Peter C. Baker

Niche illinois question: I keep resubmitting my insurance application through Get covered. No matter what I put in as our family MAGI (which is over 318% of FPL), the system automatically slots my kids into 'All Kids.' why???

TritonGPT is Here and Ready to Help The latest innovation developed at UC San Diego, TritonGPT is redefining how students, staff, faculty and researchers work together. Its suite of artificial intelligence assistants act as helpers, tut...

At this time I would council students to avoid institutions making these kinds of investments. It's a signal that they are eager to move away from human contact and interpersonal exchanges and outsource it to generative AI. They are declaring their values. today.ucsd.edu/story/triton...

If you insist ...

I wrote a novel about extraordinary rendition, marriage, being a parent, having parents, small-town North Carolina, Rome, school board politics, cats, and more -- and it's available in stocking-friendly paperback.

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/676700...

The Noise of Desire Caroline Polachek: 'Welcome to My Island' + Suburban Soccer Pickup + Waiting + Wanting + Crying at Costco

My intermittent blog/stack/media empire TRACKS ON TRACKS -- where writers explore their relationships to individual songs - is back for a holiday season run.

First up, Deborah Shapiro on listening to Caroline Polachek in the car with her 14-year-old son after soccer practice...

It's toasted

HBOMax has started showing a 'remastered' 4K Mad Men and they’ve messed things up so during Roger’s oyster vomit scene you can now see the crew men with the vomit hose on the right

2+7= _ I caNnot aNswer this qwestion, as it is agaiNst My reLigious principles. ٠١٨٨ IT'S WORTH A SHOT. aMI, 7 january 1986 NAITION

Has this been posted yet

The National Movement to Halt the Spread of Multifamily Housing, 1890-1926 Efforts to prohibit apartments, rather than merely regulate their construction and condition, began in the 1890s. Through the early 1920s, major cities used stringent building codes to achieve this...

'Through early 1920s, major cities used stringent building codes to [prohibit multifamily]. During this era housing experts played a leading role in nurturing the ideology that multifamily housing was an evil.'

wow.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Deeply deeply Northwestern move tbh

I've got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome
And a wristwatch that's a
Pocket knife and a megaphone

I'm old enough to remember when 'the big Ryan Lizza news' was that he was leaving The New Republic

W. Gass: "I write because I hate. A lot...I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste."

Hisham Matar revisits the notorious photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib, to ask what they might reveal about the nature – and limits – of American power www.equator.org/articles/pit...

Mention this to the median Evanston boomer and they'll act like you're speaking Esperanto about events on another planet .

Envision 2045 Evanston Popeyes

That he is doing this poorly despite her candidacy's glaring weaknesses is ... Something.

Evanston awaits with open arms

College Radio Time to pretend. PETER C. BAKER Last year, I found a time portal. I pressed a button and a wormhole opened up. On the other side was no particular year or era. On the other side was a way I used to be...

!!! Love this. Love college radio. Once wrote briefly about it for some kind of weed magazine: gossamer.co/blogs/news/c...

Hell yeah. Still the best campus novel, for my money ...

Cloudfare Has a Cold

It appears that Olivia Nuzzi made a horrible mistake*.

(*Reading Don DeLillo's LIBRA while writing her book about dating RFK.)

As one Massachusetts school administrator recently said; this moment with AI is remarkably like the moment when we were introduced to asbestos. Yes, it had some remarkably promising characteristics – fireproofing! – and had some real utility in science, research, and industrial applications. But a profit-driven industry bullied us into inserting it everywhere; into our homes and schools and public spaces, before we really understood the risks. This resulted in decades, if not centuries, of illness, injuries, deaths, and the astronomical financial burden of trying to remove the stuff. As you, the leaders and policymakers in our schools, craft an AI policy for our district, we the undersigned call on you to: 1. Ban AI tools into the classroom, protect our students and teachers from de-skilling and allow them the space and time to engage in assignments themselves. 2. Resist any direct financial relationship or contracts with AI providers, as well as the “training” they might offer. 3. Provide a digital literacy curriculum to help students navigate the current digital landscape, and promote critical engagement with technology. 4. Guarantee that anywhere generative AI has already entered our classrooms or curriculum, an opt-out will allow students and teachers to refuse the use of these products at no risk to their grades, progress or employment.

Love to see community action against this AI nonsense! neighborhoodview.org/2025/11/13/d...

Great to hear. I'm chewing on possible adaptation for high school students...

For folks (and journalists) who want to search the Oversight Committee email texts, I made a database for searching the 20k text files:

splendorous-chaja-f79791.netlify.app

I don't know how to get people to read this article, but I really think many more should.

Kinda shocking how far you can get on Marx + (Late) Freud

My Internet boyfriend makes a good point!

Someone had been telling lies about James B.

guys -- Durbin's voicemail box has been full for ~15 years.

Sadly, it has been full for like 15 years