Thomas Arnold

Vatmaxxing, the stack that refutes Putnam

Pre-emptive registration 🤝 Clever Hans bsky.app/profile/mich...

Had been thinking for a while of getting to Tristram Shandy, but anno gemini 2026 it's a little much to see the medical fraud is named Dr. Slop.

Quaint. My agentic AI absorbs all the books and writes all the emails, so it will have to suffer dementia and pain for me.

Call me, New Yorker.

As the New Yorker floats an ontological shrug about Claude's "self" (with in-house philosophical backing), his concept of "pre-emptive registration" deserves a strong revival to take on "alignment," "explainability," and other "well, we humans aren't so _____ ourselves" muddles.

Cope Claude Quale Quale

Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!

Also useful metaphor because Elon, in perfect conformity with the diagnosis, predicted chess will be "solved" like checkers in ten years. Just bored, tragicomically ignorant waving off of mathematical realities.

Gotta drink something to prep for the measles slouching up I-26 from SC.

Stirring insight into Twin Peaks, which invites revisiting Mulholland Drive and even his artistic credo "Catching the Big Fish." It takes an odd persistence of psyche to have "captured not only personal pain but a shared longing: for time to stop and atrocities to end and goodness to prevail."

Vladimir: We need AGI

Estragon: Yes, the climate cannot be helped until AGI arrives

*they do nothing*

a fantastic book, and an actual example of a "mechanical turk"

If only there were a metaphor for him trying to leave the island behind as forgotten history.

The faces of Cronos, Zeus, and descendant divinities, all blondish, fair, almost all blue-eyed.

Lovely book in some ways but the d'Aulaires really drew the Greek pantheon like this

Instinct, not so much The Language

A legal asylum-seeker who works at Chipotle and plays music at a church in Maine went missing. His pastor searched and searched, eventually finding his abandoned car with the keys on the floor.

ICE grabbed him. No criminal record. No explanation.

"Oakeshott Learning" is right there

The thread has some great teaching insight, and it makes me think this article would pair well with the Kevin Roose Claudeswarm post as a perspective on how narrowly the terms of "adoption" are imagined.

As Chief Executive Function Officer it's time to sound the alarm-- if I don't do something useful with this draft I'm going to lose psychic permission to keep drinking coffee.

Nice example of "intelligence" not entailing autonomy, participation, and "stakes" (was thinking of ChatGPT holding forth about alcoholism vs. introducing itself at an AA meeting). If folks need a spoonful of Talebian squid ink to take their care ethics medicine, that's at least a start.

Fallacy? I'm embarrassed for you, child. It's called vibearguing.

Imminent MSNBC segment on socio-political layers of "You're all set, hon"

"I Who Have Never Known Men," like Isaac Babel's stories, manages to drain what you thought was life's meaning at the exact same rate as your will to put the book down.

Episode 116 -- A Murder in Minneapolis Podcast Episode · In Bed With The Right · 01/11/2026 · 53m

This wasn’t an easy one to record: on the murder of Renee Nicole Good, Gestapo comparisons, and the gendered dimensions of both the murder and the right’s defense of it podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

The fact I am enjoying Ducks, Newburyport, the fact holy-moly is it long, Faulkner's like enough already, Faulkner if lived on North Shore, Benji's whole chapter just on fried oysters...

Carol from Pluribus getting the Heisman/ostrakon over voicemail

"Hi Carol. Our feelings for you poets haven't changed, the republic just needs a little space." #philsky

The day they introduce ethics into what we do, they might as well shut us down.

— Slow Horses S2, E3

Are you a student passionate about computing research? Spend your summer with the CRA-WP DREU program. Don’t wait - learn more and apply today: https://cra.org/cra-wp/dreu/

Would have been great for author to have talked to some folks in the human-robot interaction field, or even "robot ethics" (one of whose papers is literally about morality of kicking them). I get the pleasure of vibing out with Sumerian myth and one's own feel for problems, but still.

‘Death remains my intimate shadow partner. It has been with me since birth, always hovering close by. I understand one day we will finally waltz together into the ether. I hope when that time comes, I die with the satisfaction of a life well-lived, unapologetic, joyful, & full of love.’
—Alice Wong