@erinbartram.bsky.social
Historian of religion & gender in the 19th c US, drinker of tea in the 21st c US. Museum educator at MTH&M. Wrote some quit lit you may have read. Founder & editor at contingentmagazine.org. Former academic. Sings with Voices of Concinnity. She/her.
An excellent piece, and a good reminder of something my coworkers and I were talking about the other day: many of the things we're talking about are crimes if a person or company does them, actual named crimes, and laundering that criminality through AI shouldn't change that.
In early 2025, someone pointed out that the first Trump cabinet had people whose background was living in/managing material reality, whereas this new cabinet was full of people who thought vibes were reality.
I bet Rex Tillerson knows how important the Strait of Hormuz is.
And where it is.
I am a talking academic. Posting is a form of talking, fight me.
Fun fact: sea mines can be detonated by geomagnetic storms resulting from solar activity
One of my favorite vices. I've got an order arriving on Friday.
I saw this earlier and thought… I need to pass this along.
On the one-year anniversary of his detention by federal authorities, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and First Lady Rama Duwaji welcomed Mahmoud Khalil, his wife Noor, and their baby boy, Deen, to Gracie Mansion to break the fast together.
I don't think I will ever really understand siphonophores and that's okay.
Applications are now open for our summer writing program for #NutmegSky teens. I can't recommend the experience highly enough!
I guess I just want to know what they think this should mean to anyone, but especially me, someone who works in a historic author's home. Are we supposed to close up Mark Twain's house because it turns out writing as an embodied experience informed by time/place/circumstance actually doesn't matter?
THIS is the take on LLMs and the job market. They can probably do some jobs, which will worsen millions of people's lives. But much more than that, people who don't understand your job will assume that it is worthless, even more than they already do.
It's been a bit worrying the extent to which a lot of people seem to assume doing a task at all is doing it well.
The danger to my job from AI isn't that AI can do my job, it's that my job is made even more precarious by the way AI is shaping ideas of the value of work. It can't do my job, but it can be part of convincing people (incorrectly) that my job isn't necessary.
I think it's simultaneously this and the fact that many enthusiasts seem to have a narrow sense of what job tasks are/can look like. There's a lot of "you don't understand what AI can do" coming at some of us and a legitimate response is "you don't understand what I can do, and need to, in my job."
"I hoped to receive soon your answer to my request to draw up a short summary of the American question. Even if we must lose our cause we must maintain its justice and our national honour assailed in every side." Jane to Hal, 3/9/1862, SFP 95:8
For a sense of the kind of work participants do, check out the collaborative's literary journal, which each summer's cohort edits and publishes.
Applications are now open for our summer writing program for #NutmegSky teens. I can't recommend the experience highly enough!
I know it’s a safe space to poast through it but everyone here is already on their last nerve, talk to some people in real life about it!
Sometimes it feels like many of the really important sentiments about our self-authored American decline that are expressed on this site would be more productively offered on other platforms and to a variety of less-online audiences.
this one also hit too close to home
Part of Trump’s mass appeal (and of why he’s so dangerous) is that he really seems to share Joe Barstool’s worldview that there are no complex problems: Everything has a simple brute solution, which previous leaders were somehow too stupid or weak to deploy.
How much of a government can you impeach if you've got the numbers?
Seeing ppl circulate projects whose NEH grants were canceled by DOGE reaffirms my argument about AI as a permission structure. Some grants were canceled w/o a “no” from the generated summary. DOGE had a mandate to slash humanities funding & AI gave them the veneer of a rationale for their actions.
OH I KNOW THAT GUY!
(Also that sounds like the start of a limerick)
And I can point to Lindsay Graham and say "yep, that's how EVERY politician was talking when I was your age"
I'm so excited to finally share the experience of knowing the current price of a barrel of oil with my much-younger coworkers.
Neck beard?
The only silver lining of this horrific surge in energy prices would be if the WH insiders were really too stupid to see this coming and didn't manage to do insider trading/betting about it. I just know they'll be so mad they couldn't make more money on top of raining down death and destruction.
The fact that Kristi Noem was removed and Pete Hegseth was not should tell white women everything they need to know about their relationship to power.
It won’t, but it should.
I have spent the last few weeks marinating in the radical and apocalyptic vibes of mid-19th century American religious activists and weirdos and I gotta say--I sort of see where they're coming from.