Matt Seybold

It's great to see a news outlet talking with serious people in the humanities grappling with this pox. Thank you, @alicesperi.bsky.social. 🙏🏼

Critical thinking is under serious threat from large language models/AI. Uni administrators are too prone to accept tech hype! (plus it can be wrong, steals IP, has devasting environment/energy impacts). @jessicacalarco.com made a great one-pager I share with students (plus effective model of comms)

Somewhat spookily, Dora and I said eerily similar things in hushed voices when seated next to each other at a conference dinner three weeks ago.

EDITORIAL | Avoid the Institutionalization of AI Georgetown University professors could very well begin to see the phrases “indelible mark” and “valuable insight” a lot more often. With artificial intelligence (AI) constantly in the news…

GU Students:

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

Excellent piece in @theguardian.com featuring @mattseybold.bsky.social, @dorazhang.bsky.social and others (including a shoutout to against-a-i.com) on AI in the humanities classroom.

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

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...

Okay, NOW boycott he New York Times

2026 Symposium “Black Childhood and Children’s Literature in the Nineteenth Century” Visit the post for more.

More info here & to follow:

The Quarry Farm Fall Symposium is my favorite event on our annual calendar & this year’s, organized by @brigfield.bsky.social, is gonna be a doozy.

I did. It’s pretty weak sauce. Not really committed to historicism or presentism. Trying to find a Great Man where there clearly is none.

The lines that are being drawn here are around a binary in which the future of education is either:

a.) Christian nationalist indoctrination with books

or

b.) Christian nationalist indoctrination with chatbots

There is no third way coming from the conservatives or establishment liberals.

NYT article “How ICE Plans to Put 8,500 Immigrants in This Warehouse,” with the comment “Experts say the initial designs raise health, safety and security concerns.” The image is a vertical floorplan with pods tightly packed that resembles diagrams of slave ships in abolitionist literature from the 18th century

The person who made this image is well versed in the iconography of the transatlantic slave trade.

Bucki, iOSU

Read your great American novels and STFU, fake intellectual narcissists for hire.

Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era

y'all !!!!

I love that the blurbs are basically like, "listen, she is never not telling you about some bleak shit" 😍❤️‍🔥 (thank you @aarthivadde.bsky.social and @markmcgurl.bsky.social)

"legendary gift for laying out the painful truths of literary life"

love it

The most hopeful way to see this (and TJ is obviously correct in his characterization of the present) is that to best leverage the spoils system there may need to be a more distributed party organization, and this could be a (mild) threat to executive power.

"A visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior adviser at the Marathon Initiative."

You really can't compete with that.

When the grand strategy is going this well, its architects have time to complain about the line at Starbuck.

The icy stillness of establishment Dems as this has unfolded is no accident. The spoils system will help them fend off reformism within the party.

What we are recreating, BEST CASE SCENARIO, is a machine of expanding nepotism, graft, corruption, incompetence, waste, injustice, and hyper-partisanship which will endure for at least a generation.

Best. Case. Scenario.

If you don't spend lots of time reading in & about C19 US, you probably underestimate how destructive the spoils system was, how much it contributed to extension of slavery, to failure of Reconstruction, to Gilded Age inequality, to infrastructure mismanagement, to financial bubbles, to imperialism.

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.

🧵

I can't compete with this.

Highly readable review of what promises to be one of the most "urgent" books of the year.

It is certainly true that if there were a multi-billion dollar market for books about like hunting, dressing, and banquet-style serving mystical beasts, women would just be like, "THANK GOD MEN ARE READING SOMETHING!"

So grateful for this thoughtful, generous review: "Those of us who care about what books can do should consider what these contributors have to tell us."

I haven't looked it up yet, but apparently stars Steve Carell.

Wife: Did you see there's another academic show on HBO?

Me: No, but I bet its about cancel culture and professors being unprofessional. They all are.

Wife: It's probably stupid. Nothing about what you do is funny.

Me: HEY!

please remember