Vivek Virani

Most days, being a college professor feels like being a storyteller.*

*But with citations where needed.

Major media seem flummoxed about what to do when Trump shares a fake video of Obama getting arrested. Maybe they think the options are A) take the bait, or B) ignore it. But there's a 3rd option: Gather all the crazy examples and write big, loud stories about how the president is mentally unhinged.

I think LLMs are appealing to a certain set of people who think they're entitled to be good at something without wanting to actually put in any work

mostly, it seems people who think the disciplines of the Humanites aren't "real" and so just any rube can do it. Chris Arnade, basically

[AI guy watching the animatronic band at Chuck E. Cheese wiggle around while “Octopus’s Garden” plays over the speakers on stage] Fascinating... outstanding… this raises the question: how long before human bands are replaced entirely by this technology? Are we already there? We just may be.

I cannot understand why this post is written in past tense.

A very blessed Rama Navami to you all. Today the lord was born in the form of the ideal man, and freedom humanity from the oppressive clutches of an ego driven dictator who used an army of demons to take whatever he wanted. May Shri Ram guide us to liberation and justice. Jay Shri Ram!

Celebrate Email Debt Forgiveness Day! If there’s an email response you’ve wanted to send but been too anxious to send, you can send it today

If they had only waited until the end of the month.

emaildebtforgiveness.me

Very excited for these upcoming events with @friedlind.bsky.social !

Cold out, cozy in
A hushed eve before the morn
Quiet before joy

We have lost a one-in-a-century artist.

Zakir Hussain was the only musician I know who was celebrated and beloved by Hindustani master artists and broad audiences alike. He was one of my first musical heroes. No one did more to expand the possibilities of tabla as a global instrument. Rest in taal.

It's that time of year.

Universities do not exist to 'train', produce 'skills' or generate 'impact'. They exist to create new knowledge and teach about it. Any assertion to the contrary is in error, and is destroying everything it touches.

You're not going to be able to develop a highly informed, nuanced take on every conflict in the world, but I'll give you a good heuristic

Always, in every circumstance, be opposed to the wanton slaughter of civilians, no matter what elaborate excuses folks throw up about why this time is different

Quote from Terry Pratchett's book, Jingo “It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

#GNUTerryPratchett
,
#SpeakHisName
,
#Discworld

Being a parent is 10% teaching, 10% learning and 80% the ability to watch the same goddamn song over and over again till your brain pours out your nose and you keel over

The struggle is real, y'all.

To sing is to be
One with the poet, the song,
And the humming air

Domesticating Otherness: The Snake Charmer in American Popular Culture Abstract. Metaphoric allusions to otherness are widely encountered and oftentimes taken for granted. Exploring the use of the snake-charming theme in American popular media, I discuss why and how such...

IIRC this riff gets some discussion in Dr. Racy's on the snake charmer in American Culture

doi.org/10.5406/ethn...

A haiku a day?
Don't know if I can commit
...but with a blue sky....

As much of an insufferable Tolkien nerd as I am, Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea is actually my favorite fantasy series. It's just not as meme-able as nine dudes on a road trip to destroy jewelry.

F

kind of telling that a registered republican tries to assassinate the republican nominee for president who tried to murder his own republican vice president and the republican response is that democrats should calm the fuck down. 🤷🏻‍♂️

GOP candidates must negotiate a thicket of tricky gotcha questions like "what was the cause of the civil war?" but also "who won the 2020 Presidential election" and "do you denounce the teachings of Hitler?"

There's a sticker on a window that read, "Directed by DAVID LYNCH," and now my fucked up funhouse of a ilife doesn't seem QUITE as - no, that's not quite right. It's still a surreal, bizarre, whackadoo carnival of fuckery from hell. But at least if it's taking place in a Lynchian universe, I can assuage my devastating anxiety and terror with the knowledge that all of this is ordinary in Lynchworld. Now all I have to do is keep an eye out for anything that seems NORMAL in the NORMAL sense... because that's the shit that'll really fuck you up.

Stuck this to the window and now the world makes a LITTLE more sense...

Historical musicology colleagues - come work with us at UNT!

Mason jars tho

For us, the "well we're just going to have to look one of these up" interesecting clues are actors, sports players, and anything having to do with alcohol.

Happy to report I'm not ashamed of this one.

Thanks for sharing! There's a lot of great stuff in this piece that adds some wonderful texture to the plurality of popular music industries in different places - I particularly appreciate the discussion of "multiple modernities"

Thanks so much for recommending! This is really well-pitched to a casual student readership and will _perfectly_ slot into our conversations about constructions of "place" and the cultural flows of globalization!