Jamey Walters

You guys, they did it: they made a good Superman movie.

This really feels like a defining post of our time

𝗕𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗬𝗮𝗵𝘄𝗶𝘀𝗺 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗝𝘂𝗱𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗺:
Judean Cult and Culture during the Early Hellenistic Period (332–175 BCE)

Expected online publication date: October 9th.

cambridge.org/core/element...

@DHSgov on X: We’re taking father/son bonding to a whole new level. JOIN.ICE.GOV 06 Aug 25 [Young man and old man in ICE gear]

Wehrschiessen des Deutschen Volkes 1944 [Young man and old man sharing a rifle]

Oh look, ICE is copying literal Nazi recruiting propaganda again. The poster on the right is for the Volkssturm, the Nazi militia of older men and boys established during the final months of World War II.

People have trouble interpreting this. Nobody’s saying Donald Trump or Pam Bondi are personally selecting Nazi iconography. They don’t read enough for that. The point is they hire and promote Nazis who ARE steeped in Nazi iconography, and they’re fine with it.

This is a funny zodiac sign/ late antiquity joke and I stand by it.

I’m a pretty big fan of the oven/microwave (that also looks like an old tv) combo by the bed, and the offset stove fan a few feet over just takes the cake.

Some people keep saying "AI isn't just probabilities, AI understands," and then AI puts a toilet next to the office desk, both of which are in the kitchen with no sink.

This is not something an entity would do if it "understood" what those things are.

Ms. Belsky said these kinds of suggestions helped the company create its first billboard campaign aimed at college students. “Can you quiz me on the muscles of the leg?” asked one ChatGPT billboard, posted this spring in Chicago. “Give me a guide for mastering this Calc 101 syllabus,” another said. Ms. Belsky said OpenAI had also begun funding research into the educational effects of its chatbots. “The challenge is, how do you actually identify what are the use cases for A.I. in the university that are most impactful?” Ms. Belsky said during a December A.I. event at Cornell Tech in New York City. “And then how do you replicate those best practices across the ecosystem?”

Weird how the strategy is to get everyone using it and then figure out the use cases. Seems inverted. 🤷🏿‍♂️

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has a plan to overhaul college education — by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life. If the company’s strategy succeeds, universities would give students A.I. assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized A.I. study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot’s voice mode to be quizzed aloud ahead of a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch “A.I.-native universities.”

Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.

Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.

“‘Our vision is that, over time, A.I. would become part of the core infrastructure of higher education,’ Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education, said in an interview.” 🫠

The “deal” that Brown made with the Trump admin is much more extreme than is being reported. It includes government oversight of course evaluations and no barrier to government interference in faculty hiring.

Read it for yourself here:

www.brown.edu/sites/defaul...

Really wish liberal media wouldn’t use terms like “alligator Alcatraz.”

looked up the clip just because sometimes people change his words for captions that end up innocently reshared, but upon finding it decided to share the video because hearing him say it makes it 1000% more definitely true and everyone will listen/believe more than reading it written out

I'm so tired of talking about AI but also my entire job hinges on conversations about AI and I'm so demoralized and feel so gaslit and I am just deeply not okay.

One of the worst "features" ever developed is autoplay previews on streaming apps. The two possible use cases are "panicked attempt to stop it" or "ignoring it." Literally no one ever has thought, "Huh, looks interesting, thanks for the tip."

Mellon Foundation The Mellon Foundation makes grants to actively unlock the power in the arts and humanities that helps connect us all.

“American Academy of Arts&Sciences reports 96.3% of humanities grads age 23-32 fully employed. Earnings in humanitiess comparable to social/life sciences, job satisfaction levels too. A serious mismatch bw actual employment for hum grads +general perception."
www.mellon.org/voices/human...

It coulda been wurst.

Just this week:

Random tariff rates announced again

Firing BLS director over bad jobs numbers

Trump removed from Smithsonian exhibit on impeachment

CPB announces its demise

Ghislaine Maxwell moved to minimum security

President exempted from proposed ban on stock trading

***Attention Historians***

Tenure-track job postings in History and History-adjacent fields for July 2025.

A thread.

1/

A Note On Leaving Substack This is a post on why I am leaving my substack site. I am publishing it on Substack and here, for users who do not want to contribute to that site’s metrics. This decision has been a longtime…

A Note On Leaving Substack – SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE
sententiaeantiquae.com/2025/08/01/a...

August 1st. Be gentle with the U.S. academics in your life, today is the day the sinking feeling begins.

Shocked to learn that doing everything you can to ruin the American economy isn’t great for job growth

did something happen here

"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

“The president cut your health care so he could build himself a golden ballroom” is a pretty easy message to sell

They’re literally building Versailles

They ended cancer research for this.

Colleges, Accreditors and States Embrace 3-Year Degrees Colleges from Utah to Indiana and Maine are on track to offer three-year degrees in the near future. But the hesitations that have long plagued the movement haven’t disappeared.

Here's the full story from Inside Higher Ed:
www.insidehighered.com/news/student...

Screen capture from online article. The text says: That doesn’t necessarily mean those are the only types of programs that suit the three-year model, Zemsky argued. But faculty in “traditional” majors, like the humanities, are especially resistant to taking on the challenge of offering a shortened degree, he said. “The bad news is, I think in the traditional disciplines, there isn’t as much movement,” he said. “I wish some history department would take it on. We don’t have a history department yet that’s said, ‘We’re going to do a history degree in three years,’ and in some ways, it makes our life harder because it looks like we aren’t interested in traditional higher education, and we are. But we can’t lead people to water.”

The broken metaphor at the end of this observation that "traditional" fields like the humanities, and especially history, are hesitant to advocate for a 3-year bachelor's degree (instead of four years) is, truly, ::chef's kiss::

[Link to full story in thread below.]