Goblin Gower, PhD 🔮🧙🏻‍♀️

"People are getting free food and they might not deserve it!" who gives a shit man literally one of the unambiguously good things about the 21st century is we have lots of excess food production and we have the capacity to have hunger be significantly less important in decision making.

more like Edward I, but in reality no kings were involved in the building of Caerphilly Castle

The lie of AI research is that somehow we'll be able to comprehend it all and therefore we will have superior insights. This suggests not a conversation, but an endpoint. Why would I be interested in an endpoint when the conversation is so much more interesting? Once I told students to lighten up...

Apart from anything else, the "Lincoln bathroom" wasn't Lincoln's bathroom. It was Lincoln's office and cabinet room.

It wasn't renovated in the 1940s, it was installed in the 1940s.

A medieval latrine in the guardhouse at Caerphilly Castle, Wales. A stone room with a thin, glassless window. The toilet consists of a board with a large round hole positioned on a small stone bench built into the wall.

remodeling my bathroom like a king

I think pattern matching is the right term! Book matching is when they cut the marble so it has that mirror image effect. It’s not my favorite look but more to the point, if you do it once I think you should do it throughout

the most ahistorical bathroom remodel of all time

haha well I am merely an interior decorating hobbyist but this spot behind the chandelier looks like shit to me

to be fair, we can make engineered marble that looks a lot like Carrara—but as we know, dear leader would never lie about his building projects

I assume he's been told it's Statuario, which is a type of Carrara that autocorrect doesn't like. regardless, the install job looks terrible. why are only some of the joins book matched? too cheap to buy enough, I assume?

not an expert but it looks like Carrara

a phd is about being so unemployable that you can't get a job at costco

exactly—it's a wan attempt at a neoliberal argument for human thinking as a commodity. but what she misses is not merely that there is no market for the commodity she's selling, but that the cost of creating it is anathema to the admins she hopes to convince.

she's ostensibly white and tenured at UChicago, so no. I will say that upon 2nd reading, I think she's trying to push back on PhD admission freezes, not encourage applicants, but the message is buried so deeply behind bogus data points and wishful thinking that it fails to land.

Okay, I read the article again with my rage goggles off and I think it's clear that this piece is intended to try and sway administrators—CHE's obvious target audience—to push back on PhD admission freezes. But that won't be immediately obvious to many other readers.

can't believe I'm saying this but I'm considering a letter to the editor

In six years of university teaching, I experienced a single "woke police" student incident. I understand how painful and damaging it can be when people who claim to share your values try to get you fired.

But I was never afraid that those students would dox me or show up to class with a gun.

I heard that if you stop buying a little pastry every week, one day you'll have a bathroom like this

two headline articles in the chronicle of higher education. Top: Pauses in PhD Admissions Are a Blessing in Disguise. Bottom: There has Never been a Better Time to Start a PhD.

lol

I have the highest respect for Ada Palmer's scholarship on the early modern period, but this is a deeply irresponsible essay.

She's talking about a program that operated *over 10 years ago* in the same article where she claims without evidence that LLMs have caused mass layoffs!!!

holy SHIT dude

D: This is the most important thing of all: we’re never going to defend the merits of graduate education from a career metric standpoint. It’s a losing game, and one that only benefits people who want to eliminate or slash doctoral study. We need to make a case for knowledge as a cultural good.

1. Even if you get a fully funded place, doing a PhD is not free.

2. Humanities PhDs are not helpful things to have on your resume/CV if you are looking for jobs outside academia, which the vast majority of graduates will need to do.

3. Tenured professors have no business opining on any job market

Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 322, p. 187

This is the feast of Wolfgang of Regensburg, d. 994. Otloh of St. Emmeram wrote his life and the earliest surviving manuscript of that text is the second part of Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 322. Here's the first page of that text.

The MS is digitized here: e-codices.ch/en/list/one/...

This is not "reporting", it's an anecdote about vibes.

the fact that the right is actively building a coalition with its most extreme fringes while the center-left occupies itself with compulsive infighting about trans kids and immigration is frankly terrifying

"shrill" should tell you everything you need to know about the person who wrote this

• Professors should never put a student's words or work into an AI software without their consent. • Professors should also be transparent about their Al usage with grading, curriculum building, and any other way they might use it in their teaching. • If a professor does use Al chatbots in the classroom, they should explain their reasoning behind this decision and how its usage will help students meet learning outcomes. • Professors should additionally respect a student's choice to refuse Al. To do this, it would be ideal that they have assignments that students can choose from that do

Eminently reasonable proposed principles for professors’ use of AI, from a student refusinggenai.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/a...

we got takeout last night because my wife is injured and can't cook and I needed to do some emergency toilet repair, put me in the stocks

first they came for the little treats
and I spoke up, because fuck that