colors. Born from both, with an even larger mission, is U.S. Army Transformation & Training Command (T2COM); responsible for Force Design, Force Generation, and Force Development.

May the United States be inscribed for a good year in the book of life. A year of empathy and community. A year of peace.

“Digital tools in the humanities have massively increased in use, but it’s usually for the processing of mass data, not so much for qualitative analysis…. This is clearly not the silver bullet – this is one tool among many. The human factor remains key.”🧪

“This is a significant advance in understanding how societal-level inequality gets under the skin to affect mental health.” @profkepickett.bsky.social 🧪🛟

91 years is a good long run for most but too short for someone like Jane Goodall. Damn.

“I have to go on doing it bc I care passionately abt nature.I care passionately abt children.If I didn’t make a diff, I wouldn’t do it.I don’t say that to brag.It’s just that every day ppl say: ‘I read your book&I changed. I heard your lecture&I changed.’So if I care, then I can’t stop”JANE GOODALL🧪

“The physical discomfort…may trigger a deeper,more dangerous despair, an overlooked factor in suicide prev…allergies’ physiological effects, such as poor sleep &mental distress, may contribute to this increased risk. ‘A small shock could have a big effect if you’re already in a vulnerable state’”🧪🛟

“while structural factors for suicide are well-researched, short-term triggers are less understood…. ‘During our study pd, there were ~500k suicides in the US… we est that pollen may have been a contributing factor in up to 12k of those deaths over the ps, or roughly 900 to 1,200 deaths per year’”🧪🛟

I'm here for this kind of burn.

“And she didn't hide their dark side, either. She witnessed brutal assaults, killings, even cannibalism. As she explained.., it sure looked like warfare. ‘I was shocked. I was saddened,’ Goodall said. ‘But I realized that, very sadly, this makes them even more like us than I thought before’.”🧪

“we need leaders & active citizens in all levels of our societies who will stimulate the compassionate & cooperative instincts we share with other primates, who encourage us to find the best in ourselves & work together to tackle the formidable problems we face.” 💔 JANE GOODALL (1934-2025)🧪

Frog and Toad jumped away. Frog was trembling. “I am not afraid!” he shouted.

“She acknowledged a simpler way to reduce mass shootings. ‘Gun legislation would absolutely reduce these incidents, and we absolutely need it, full stop…. We’re all-in on stronger gun legislation here in counterterrorism land’.” 🧪🛟

“‘Thoughts and prayers aren’t enough… Mitigating these things—security cameras, security guards, school drills—isn’t enough. You have to act to prevent them’.… there is evidence that mass shooters tend to follow a common path to violence, that they leave signals of their intentions”🧪🛟 *gift link

Thoughts and prayers to those coming up 95 tomorrow morning

I may have found my defining quote. Pair this with my pinned post and you will see what I mean!

“ — as though all night they had thought of what they would like their lives to be, and imagined their strong, thick wings.”

Reading. www.thedial.world/articles/lit...

I have a new translation up at @thedialmag.bsky.social, Lauren Bastide's Courir l'escargot, which we're calling Consider the Snail. I loved this book & was so happy to get to translate some excerpts from it, about slowness, failure, grief, alterity, cycles, & goo www.thedial.world/articles/lit...

while we’re thinking about apples… a james tate poem

“Experts say one critical solution is for elected officials and others with political clout to lead the charge in ratcheting down demonizing language. ‘We have to start suppressing the hate-filled rhetoric,’ Wackrow said, ‘because we’re in this national tailspin’.” 🧪🛟 @joshscampbell.bsky.social

[person inventing the tooth fairy] “And if you put it under your pillow, there will be some money there for it in the morning” [everyone else] *concerned glances*

All true. All we can do is keep bearing witness. You never know who is listening (in a good way)

Ethics breed accountability. Ethics breed empathy. Ethics breed strategic patience. Ethics breed strategic thinking. Ethics breed strategy. Ethics breed missions. Ethics breed task cohesion. Ethics breed team cohesion. Ethics breed teamwork. Ethics breed readiness. Ethics breed strength.

In my latest piece, in @nytimes.com, I write about my surprisingly positive experience as a liberal advisor to the Turning Point USA chapter at my university. #TPUSA

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed … “The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.” Moby Dick, Chapter 59: “Squid”

“The worst part is, in the same way that when I back up a truck and my dad is sitting on my shoulder, when I’m performing, especially singing, Megan is very much on my shoulder. When you’re married to the Lionel Messi of performing, it can be tough to keep your shots on goal.” ❤️

Most of my students think it's okay to use for "brainstorming" and "generating ideas." Once again: GENERATING IDEAS IS THE ENTIRE POINT OF YOU

Nobody’s better at social media than @rebeccarhelm.bsky.social! This footage has been my holy grail since I was a kid…

“Payne-Gaposchkin ultimately was the first woman promoted to full professor at Harvard and chair of the astronomy department. As she would later reflect: ‘The truth will prevail in the end. Nonsense will fall of its own weight, by a sort of intellectual law of gravitation’.” 🧪

“When the study launched in 2013, ‘people literally laughed at us’…. Menstrual blood was messy, it was imprecise, it was difficult to collect…Why bother when the disease could be diagnosed with surgery?”🧪 *WHY BOTHER* discovering a NON-SURGICAL diagnostic method??? Because nope icky period blood

“Each incidence of *workslop* carries real costs…. For an organization of 10,000 workers, given the estimated prevalence of workslop (41%), this yields over $9 million per year in lost productivity.”🧪

Appreciate these insights from @emollick.bsky.social. But the "wizard problem" isn't that AI is too opaque. It's that we're designing systems that hide their processes. We could build AI that shows its work, explains, and lets us intervene. Instead we're choosing black boxes and calling it magic.

Painting by John Moore ‘Quitting Time’ 2015. Oil on linen. 127 x 106.68 cm.

“in a measure of ‘higher-order learning’—engagement in activities that promote the critical, analytical thinking central to a cllge educ &essential to jobs in an age of AI—there was ‘no statistically signft diff’ btwn the most selective schools (<20% acceptance rate) &the next tier down (20%to40%)”🧪