Peak parenting experience: introducing my sensitive, thoughtful 4th grader to "The Man in Black", explaining what makes it so cool, and being met with considered appreciation rather than eyerolls.

This dinergoth piece is getting attention elsewhere with much wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth, but it's neat. It aligns with some things I've observed, puts them in a bigger picture, echoes how I see my kids starting to explore the world (for better or worse). www.thenewatlantis.com/publications...

War, war, what is it good for? ... According to an editorial I'm editing today, training higher-quality trauma surgeons 😬

Somewhat lost in the discourse hubbub, this is huge news - increasingly seems like we're committing to trying a private response (or lack thereof) to climate change. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/c...

It's been a difficult week on multiple levels — and having a Thursday with two @catherineproject.bsky.social discussions of Dante and Dostoyevsky with groups of incredibly thoughtful readers has been the absolute highlight of it. Tremendously spirit-lifting. (And completely free.)

It's mildly trippy to be editing a paper by East Asian researchers where "USSR" is used as an acronym for ulnar superficialis slip resection. The world moves on, life-changing institutions for some are random historical footnotes for others, and so forth.

Somehow I never watched the classic James Bond movies — and I'm delighted to find that the most charming part of "From Russia with Love" is the background footage from early 1960s Istanbul.

I was noticing today how I still get ~1-2% of my editing work in .doc, not .docx, format, even nearly 20 years after the .docx format was released. Kinda interesting re: technology obsolescence cycles, maybe especially for technologies that generally fly below our conscious radar screen

Introducing the 4th grader to some (recorded) late night talk shows: "Is Stephen Colbert a bear? A cold bear?"

This meso loop of #Melissa from CIRA is absolutely stunning at it makes its closes in on landfall in southwestern Jamaica. rammb-data.cira.colostate.edu/tc_realtime/... #hurricanemelissa

Ooh, another nice linguistic coinage tonight from the middle schooler — "more sneakily" is "sneakilier".

Glad to see no "surge" this weekend, but also disgusted by the framing, on multiple levels. www.berkeleyside.org/2025/10/23/t...

Philosophical conversation with the 7 y/o today — why, indeed, ARE farts funny? "They're just smelly things that have noises and come from your butt! And why are butts funny, bro? All they are is like an oval with a crack in it that shoots out poop [pause] that's kinda funny."

Interesting innovation in phrasal verb usage from the 9 y/o: "this make sures that..." I've heard similar things from the 11 y/o too but have forgotten to jot them down.

Interesting Gen Alpha linguistic usage from the middle-schooler today. Apparently "AFK" can apply to being absorbed in work for a couple hours—even if that work is *at a laptop*, literally *at a keyboard*.

Very interesting interactive map of indigenous territories, treaties, and languages: native-land.ca. The choices of what to include in Asia, Africa, and Europe are quite interesting. I wonder if future versions will have more Siberian representation (e.g., Tungusic?)

I started learning Turkish many years ago with high-minded ideas about using it in my research. 15+ years later, I'm rocking out to this fun ditty about partying with Dracula, hooking up with Frankenstein's wife, and becoming a vampire. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOGD...

By far the best part of watching Oakland A's games now is listening to the back-and-forth between the announcers, esp. how Dallas Braden tries to politely conceal what seems to be genuine dislike and WTF responses toward Chris Caray's random comments.

Feel like one political party kidnapping an opponent should be bigger news

Thoroughly enjoyed @mastroianni.bsky.social's post on the woeful state of academic psychology, esp. the critique of "pick a noun and study it" (I often edit research along those lines, in nursing). Not sure I share the optimism re: boredom's effects, though. tinyurl.com/5akw8b3h

Watching Jurassic Park with the 9 y/o, and I had never noticed before the thread of "whether to have kids" discourse, or remembered that the cool, black-leather chaos theory guy apparently has 3 kids and is a big fan of both kids and divorce 😂.

This online presentation of the Genji poems is one of the coolest things I've seen in quite some time! Not just that the "poems are online", but so much thought and care has clearly gone into the presentation and interface. genjipoems.org

Today's work-related reminder that someone's always having a worse day (and of the importance of flared devices) — apparently there's at least one documented case of a heart attack resulting from the stress induced by a self-inserted glass bottle getting stuck in the rectum.

Never imagined a word-for-word theatrical adaptation of a short story could be so good. I was stunned by Word for Word's adaptation of "Annunciation" www.zspace.org/annunciation. One vividly played character in particular was a delightful reminder of someone from my past, too.

Plans for bacterial-driven biomanufacturing on Mars! Super cool. Back when I was a 30-year-old career-changing premed (before those plans fell through too), I low-key fell in love with microbiology, and this reminds me of why. pioneerlabs.substack.com/p/our-first-...

A little bit of Goethe today, reflecting on how our entire built landscape is a sort of fossilization of human stories and passion. #poetry

"Competitive authoritarianism" is a great phrase. Also an excellent point re: people's assumptions about transition states — there's never going to be a day where we wake up to the announcement, "NOW HEAR THIS, IT'S AUTHORITARIANISM TIME," and waiting for such an announcement is a fool's errand.

A first in a paper I've edited: "Statistical analyses were conducted using ChatGPT 4o." 🤔🤔🤔🤔

Mamdani & the impact of his campaign/election remind me a lot of Obama, maybe not least because I lived in Chicago (and was in my early 20s) when Obama became prominent. Multiple parallels come to mind, and I'm surprised I haven't seen more people note the similarity.

This group doing 19th-century adaptations of major Russian rock songs is the most delightful thing I've found in ages: "Городъ в огне как при Бонапартѣ..." "Метаморфозъ, алчемъ метаморфозъ..." Absolute genius. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTfH...

Excellent thread about a fascinating paper. 🙏 to @philipcball.bsky.social for the post! The overwhelming mechanistic complexity of regulation should be better-known, especially when it comes to bio-futurist discourse.

The collision between "creation mindset" and "production mindset" was a difficult part of my transition from academia to industry (non-tech), and I've seen it be hard for others too. Recently, I've had one foot in both academic & pro-AI Bay Area circles. V. little mutual understanding or curiosity.

Documenting my entry into the World Championship of Parallel Parking here. (Don't worry, I did move forward to avoid being a complete jabroni).

Super-cool thread! As a diachronic linguist with geologist parents, I'm struck by the similarity of the thought processes between field. I ♥️ that feeling when indirect or secondary evidence all starts to click in a way that supports a hypothesis.

♥️ This trailer and the passing of the seasons (as well as the interlude with masks) and can't wait to see this. I have some feelings about reviving/building on new shows, but KOTH was (and hopefully will still be) a work of genius.

This is something I wish I understood earlier in life, but learned the hard way instead - you can't really silo or firewall mental and emotional habits when you're under the influence for a substantial proportion of your waking hours.

♥️ Beautiful post. It echoes and amplifies the most memorable line from that Mandel'shtam poem I posted the other day. "Я и садовник, я же и цветок // В темнице мира я не одинок." "I'm the gardener, and I'm the flower too // In the dungeon of this world, I'm not alone."

🎵 "...To the west you'll find a silicon promised land Where machines replace our minds for systematic profit plans Course of human progress staggers like a drunk Its steps are quick and heavy, and its mind is slow and blunt" 🎵 One of my all-time faves. Highly prescient too.

I was reading some Mandel'shtam today while the kids got ready for school (as one does?), and this poem (published in the poet's early 20s) struck me—powerfully evocative of the joy/piti (in the Buddhist sense) of youth, with an echo of some hard-won wisdom to come. Re: the translation…(1/2)

My current favorite song from the playlist my 9 y/o made for me: "100 memes in 1 song (in 10 minutes" (piano) open.spotify.com/track/0WWJXb.... Per the recent article making the rounds, it's great music to read Dickens by 💀.

An unexpected moment in the political education of a tween: the difference between BERNIE Sanders and COLONEL Sanders ("the KFC guy") 💀. And of course it came up at 11:30 pm.

Amazing piece on Ted Kaczynski's brother — very poignant to me as a brother, as a father of brothers, and to some extent as a parent trying to make sense of how tech fits into, shapes, and distorts my kids' lives. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/u...

*putting on my ex-Chicagoan hat* — it does seem like a bit of a missed opportunity to have Pope Ursus I or Pope Taurus I.

I'm not a Catholic, but the selection of a new Pope is an interesting opportunity to reflect on my hopes for the Catholic Church (and other religious organizations). In a nutshell, memetic diversity.

As far as I can tell, the Pope was chosen quickly, and Cardinal Prevost wasn't on the media's radar screen. My rule of thumb for many situations (in politics and beyond): those who know aren't talking, and those who are talking don't know. Perhaps a lesson or two there.

What an amazing example of C. S. Lewis' quote about how evil is "simply good spoiled." I usually refrain from Musk discourse—he feeds on attention, and hate is just as good as adulation for his types. This, though, is just sad. As the Buddhists say, may he (and his children) be well and happy.

Today's editing queue includes treatment guidelines from an academic society. I always love these — they're usually exemplars of careful, evidence-based reasoning that engages with shades of gray, hypotheticals, and degrees of (un)certainty. Very rare in most settings.

The recent cancellation of NEH funds has hit the wonderful resource that is the Medieval English Text Series (METS) @urochester.bsky.social, a free online resource that 1000s use for teaching & research. Please consider making a donation if you can, and please share! metseditions.org/donate

This 1964 poem by Andrei Voznesensky, from a paradigm of Cold War technical innovation that now seems downright old-fashioned, is often in my mind in our days of AI. A "mechanical nightingale" (механический соловейчик) indeed. Also, "горло саднит от техсловес" has a certain ring. #poetry

Some striking omissions from the discourse on AI competing with humans: friendship, romance, community-building, caregiving. Depending on what you value, some concerns can loom like mountains or dissolve into the wind.