Can’t help but hear “faster and more varied” in the robot voice from Radiohead’s “fitter happier.”

Today’s chunk of #md is so rich that I’m not sure what to post, so I’ll just say that I love this burn of the Vermont / New Hampshire hay-seed: “a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.” 🐋

My morning’s 🐋 wormhole? The Seaman’s Bethel, a real New Bedford church without a ship-shaped pulpit until 1961, when complaints from tourists drawn to New Bedford by the Huston film inspired the construction of a mock-pulpit to match the one Huston filmed in Ireland. www.nps.gov/nebe/planyou...

"We used a freakishly advanced language model built on trillions of pages of text and crazy linear algebra engines powered by cubic meters of natural gas to achieve a task that could have been done with some dice and a look up table" is like 80% of popular AI applications

“Why are Americans mistrustful of AI?” asks the morning briefing thing I’m skimming while I “no” through literally a dozen questions being asked to me by a robot who stands between me and the person I need to talk to to schedule the x-ray that I really, really need

Seeking investors and at least one trained bartender named Jonah to explore this exciting new restaurant concept. 🐋

🐋 #md

Anybody up for a bicentennial read-along of Mary Shelley’s THE LAST MAN?

Reading 🐋 for the first time since it was required summer reading in high school. I’ve always known I probably read it pretty carelessly, but I was not prepared for how this thing starts!

Nick Jonas once cut me in line at a Mediterranean Grill.

I wasn’t sure they were going to publish this. So good for them.

That is one of the hardest parts for me as an educator, to see how much it has affected students' confidence in their own skills and abilities. So many don't believe they can produce something as good as the LLMs.

Worth noting that “instructors have infinite time and energy to reimagine entirely their pedagogy with every new tech innovation” is at least as naive an assumption as “gen ai will go away.”

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, got a guitar and he’s learning how to make it talk. His car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long walk from the front porch to his front seat. The door’s open, but the ride ain’t free.

If summaries are useful to your process, you don’t need Gen AI to get them. Vetted summaries exist in book reviews, on Wikipedia, on the back of the book, on the publisher’s website, etc., etc., etc. Gen AI continues to be a solution in search of a problem.

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

This is a great joke but ,actually, I think their worldview would lead, long term, to a massive buildout of public transportation options.

every time i read about one of these college presidents promising to reinvent the liberal arts education i think of "marge v. the monorail"

Finally watched the GDT Frankenstein. What’s the consensus out there on it?

it’s an important moment for arguing in favor of habits of mind, modes of learning that are worth teaching and if caring—about details, students, art—is not central to that discussion, what are we doing

I didn’t get the wording down precisely, so I won’t quote it, but one of the things that hit hard in the room: Reactionaries waging culture wars against the humanities have a more accurate account of our power than we do. And our humility is not admirable, but an abdication of responsibility.

If I could offer students one bit of…advice: be brutally traditional about what is printed on your degree. If you are first-gen or in any way non traditional, this goes double. Let rich kids get degrees in AI. You get something called “English”.

Darkly humorous that I had to click through an ad for the LA Times’s collaboration with Perplexity’s AI browser to read this review.

Today I'm doing a talk about Women and the (early) Gothic and it might be time for a list! So here are ten early women writers of the Gothic to give an idea of the range of things that women were creating in the period!

let’s have a conference

wowwww this is incredibly beautiful. tagging some friends who will love this: @ladyofsardines.bsky.social @heymrsbond.com @marcusluther.bsky.social therumpus.net/2025/10/02/h...

I’m shilling CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY hard because I’m so proud of it —specifically because it, like every close reading, is the product of a community and an offering to a community. @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I collaborated with each other and also 22 brilliant contributors.

🫡

“It’s a ‘driveway with a basketball hoop,’ Michael. How much could it cost?”

Say it often, say it loud: "Overall, research has not supported the common-sense presumption that digital approaches to schooling are better than non-digital alternatives. At the broadest level, widespread computer use in education has been found to be associated with lower student achievement."

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

I’m starting a new AI consulting company called It’s Not Going To Work, LLC. Here’s how it works. You give me $100,000, I tell you “It’s not going to work”(TM), you save $1M+ in wasted contracts, lots of wasted effort, and embarrassment. It’s a good deal. Try it out.

I think this is also true of LLMs

Patricia A. Matthew explores class, leisure, and the historical context of Pride and Prejudice. lithub.com/what-pride-a...

No way of knowing for sure, but I think I once disqualified myself from consideration for a TT job at a SLAC because I asked about opportunities to teach/mentor students in the joint English major/ed degree. Whole tone of conversation soured. Anyways I work in K12 ed now.

So good that I am reposting even though the high in Atlanta on Wednesday is 88

You’ll be shocked to hear that their recommendation is not limiting the circumstances in which AI is deployed, but rather accepting the inevitability it will occasionally have catastrophic effects.

Major new piece from David Ben-Merre (Buffalo State) and Manu Chander @profchander.bsky.social (Georgetown), in epilogue of David's excellent new book "O: Apostrophic Ghosts and the Disappearing Acts of Lyric Poetry."

I don't use feedback on my writing from an LLM because it can't read and I write for readers. When students say they find LLM feedback "helpful" what are we signaling about what's important about their writing? Helpful for what goal? Helpful how? What values are being reinforced?

If you're in or near Atlanta, or *super juiced* 😜 about close reading and love to travel, come to Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century: A Symposium at Emory University on Friday, November 7. And hear from these superstars...

I just wanted y’all to know that “abstinence-only AI” is an agitprop term. That’s all.

This articulates something I’ve been feeling about even the most well-meaning and careful LLM integrations into classrooms—don’t we want our students to learn to interact with each other?!

I'm thinking of teaching a class on "The Work of Art in the Age of Slop" and am wondering if anyone has ideas abut what to include?

I curate the history series at public media's journal Current. We're looking for pieces on the history of NPR & PBS, educational, community, and affiliate stations. We accept academic articles repurposed for wide readership. Plus, we pay. Please circulate! current.org/series/rewind/

Different level but same here. I forget these are different platforms & all of that history is now gone. But I did all the things - flipped classrooms, in-class cellphone surveys, test design, meta cognition blogging. I learned Omeka, GitHub, Libre, wikis etc etc And here we all are.

I point this out for clarity. I also have a long-term interest in how my crafting of ideas is sometimes confused for the very serious idea being crafted. So to be clear: AI is political attack on labor with few limited cases for social value and an absolute ecological disaster.

The unbundling of teaching and research will be - in fact, has already been - disastrous for students.