PVermeulen

Mircea Cărtărescu’s Interview for De Standaard: On Theodoros, Giorgio de Chirico, Surrealism, writing methods, literary fame, ambition, tyranny, and his work in progress Photo: C.Stadler/Bwag I am honoured again to publish on The Untranslated an interview with Mircea Cărtărescu. Like the previous time, the interview was conducted by my Belgian friends Emiel Roothoo…

Mircea Cărtărescu’s Interview for De Standaard: On Theodoros, Giorgio de Chirico, Surrealism, writing methods, literary fame, ambition, tyranny, and his work in progress

theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2025/10/09/m...

My take, which I’ve banged on about before, concerning the state of young people reading these days is that reading is a rhythm. It’s like a mix of slow breathing and being pleasurably bored. We need to bring back spaces and times where our young people can breath and think and get lost in a world.

Man, I'm sorry, but reading all these AI generated essays from students, it just sucks all the joy out of everything. It's exhausting, makes you into a weird paranoid cop, grinds you down, wastes your time, makes you feel like shit about everything.

Fuck this shit technology and all its enablers.

Door te begrijpen hoe #pijn in het zenuwstelsel ontstaat, kunnen we betere strategieën ontwikkelen om #chronischepijn te verlichten.

Prof. Iris Coppieters (VUB, KU Leuven, Universiteit Maastricht) legt uit waarom #pijneducatie cruciaal is.

🔗 www.tijdschriftkarakter.be/chronische-p...

Amateur view. AI bubble shows that there is too much money chasing too few opportunities for genuine innovation. The solution is to take a medium/long view and put much more funding into basic science in universities rather than cutting as is happening now. (But I would say that wouldn’t I?)

Cover art for JBR Vol 11, featuring James Baldwin's US passport. courtesy of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

James Baldwin Review (JBR) is proud to announce the publication of its eleventh volume with thanks to the extraordinary collaborative vision of three European guest editors: Remo Verdickt, Pieter Vermeulen, and Gianna Zocco.
#JamesBaldwin

www.manchesterhive.com/view/journal...

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

Ik kan je verzekeren dat 'lekker discussiëren' met collega's aan de universiteit vele malen 'onveiliger' is dan zoals Waling elke week een EW-stukje tikken voor gelijkgestemden. De conservatieve-commentator-pijplijn is gevuld met gefaalde academici die échte intellectuele kritiek te gemeen vinden.

If a college or university pledged to eliminate not only AI but screens from campus, outside dedicated labs, I would want very badly to teach there.

Filip Brusselmans in Terzake, Fabrizio bij Peter van de Veire, nu dit: ik weet niet waar de openbare omroep met Vlaanderen heen wil, maar ik ben er precies liever niet bij als ze daar aankomt

I’m sorry but let me unbury this lede: *the genAI industry is literally the financial engine that is powering the fascist regime in the United States*

I hadn’t even made this connection and now I’m even more horrified by this tech than I have ever been.

Boosterism == fascism, literally

I think more than anything else AI feels like a miracle to people with questionable literacy because it can read and write for you, and a lot of us who are highly literate underestimate how many of our society's leaders, esp in business, struggle with literacy.

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

Public Events on Memory & Responsibility

🌍 Roundtable: Practising Memory in Times of Crisis — Amani El Haddad, Manoeuvre vzw, Pieter Lagrou, Ann Rigney & Michael Rothberg
🎓 Keynotes: Carlos Fonseca · Sara Dybris McQuaid · Hanna Meretoja

Info and registration: event.ugent.be/registration...

as hard as it is to imagine political solutions to the current moment, it’s even harder to imagine how we could be expected to comfortably share a society with these fucking babykillers

Accessible and expanding archive of resources tailored for teachers who are trying to explain and engender AI skepticism, create AI-free classrooms and curricula, & think with other scholars and educators who are doing the same.

Europeans have come to detest immigrants and can no longer explain why in any rational fashion. Islamist terrorism has declined to nearly nothing. Crime is low. Immigrants have jobs and so do locals. Only remaining one is blaming them for the housing shortage which is gibberish

Forget the comparisons to Hitler or Mao, the allusions to Orwell or Huxley, we are headed into new levels of distortion and deception fueled by a narcissistic ego and a collapsing empire, made possible by new technologies of fabrication and hallucination

So-called «artificial intelligence» is essentially an explication machine, rendering explicit not only latent patterns in masses of data, but also fascist tendencies in liberal democracies as well as the exploitative, extractivist, and ultimately destructive business models of platform capitalism
1/

I don't have a great answer on what this looks like or how to do this but it's pretty clear people want a job market that translates "work hard and do the right thing" into "stable middle class lifestyle" without engaging in a risky gamble about predicting the sectoral labor market 20 years from now

my job is just review

Life of an ordinary older academic

Backlash to AI is coming and honestly we might actually save the English major by just advertising it with: Write with your human brain. No bots allowed.”

A head-and-shoulders shot of a 30-something white man with hair medium on top and short on the sides and swept back, presumably with a gel assist. He wears a white dress shirt and a dark tie with an ensemble of a dark sweater vest and dark suit jacket or sportcoat. The overall effect is traditional, somewhere between a preppy '80s movie villain and a character in American Psycho.

A fifty-something man stands in front of a colorful tech-talk background. His hair is styled to make him resemble a hairless crested dog, with a greasy-looking topknot and close-shaven sides, and he has a short beard. He wears a gray heathered sweater vest over a tight olive T-shirt and charcoal technical-fabric slacks, a violently clashing assemblage of neutrals. His skin is tight and glistening a la Peter Thiel. A pinkish-toned blob of microphone floats on an almost invisible wire by his mouth.

Googled the Princeton-legacy Princeton professor who wrote that bad piece about generative AI in the New Yorker to try to figure out what his deal is and this 2001/2025 before-and-after makes for a real capsule history of the 21st century so far

Computers used to scream every time they connected to the Internet. They knew. They tried to warn us. We did not listen.

Dus als Iran terugslaat - wat het het recht heeft om te doen - zou de hele NAVO betrokken worden? En voor dat soort fascistische oorlogszucht zouden we 5% bbp moeten besteden? Zijn we collectief gek geworden?

The way nobody can drive well anymore because of GPS — not just atrophied turn-by-turn navigation, but the way ppl no longer know the layouts of their town or the names of roads or what to do when the map doesn’t match the terrain — that’s what genAI is doing to communication skills and literacy

Funniest detail to me re: Thom Yorke's weird relationship to Israel is that it's the first place Creep really took off so Israel kinda launched Radiohead's career. Israeli music fans could not get enough of a song that asks "what the hell am I doing here" and answers with "I don't belong here."