Chris Forster

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Reposting for the work week crowd:

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

I sat on the technical advisory committee for the BLS for about 5 years, and the statisticians who work there are so conscientious and hard working. I am SO UPSET to hear about the commissioner’s firing!!! 😩

To reiterate, as a trained observer of human behavior I’d hazard the opinion that it’s bad for there to be no negative consequences for repeated, barefaced, public lies; and also speculate that it’s bad to subordinate the institutional production of knowledge to the personal vanities of leaders.

"When the first of August came round, the Professor realized he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week."

--Willa Cather, 1925 and timeless

Have you listened to any audiobooks lately? I would love to hear your thoughts on audiobook narration via the link above.

Hi everyone,

As part of my dissertation, I am researching audiobook narration.

If you have listened to an audiobook within the last two years, or have previously been a frequent audiobook user, I would really appreciate your thoughts!

You can find the survey here:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

(Don't think folks would mind me tagging @wcaleb.org, so he knows that we appreciate his work!)

Another semester, another moment to thank that guy from Rice University who made that syllabus maker thing. I love you

wcaleb.rice.edu/syllabusmake...

(One way to counter this would be to archive all URLs via the Internet Archive, www.archive.org, and then cite the archived link. Indeed editors should accept only archived URLs and not the current practice of saying when a link was accessed—a useless piece of information that does not prove that a deleted page existed.)

An interesting parenthetical comment in this NYRB review of two books on China’s communist party. [Link: www.nybooks.com/articles/202... ]

So this phrase “able-bodied” has clearly been on the most recent list of R talking points. It comes from the first round of English labor laws, which were instituted after the Black Death.

A mini medieval story time!

Trying to keep AI slop out of articles, Wikipedia has compiled a list of common phrases and discursive gestures that that generates. This is useful reading, too, for anyone marking student essays.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

#GenAI

Not what you’re looking for, but the historically based “novel” THE MANIAC by Benjamin Labutut covers von Neumann and AlphaGo in a way that is fascinating and compelling. NOT a survey, but a fascinating adjunct or supplement to one.

The open access version of Selling Sexual Knowledge is out (hardcopies coming shortly)! Reposting this little thread from December where I take a break from chowing down on holiday treats to talk a little about what it's actually about and why I wrote it.

Book cover displaying a "doodle-painting" by abstract artist Jonathan Lasker. Red, blue, orange, yellow, green, pink, and purple squiggles parade a canvas, with many looping black gestures contained in a grid structure. Above the grid is a tangle of thick Play-Doh-like ooze that spoils the flatness.

My first book ANEXACT FORM & MODERNIST CULTURE is published July 2025! I'm very excited for this to be out in the world + feeling grateful to everyone at Edinburgh University Press - especially series editors Georgina Colby & Eric White!!

🎉 ꩜ 🫟

@edinburghup.bsky.social /// tinyurl.com/3sf7yj8d

There Were Still Old People When Life Expectancy Was 35. A demography myth that won't die

“Historically, no one lived past age 35”

"I’ve heard *so* many versions of this claim, including recently from a menopause doctor (implying menopause is not “natural” because noone lived long enough to go through it). Every time someone states this “fact,” a demographer loses a piece of their soul"

My sense of folks’ opinion around the Google books case was very different from our current moment. I’ve been surprised how much copyright has been an object of (sometimes unnuanced) defense or even celebration.

A lot of people know about the Germans in the space program, but the more relevant engineer might be Qian Xuesen, the MIT/CalTech aerospace professor who co-founded JPL and was sent to recruit the Germans.

We deported him the 1950s. He became the leader of China’s missile program.

I'll grant that the politics of "non-consumptive reading" have been up-ended over the last half-decade. (Maybe I'm a sucker, but I'm still pro-non-consumptive reading.) But the more immediate impact for research (on in copyright and, frankly, out of copyright works) is the status of HTRC.

Thanks. I’m bummed b/c, a decade late to the party, I’m finally feeling comfortable with the htrc_features library! But wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing some larger context. (🤞 that ht analytics survives in some form)

Is 2 a reference to changes at HathiTrust in particular?

Twitter screenshot of a statement by Don Beyer .. I just met with legal counsel for my constituent, Dr. Badar Khan Suri. Dr. Suri is a global conflict scholar at Georgetown University who was detained without explanation by masked agents outside his Arlington home, then disappeared without due process to a prison over a thousand miles from his wife - a U.S. citizen - and three children. Dr. Suri has not been charged with a crime, the Administration is targeting him to instill fear on college campuses and clamp down on the freedom of speech, a freedom that is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. What that they have done to Dr. Suri is deeply wrong and contrary to American values, and he should be released. I will continue to speak up about his case as courts consider it in the days ahead.

thank you @beyer.house.gov

eventually someone is just going to write gender trouble for straight teenage boys.

If you had asked me last year which historical detail from my book was going to show up in the 2025 news, "working class women forced to band together to make sure there's no lead in their kids' milk" wouldn't have been on the list.

But here we are:

buttondown.com/theswordandt...

This is essential to understand: despite the perception of gov grant funding as sustaining university research, most gov grant projects lose money for the university.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

Moreover, these funds serve the public interest. Universities do things private companies with research capacities cannot: train research talent, conduct basic research with uncertain payoffs, and distribute knowledge as a public good. And the rewards have been enormous. Everything from the internet to pharmaceutical and health care innovations evolved from such investments. We are richer and healthier for the investment.

The trope that universities are "dependent" on the federal government fundamentally misunderstands how vital this partnership has been for the US. The private sector can't replace it. If we kill it, we're all worse off. From @donmoyn.bsky.social and me: donmoynihan.substack.com/p/are-univer...

Trying this query again 🥺