Gabriel Hankins

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

As a professional military strategist, I just wanted to make sure everyone has a full understanding of the American strategy in Iran, thank you for your attention to this matter

Why is everything possibly better in that font

Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran has no mandate – or legal basis US president violates UN charter just days into his Board of Peace era, and chooses to take the biggest gamble of his administration

"Over [the] half century, Iran has arguably never posed less of a threat than now" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

An excellent piece throughout

The first war of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace era has begun – an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict, and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public.

What an opening passage!

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Cool essay about how designed environments shape our cognitive practices, especially in libraries, which the author calls "a gymnasium for attention"

On Life Support--cover with cutaway image of a section of a ringed space station, showing buildings, greenery, and people. Title type in star-filled letters above--next to The Inattention Economy--cover with title in white on black background, upper left. Subtitle and author in oval fields among colored circles and eyes that take up most of lower right.

So many great books (w/fantastic covers) coming out this spring. I'm thrilled to see Matthew I Thompson's @quickpickles.bsky.social On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s & Lisa Nakamura's @lnakamura.bsky.social The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet!

"The biographer is a kind of scavenger, who lives with corpses and finds pleasure in devouring them...Any biography seen as a story has a philosophy of history implicit in the sense of a succession of historical events. But what if life had no meaning, in both senses of significance and direction?"

Early in the day for this one! Even worse, what if one life in isolation has no meaning

Jennifer Scappettone's Poetry After Barbarism Tickets | Free | 1 Mar @ 2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles | DICE The Poetic Research Bureau presents a reading for Jennifer Scappettone's new book *Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance...

This Sunday (3/1) at 5 pm, The Poetic Research Bureau presents a reading for Jennifer Scappettone's new book POETRY AFTER BARBARISM: THE INVENTION OF MOTHERLESS TONGUES & RESISTANCE TO FASCISM at 2200 Arts & Archives in LA. bit.ly/4rzVNnd @xenoglossic.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social

@tedunderwood.com posted a version of this? It seems like acceleration is coming whether or not the left plans for it

Another excellent MLA 2027 guaranteed session for which I will help evaluate abstracts: "Postcolonial Indigenous Ecocriticism in the Global Anglophone." 200 word abstracts. Deadline: 3/15.

More info here: mla.confex.com/mla/2027/web...

Please share!

Birria and kimchi ramen with dill

When all else fails make a birria + kimchi ramen

"In my meditations I had a sense something ominous was coming": to be fair, absolutely accurate

The Enclosures of Free Verse Throughout the twentieth century, scholars accepted that there was something called “traditional” poetic meter, and that free verse liberated poets from ...

In honor of the publication day of The Enclosures of Free Verse (uncpress.org/978146969306...), here's a little thread about what the book does and does not offer.

$ALT economies of the word!

Amazing throwback, thank you

So... not all bad!

Precisely why we drafted this on behalf of @modernlanguage.bsky.social. Ed tech providers (like Canvas) need to take the lead in cutting this off at the knees. Professional organizations and our institutions can’t do it themselves. cc @annamillsoer.bsky.social www.mla.org/Resources/Ad...

Interesting move to semantic space here that recalls an earlier moment in spatial semiotics after Greimas

Vector Theory Understanding digital media, technology, theory, culture and society.

Vector Theory

An extract from a new book I am writing

stunlaw.blogspot.com/2026/02/vect...

Seems fine!

vmfunc.re/blog/persona/

Why One AI Administrator Is Skeptical of AI Matthew Connelly, a vice dean for AI initiatives at Columbia University, has been using machine learning for 15 years. But as more students have turned to generative AI over the past few years, he’s n...

This all seems correct but self-exculpatory: where is the "we should build open / non-plagiarizing models that don't monetize or compromise student information?" At the end of the day Columbia seems largely on the path of its less critical peers www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Yes I agree, it's a serviceable name for a number of forms.

Ted Chiang’s shirt fic on parrots is basically this too

But “book” clearly means so many things in 2026.