Scott Selisker

!! And got the moves!!

I enjoyed learning Ric Ocasek of the Cars produced that first album, to a click track, and said of it, sometimes perfect time is a hook by itself…

Find a Chapter A list of AAUP chapters, both unionized and nonunionized. (You can also see a list of just union chapters.)

AAUP holds a day of action this Friday Oct 17

nationwide teach in against the loyalty oaths us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

the original 9 persecuted campuses have in-person events

find your chapter www.aaup.org/chapters/fin...

Federal agents invaded even the offices of The Crisis and the National Association for the advancement of colored people and asked searching questions: " just what, after all, were our objects and activities?” I took great satisfaction in being able to sit back in my chair and answer blandly, “We are seeking to have the constitution of the United states thoroughly and completely enforced.” It took some ingenuity, even for Southerners, to make treason out of that.

How W. E. B. Du Bois responded to government policing of "anti-American" sentiment during the 1910s:

"I took great satisfaction in being able to sit back in my chair and answer blandly, 'We are seeking to have the Constitution of the United States thoroughly and completely enforced.' ”

Looks like nobody's said On Beauty or White Noise yet?

Disagree! Looking forward to rereading upon imminent audiobook release! I will, alas, probably never teach it or Lightning Rods, but I think about both all the time. (Along with Some Trick's "On the Town.")

crafting an administrative turducken: reporting on the reports to be reported inside a larger, meatier report

Larsen’s Passing and Evan’s Black Box might be good complements?

Screenshot from statement “Universities and colleges have one mission: to advance knowledge. Faculty carry out the mission by conducting research and teaching students. The knowledge they produce and circulate is independently assessed by professional peers. Interfering with that process by forcing knowledge to pass through a political filter is a tactic adopted by the Soviet Union and other authoritarian states. The White House is dressing up its compact as a reasonable corrective to what it views as problems in campus culture. Let no one be deceived. This proposal imposes government censorship on academia. It is anti-American, and it weakens our democracy by devaluing academic expertise.”

ACLS statement against White House “compact”: THIS IS SOVIET SHIT

For sale: Skeleton with disfigured toe

Excellent analyses that go beyond a lot of the media coverage of the Compact I’ve seen. Esp good on the glaring absence of a carrot here, and on the significance of the range of medium-to-soft targets…

this great point about the social character of knowledge —how knowing real things relies on others signaling when you’re wrong—is another way of highlighting the political importance of social shame. It also clarifies the fundamental nihilism of the AI-industrial complex

Opinion | Trump’s ‘Compact’ With Universities Is Just Extortion

“This is extortion, plain and simple.

It is not hyperbole to say that the future of higher education.. requires that every university reject it…The only solution is solidarity and collective action against this effort at federal control over higher education.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

I picked them up from where the show left off, worked great but means I can’t speak for the early ones.

Recent reading:

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall: amazing experience of reading thinking it was from ~2015, finding out midway it’s from 1963. Evergreen Robinsonade Mood

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud: Another first-rate encounter study

Martha Wells, Murderbot: my students’ comfort reading, I so get it.

Recent reading: Mick Herron’s Slow Horses books, smack between Dickens and Le Carré, silly at times but still a sustained meditation on failure, hopelessness, dysfunction, delusion, incompetent leadership, corruption, decline etc for These Times.

The short *spy novellas* are lovely studies in mood.

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

Amazing, congrats!!

And I thought it was just middle aged me bumpin Strategy after dropoff…

I bet!—I’m most interested that MM seems a little less informed and constructs this as his fantasy of a better AI (I haven’t really looked at any of the small or open models personally)

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete Illustration: Marian Bantjes “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmologi...

I genuinely think so much of our present pass is crystallized in the idea/hope that big data is the "end of theory." Similarly, Cass Sunstein on "infotopia" (and really his whole deal). Such a thirst for circumventing the social and politics as such. www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-t...

Totally

Still thinking about this, the idea of bespoke, custom, single-use text or code as the source of LLM appeal… McConaughey’s weird fantasy of his own LLM seems right in line with it…

This also reminds me of (I was pretty sure it was your post, bsky search not cooperating) the widespread assumption that bespoke, disposable text made just for you is a reasonable or good thing to want…

How Translations Sell: Three U.S. Eras of International Bestsellers - Public Books A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it.

Big essay out by @sdileonardi.bsky.social in @publicbooks.bsky.social today, drawing on 100 years of translations and bestseller data to show that the US has seen three waves of translation: European; Latin American Boom; Nordic Noir. And what this means for us.
www.publicbooks.org/how-translat...

@thisishannahkim.bsky.social is on here too. Looks like a cool symposium!

submitted revised book manuscript, joined AAUP (already proud UCW local), purchased vocoder, an excellent labor day.

“I was thinking you might marry … me. If you’ll have me.” YESSS (indelible scene in both versions, but also my yes to Mark Rylance)

Fair play tho! “His only friend in exile turned out to be the real spy, to the extent there even was a spy” was a true thrill ride

I like how Buzzfeed-coded this endorsement is (“You won’t believe number 17”), guess I’d better click!