Tobias Wilson-Bates

🔥🔥🔥

The Danger of Silence When Academic Freedom Is Under Threat Inaction from rank-and-file workers enabled government censorship during the Red Scares.

You ever write something and there are so many parts you hope people engage with that you can't figure out which ones to quote?

I'll do a wee thread on the 3rd, and final, essay from my Red Scares series

www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

The Squeal Of Peeling Tape, explained

Weak shock waves
triggered
by micro-cracks in the adhesive
layer of tape cause it
to screech when being

unsp o o o led

from its roll.

1. Are you currently using an AI tool for work-related tasks or projects? * Yes * No, but I would like to (PLEASE SKIP TO QUESTION 7)

My employer asks me to complete a survey on AI usage for which this is the first question (required):

And some kind of resource distribution apparatus to incentivize the best work in that discipline

Yep. Corporations defanged the one minuscule sanction consumers have — not choosing their good or service — if they can convince us that expressing dissatisfaction will hurt a worker and not the company. It’s a neat trick.

Well, late career Wordsworth…

Screenshot from the second JJ Abrams “Star Trek” reboot with the new actor playing the villain Khan scowling and declaring “You should have let me sleep.”

Day 2 of Daylight Saving Time:

Love this kind of science. Also “The squeal of peeling tape, explained” feels like the title of a banger poem

somebody i know met the fascist NEH head McDonald at a DC event not long ago &, knowing nothing abt academia or how it works (I do not at all fault for that!), told him about me & my wife’s work and then texted me this. “30k grants for interesting projects” are the gifts he could bestow at parties

The number of authors I’ve heard this from. We live in an era of the real title being the subtitle 😩

This marks the return of the 19th-century "spoils system." It sets a precedent for extremely high turnovers of the federal bureaucracy every election cycle. Assuming a Dem wins in '28, it would be stupid of them not to clean house, which means our century of non-partisan bureaucracy is over.

🧵

There was a TikTok trend about a year ago of Gen Z workers laughing at older customers who ask them questions about stock and such.

Someone explained to them that workers used to…know these things. This started a whole trend of them asking if it were true.

I love “The Psychographic Turn” as a subtitle

I remember watching in the 2010s as the presumption that my students would get Matrix references slowly dwindled

Can you post a link to your book?

bsky.app/profile/gell...

Let me see if I can find it!

Jestergooning orthodoxy

I know this isn’t news to anyone with even an intermediate level of statistics training, but I think about it every time I see popular polls touted as evidence.

Saw a study the other day that described how the wording of polling options can alter poll outputs by +/- 20% which when you think about it really turns pretty much every piece of polling data into a set of preordained outcomes.

From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing Asymptomatic AI Harms for Dignified Human-AI Interaction In the future of work discourse, AI is touted as the ultimate productivity amplifier. Yet, beneath the efficiency gains lie subtle erosions of human expertise and agency. This paper shifts focus from ...

Congrats to @upolehsan.bsky.social and team. Their CHI'26 paper won an Honorable Mention award!

"From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing
Asymptomatic AI Harms for Dignified Human-AI Interaction" (arxiv.org/abs/2601.21920) dives into the AI-as-Amplifier paradox, explained in comic form.

Elizabeth Gaskell: 1851 portrait by George Richmond. A chalk portrait drawing of a Gaskell, shown from the chest up against a plain light background. She has dark hair parted centrally and drawn back smoothly, with loose strands falling at the sides. Her features are delicate and her expression gentle and slightly smiling. She wears a light dress with a dark brooch or bow at the neckline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Gaskell#/media/File:Elizabeth_Gaskell.jpg

Elizabeth Gaskell: The Unsung Author Jane Austen And Brontë Fans Will Love

The Victorian writer had the wit of one, and the friendship of the other.

By Amy Glover

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/read-g...

Gaskell at PG:
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/autho...

#books #literature #womenhistoryMonth

The difference between being too lazy to do it yourself and being too lazy to check that an ai did it right is very small.

So cool!

Short for “All the Best Fuck Yous”

Oliver Twisted, Grave Expectations, Bleak House

Sabrina Carpenter to Star In and Produce Long-shelves Alice in Wonderland Musical Film

Did I miss the memo about the decision to create new adaptations of every major work of Victorian literature???

Whole 🧵