Chris Fosen

Ned Ludd Did Nothing Wrong

Amazing. Let’s give over security and financial decisions to this flawless tech. 🤨💻

More Than Words A veteran writing teacher makes a “moving” (Rick Wormeli) argument that writing is a form of thinking and feeling and shows why it can’t be replaced by...

My philosophy for getting students writing is that writing needs to be a desirable alternative to outsourcing to the automated syntax generation machine. There's lots of hurdles to clear, but the start is to convey that writing is about more than words. www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-...

Didn’t want to believe this was true. It’s true.

One of the biggest obstacles faced by my first-gen students is a fear of writing. Fear that they'll be called stupid or wrong. Fear that they won't use "smart" words. Instead of working through that fear, LLMs give them a way to never confront it, never overcome it, never learn. I hate it so much

Michael Warner's take on polling in The Mass Public and Mass Subject remains vital: its not that its telling you nothing, but if you're treating it like a scientific piece of information all the way down the line its a big problem

I’m trying to think of a pointless, badly-motivated, ignorant, contemptible and tragic rejection of a demonstrated public health advance with the same promise and on the same scale as RFK Jr’s mRNA vaccine decision. It’s hard.

Hello. The president's continued insistence that the BLS numbers are rigged, political, or otherwise manipulated is a lie. Please stop saying 'baseless claim.' Thank you.

Our flâneur president is exploring the psychogeography of the White House in the context of its urban environment but go off

World Cup 2026 amirite?

Thread. People need to understand the damage that is being done.

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

you know the world is ending when Summers is supporting a woman in STEM

Me in the 80s and 90s, saying 1, 2, or 3 instead of “Potomac”

[quoting a tweet by fractalcounty that reads, “today I learned that there are actual people irl who get genuinely upset if they catch you using chatgpt. like they view it as a serious moral failing in certain circles”]

If you're using AI to write essays, eulogies, a text to your wife, I do think less of you as a person. Ceding your mental and creative abilities to a machine is an embarrassing thing and people should be ashamed to admit doing it in public.

In the nineties, I worked for minimum wage and couldn't afford cable. PBS always has something good to watch for everyone. Watching Rick Steves travel show was a highlight for me. Thank you PBS.

We’re destroying public broadcasting, a service that costs less than what we will spend to upgrade a second-hand Qatari party jet for Donald Trump.

In the world of nachos, there is a tremendous gap between those who see it as fundamentally an experience of dipping and those who treat it as a layered dish, equivalent to a biryani or lasagna

Absolutely beautiful obituary for Bill Labov, describing a life rich in insights and in humanity www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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I Embraced AI in My Community College English Class — and My Students Loved It - EdSurge News “If we don’t meet this moment with intention, we will leave our most vulnerable students behind,” writes community college English professor Susan E. ...

I am sorry but this is one of the most tone-deaf and self-congratulatory essays that I have read on the supposed merits of AI in the classroom framed in "no kid left behind" rhetoric. What is described here is an incentivized suite of surveillance & function creep.

www.edsurge.com/news/2025-07...

Amazon review of Pride and Prejudice, left by carlton p morgan on 30 July 2010: "Just a bunch of people going to each other's houses"

Happy 15th anniversary of the peak achievement of literary criticism, to all who celebrate

AI integration initiatives are spearheaded by administrations with little input from faculty members and other campus community members, including staff and students. High levels of concern arose around AI and technology procurement, deployment, and use; dehumanized relations; and poor working and learning conditions. Seventy-one percent of respondents said decision-making and AI initiatives are overwhelmingly led by college or university administrations, and many respondents described administrators exerting great effort to introduce AI into research, teaching, policy, and professional development with little meaning­ful input from faculty members, staff, or students. Examples include the development of institutional AI tools, workshops on teaching and detecting plagia­rism, and subscribing to AI tools for students (such as Grammarly, marketed as an “AI writing partner”) without involving faculty members or students in the decision-making process. One respondent noted that “admin doesn’t seem to care about or value faculty input on this or any other topic” and hoped for “more faculty involvement in determining how AI and tech generally are used.”

The @aaup.org report on AI is so hugely important. Among other key takeaways is the fact that most AI programs have been introduced by administrative fiat and by circumventing meaningful faculty, student, & staff consultation.

shorturl.at/InI5Q

Conservative Org. Requests Materials for 70 Chapel Hill Courses The Oversight Project, founded by the Heritage Foundation, is using an open records request to search for terms like “DEI” and “gender identity.” Faculty say it encroaches on academic freedom.

🚨Conservative Group Requests Materials for Over 70 UNC Courses🚨

“It’s a violation of academic freedom…of individual free speech rights &… teaching…in the name of…a right-wing agenda.”

—Joan Scott, AAUP Committee on Academic Freedom

www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

@unc-ch-aaup.bsky.social

If there is a senior in your family, you have been praying for something like this.

FOR JOHN CLARE Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything—bush and tree—to take the roisterer': mind off his caroling— so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future-the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope— letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier—if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside-costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay. It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because

there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind—and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too-nothing says they aren't to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to-dumb bird. But the others-and they in some way must know too-it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: "No comment." Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

Happy birthday to John Ashbery, whose poetry opened a tiny weird window in me that I’ve never wanted to close again. This is “For John Clare,” my favorite of all of his poems.

Screaming this at the top of my lungs every chance I get this semester

If you were alive in the 1980s, this is among the most wonderful & truly incredible things you have ever witnessed in your lifetime.

You've shown a guy famous for making bad faith claims that you'll cave almost immediately if he threatens your funding, and you think that's the *end* of uncertainty?