David Porter

In case you missed it, Kerry Brown wrote a book that plagiarized Shelley Rigger’s classic book title.

I, along with others who were asked to review Kerry’s manuscript, said verbatim to change the title.

In the most tacky and unprofessional fashion, he stole her title anyway.

The equal field system - Communism!

I have to now be uncharacteristically sincere and say that I was actually very impressed by the Canadian citizenship ceremony, especially the genuine effort to incorporate indigenous perspectives/traditions and that I am very pleased to now be a Canadian

For those who know the backstory, it would be more amusing to say that it's an oath to a British king named Charles, but I maintain that I am not swearing an oath to a British king, but to a king of Canada and that this distinction is both real and important

Those who knew me at a certain earlier stage of my life will be pretty amused to learn that this afternoon I will be voluntarily swearing an oath of allegiance to a monarch (and specifically to a king named Charles).

To be fair, a writing-intensive class with 225 students has always been impossible to teach well, unless you have multiple TAs and immense confidence in their teaching abilities (hard when they're often grad students teaching for the first time ever)

An LLM-produced essay is tangible proof that a student doesn’t care, and yet responding to it properly requires hour upon hour of careful work. It’s asymmetrical and overwhelming.

Would have to limit yourself to a pretty narrow range of hotels too

Chaos is when your partner reshelves a Wade Giles-romanized Lu Xun translation under H

Incidentally, many of these are terrific places to eat regional cuisine (the lobbies, which are linked to hotels/restaurants, not the detention systems).

Congrats Hannah!

This is happening!!!! December 2: just in time for Christmas present season. I am still in the anxiety stage, not yet in the Saoirse Ronan as Jo March watching her book get published scene-stage, but I'm glad other people are excited already!

A Post-Literate Society is a Too-Literal Society Directness is a virtue and subtlety is lost

I think Paul, of blessed posting memory, is entirely right here, and I say this *even though* the young people I know remain highly literate and engaged, because I think his sample is way more representative than mine.

musgrave.substack.com/p/a-post-lit...

The basic structure of so much commentary, some in the guise of academic study, reduces to:

(1) generative AI products are detrimental to the goals of education

(2) therefore, the goals of education must change.

Without the tacit axiom that AI has authority behind it, that just doesn’t follow.

I didn't create the error in the book's publisher, which should say Harvard University Asia Center, not Cambridge University Press, but I must confess to failing to catch it in copy-editing/proofs.

Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China. By Lawrence Zhang. Cambridge University Press, 2023, 328 pp. $59.95. Click on the article title to read more.

My review of @historianzhang.bsky.social's excellent Power for a Price is officially out in @hisjournalha.bsky.social onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Mais pour les étudiants à la maîtrise et surtout pour les doctorants, il est impossible d'avoir une université de classe mondiale sans accueillir un grand nombre d'étudiants venus de l'international.

Lorsqu'on parle d'étudiants universitaires, on pense souvent aux étudiants de premier cycle. Et oui, plafonner le nombre d'étudiants étrangers de premier cycle peut fonctionner (malgré certaines conséquences financières)

Comment détruire le réseau des universités de recherche du Québec le plus rapidement possible.

Wow, what a nightmare - I can see this becoming a big problem for those of us in Canada who work in fields where local library resources aren't great. Of course at the moment it doesn't matter for Canadians because the Canada Post strike has killed all ILL entirely anyway

This is an extremely important point, but I would be more sympathetic to Nous if it seemed like they were actually convincing administrators of this fact

Exactly! Now they'd just modify the headline when the results make clear it's wrong

Current headline practices are going to be such a pain in the ass to deal with for future historians

Sorry to the author, but I think refusing to provide physical review copies is ridiculous (and also makes it harder for me to read a book as intensively as is necessary to write a good review)

I'm making a highly principled stand on a matter of relatively small import and refusing to write a book review of a book whose press won't send me a hard copy.

Yeah, looking at Confucius in non-Confucian texts sounds like a lot of fun. Could throw in Zhuangzi too

A) I would not assume I know it better than you. B) I'm doing the film not the novel

That section will be taught by me personally and will be way more work, but students should also learn way more. Interesting question as to how many students will opt in to that - but I'm hoping it means that policing the scourge of AI will not deny learning opportunities to those who want them

Strategy for dealing with AI in my giant intro class next term, while not completely giving up on my desire to actually teach skills: students are evaluated entirely by in-class exams, except that there will be a small optional writing intensive section for anyone who actually wants to learn