Helen Rottier

We studied history thinking it would stay history 😭

I am trying to remind myself that it feels like my entire syllabus and system of course management are completely collapsing around this point in EVERY semester* as a consequence of, well, the time of the semester, and I am not, in fact, completely failing at my job.

Actually yes I am saying that you shouldn’t dehumanize anyone

No exceptions to the rule

🤷🏽‍♀️

I worked at a clinic in Minnesota. When I said that blue collar workers got REALLY crabby at this time of year, they looked at me like it was a useless comment. They can’t get back to work. The can’t ice fish. They can’t golf. They can’t get back to league baseball. They get VERY crabby.

Octavia E. Butler said, “When you have nothing to say, don’t worry. Simply say nothing.”

Elite Doctors Served Jeffrey Epstein While Treating His ‘Girls’

NEW: I and colleagues reviewed 15,000 documents to illuminate how Jeffrey Epstein used VIP doctors to control and manipulate young women* — and how the doctors helped him, treating his needs as more important than the patients'. Gift link.

*see next post in thread

I‘m in the sandwich generation: I serve as tech support for both my gen-z students and my octogenarian parents (thank you, David, for your service)

Like culture posts on this app simply don’t get the engagement and I think it’s because people feel it’s frivolous and actually it’s the thing we are fighting for, the freedom to make culture and cultural works

I am becoming an angry person. I don’t want to be an angry person, so I am particularly angry at people for making me an angry person

It's exhausting living through an entire verse of "We Didn't Start the Fire" every day.

I am thinking a lot about the idea of the art of the well-crafted question that directs & opens up — both as a teacher and in games — because I spent this last week keenly aware of the magic of that specific mechanic.

Aligned w/ TTRPGs as a kind of invested conversation, a way of looking-closely.

I’ve been wrapping myself in something Alice told me (and many of us) - that the next small thing we can do to change the world is worthwhile. The next small thing. For all of them.

We have to survive to meet the day of victory, or else all our people who have died died in vain. OBVIOUSLY MORE COMPLICATED but that's part of it.

I'm not going to quote post because I don't want to dog pile.

But when people say, "don't heckle the staff," this isn't 2010.

We're not talking about normal people choosing normal govt staffing jobs.

This is 2026 where we're kidnapping foreign officials and building concentration camps.

I talked to college students and a big chunk of this conversation centered on how white people are uncomfortable being uncomfortable but I don't know what to tell you.

POC live in fucking discomfort and like in my early 30s I made a pledge to spread that discomfort around.

My phone autocomplete offered CREAM after I typed ICE and man, wouldn't it be amazing if that's what I was talking about? 🍦

the thing about running my own work day and business is that i work really weird hours so that i can do art and the other things that i actually want to do

i recently told my therapist that i finally found the balance between art, reading and friends and it involves not having a job

Folks, it does not matter how much you teach critical thinking or information literacy, if your students don’t have a solid base of actual knowledge it doesn’t matter at all.

A smartphone and internet access is not a substitute for actually knowing things. That was true when Google worked.

And not to be histrionic, but the book that the article is discussing (Picky, by Helen Zoe Veit) is a classic example of survivors bias and will absolutely do damage to folks with ARFID, food aversions, and the neurodivergent.

All this, plus people with food aversions have existed throughout human history and simply died in childhood because of an inability to meet their needs. It still happens.

When a company in an industry built on hype tells you that a use case is a bad idea—and actually dangerous—that means it’s a *catastrophically* bad idea.

guy with a lab coat? No thanks

guy with a technicolor dreamcoat? Hell yes

peer reviews? no thanks. how about weird reviews

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.

I have made peace with the typo in my post. It is not tormenting me with each repost and comment. I am not haunted by it. I can rise above the shame.

A broader takeaway I think is nobody should be allowed to be so rich that being told no, or being held accountable, represents such a moral injury to that person's psyche that they feel like their only recourse is to burn the world down.

Nightmare—this is the inevitable outcome of attacking vaccines and building a system predicated on the denial of preventative care.

Even though I wasn't a fan of how Season 4 began, I ended up enjoying the season way more than I thought. Rob Rausch actually saved the season. #TheTraitorsUS

This is a frame that people really like about a certain kind of conservative woman (always white)
- she is nice
- she is a problem solver
- she has a conscience (but always follows The Rules)
- she softens and sells cruelty as safety
- she talks "tough" using household language

And yet this violence towards disabled people (especially disabled people of color) is a part of the very foundations of what the US is and always has been.
Violence that is only ever exacerbated when it is disabled poc immigrants.
Three intertwined axes for hatred and violence.