DMC

Dr. King forever, but I'm kinda glad for the quiet first half. I liked the flirty patient-turned-fleeing suspect early on, but it felt borderline too cutesy, as if the writers took note of Mel's popularity & were going to lay the quirky antics on too thick. Glad it's been dialed down & not overused.

"I want students...to read about marginalization—about the forms cruelty can take and the choices an individual can make in the face of attempts to keep them down. Beyond any other principle, I try to assign books that are worth...discussing and writing about for a sustained period of time."

This is a big piece of it for sure. I recently gave a short essay assignment for which I told students they would NOT get lower than an A-, no matter what, as long as they did not use outside sources and only presented their own ideas, and 20% of them STILL used AI. They so don't want to be wrong.

A letterpress card in cream with all caps writing: R.E.M. GAVE ME UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS FOR HOW I'D FEEL AT THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.

A greeting card for my Bluesky friends

Dr. Mel King of HBO Max's "The Pitt," lying dazed on the hospital floor after being knocked down by a patient trying to get away from police. The closed captioning reads "That was a doozy. [chuckles weakly]"

Dr. Mel is all of us, pretty much every day of 2026.

The number of times the last few days I've had to stop and just remind myself to breathe...

Sadiq by Brian Turner It should make you shake and sweat, nightmare you, strand you in a desert of irrevocable desolation, the consequences seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline feeds the muscle its courage, no matter what god shines down on you, no matter what crackling pain and anger you carry in your fists, my friend, it should break your heart to kill.

…it should break your heart to kill.

Our two cats will be 12 this week and we still, and will always, refer to them as "the kittens."

Well, that's not encouraging.

I'll take it.

Sorry-character limit made me unclear. Certainly not anything about Helen! I meant that, while I empathize with her, she is prickly & misanthropic, so she doesn't have other connections. So Helen being her "one person" is somewhat self-inflicted (although her backstory explains lack of family ties).

I 100% agree, and sad to see all the hate here. In the show's world, it's only been 12 days since she lost the only person she loved & trusted. Did she bring that on herself? Sure. But it's a fascinating exploration of grief...her burying Helen's body & then protecting the grave was gutting.

Ah, NOW it's the holidays!

I think the shortest version of why LLMs are an anti education technology is that education is fundamentally about making shared context to understand ourselves, each other, and the world

And by design LLMs destroy shared context

The Top Five Ethan Hawke Movies and a Double Shot of Richard Linklater, With Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater! Podcast Episode · The Big Picture · 11/17/2025 · 1h 49m

The last 20 min of this talk with Ethan Hawke & Richard Linklater—about how hard, and how necessary, it is to read in today’s world, & the impact of tech & AI & all the things, made me feel both anxious & optimistic (“Everything’s terrible, everything’s great.”).
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

I'm doing that tonight for my niece's birthday, and I both can't wait and am a little intimidated 😂

I have many, many foot issues, and Vionic slippers whenever I'm in the house have been a huge help:
www.vionicshoes.com/women/slippe...

Watched the first episode of S2 last night, but am going to try to ration them so the good vibes and comfort get me through the holiday family madness!

As an English teacher in public education witnessing the eager adoption of AI, watching Pluribus's grouchy, grief-stricken Carol Sturka resist the hive is almost too painful to bear, yet somehow simultaneously affirming. Help us, Vince Gilligan, you're our only hope!

I couldn’t agree more with the conclusions in this piece and am always paper-first in my classroom, but one issue I don’t see mentioned is that many districts (including mine) use the availability of tech as an excuse to ration paper

I was grading papers at a coffeehouse in September and had a lovely discussion with 2 seniors in private school about their summer AP lit reading (Atonement, Their Eyes…) and remembered those days fondly— my district banned summer assignments @10 years ago, including reading.

Anne Burrell’s Frizzled Brussels Sprouts with Pancetta & Walnuts Visit the post for more.

I love brussels sprouts, but my husband is not a fan, and yet whenever I make Anne Burrell's recipe from her Cook Like a Rock Star cookbook, he devours them:
livewithkellyandmark.com/recipes/anne....

When We Devalue Art (Books!) We Devalue the Future When you’ve spent your whole adult life working in and around book publishing you get used to hearing that people don’t read anymore and that the industry is on its last legs. There is always a cri…

I wrote about why I can't sleep at night: the devaluation of so many things (critical thinking, creativity) I thought were paramount. lithub.com/when-we-deva...

Jeff Hiller and Bridget Everett from HBO's "Somebody Somewhere" on a baseball field.

All junior teachers at my school still do it, at least for now. I've actually had several students every year say it's their favorite text we read, which always delights me when it happens.

Photo of my arm with a post vaccine CVS bandaid

In the last 5 weeks, despite my needle anxiety, I’ve gotten a TDAP booster, flu shot, Covid shot, AND my first Shingles shot. Planning some celebratory ice cream and thinking the Yankees should reward me by taking the division. From the Jays this weekend!

RIP to Robert Redford, whose achingly beautiful A River Runs Through It is my all-time favorite film. “I am haunted by waters.”

While it's not necessarily his best movie, A River Runs Through It is my favorite film of all time. It is achingly beautiful.

It's just so humane--basically decent people just doing their best to do their jobs as well as they can. That's why, even though it's intense and grueling, it was still ultimately the right show for the moment; it felt good to be reminded each week that people like that exist, even if it's on TV.