Sarah Bull

Also have a new tokenization notebook to go with it, a basic BPE demo with a little in-notebook visualization of the tokenization results. Probably could go into more detail here, but it's a v1 draft delivered just-in-time for today's class. colab.research.google.com/drive/1A1ngb...

Here's the thing: Trump has extracted concessions but he hasn't actually signed significant deals. America, e.g., hasn't obtained new market access for its goods and has actually made its necessary inputs more expensive.

To remedy that, he needs comprehensive trade deals. Here's the problem-

But here’s the deal: There’s no deal to be had. Behind the glad-handing and theatrics, Trump doesn’t even know what he wants. He has found his preferred tool in achieving his grandiose goals — ending the drug crisis, eliminating America’s trade deficits, reviving American manufacturing — and it is tariffs. Don’t like those demands? Don’t worry, he has others: A place to send the people he’s deporting, free capital to invest in American manufacturing, or unrivaled access to rare earth minerals. Exactly what Canada is supposed to do to escape tariffs remains murky as ever. We’re not the only ones. Trump’s conspiratorial trade adviser Peter Navarro once promised to sign “90 deals in 90 days.” The administration’s biggest deal has been with China — and it’s a loser. The deal reduces, but doesn’t drop, American tariffs on China in exchange for more critical minerals from Beijing. This is Trump’s version of a win-win: He gets concessions, but gets to keep the tariffs.

Trump is posting on Truth Social that he's terminating negotiations with Canada over a "fake" ad criticizing tariffs (that was run by Ontario, and which isn't fake.)

It's all theatre. There was never a deal to be gotten. Trump just wants to claim victory. #giftlink www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Just walking around and muttering “the utter state of things” all day.

Totally — they would be incredible for all kinds of assistive use :(

Maybe I'm wrong! But even if they're not distracting to the user or creepy to people they talk to, a device you wear on your face is historically a hard sell.

The glasses industry has tried to make glasses a fashion item for years, with relatively little success. People wear them because they have to! Except for assistive use cases, I don't see bulky glasses that a) seem like a major distraction hazard, and b) have creepy uses catching on.

This is totally fascinating!

Why was the British women’s suffrage movement more violent than the American one? This post is an edited version of a talk I gave at the VISAWUS conference at St. Louis University on October 3, 2025. It’s more of a straight-up take on Victorian history than I usually post here, …

I put my VISAWUS talk about suffragette violence up on my blog -- in an attempt to answer the question "Why was the British women's suffrage movement more violent than the American one?" eleanorcourtemanche.wordpress.com/2025/10/23/w...

everything's coming up heist

oh indeed

interccect.com/2025/09/26/w...

Someone in computational humanities needs to write a paper about the premise of style/content separation. We've got whole subfields (like "stylometry") that seem to promise you can achieve it, and my sense is that there's a lot of quiet skepticism that hasn't crystallized in explicit statement. +

I feel like this needs re-upping.

I'm at "you know, it's not too late for you to get braces!"

Joke's on them — I HAD braces. Yup.

And here's the site he very kindly posted it on. I use a more typical grading scheme than Ryan does — if you'd like my version/the rubric I made for it, feel free to email/DM for it.

against-a-i.com/assignment-i...

Commonplace Book An English Seminar at UIUC, Spring 2025

s25bbb.ryancordell.org/pages/assign...

I wasn't sure how it would pan out, but it looks like they're having fun! Some of the students anticipate what their clubmates will think of the readings in their commonplace books, which I didn't expect and love. "I'll bet X will see it a different way, but..."

‘How do I really want to be as a man?’ Masculinities, critical consciousness, and contraceptive decision-making – findings from an interview study in Germany This paper examines how men in Germany reflect on (their) masculinities in the context of contraception and family planning. Through twelve qualitative interviews, three of which were couple interv...

Do men rely only on women to prevent pregnancies? How do masculinities, critical consciousness, and contraception intersect? Our project's final paper is part of this month's issue of Culture, Health, and Sexuality. Check it out here:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

@tandfresearch.bsky.social

Youngest made a very cool model hurricane.

Social media was invented for this sort of thing:

The Chevalier d'Eon, the Man-Woman, from the frontispiece to The Mysteries of Sex : Women Who posed as Men and Men Who Impersonated Women by C. J. S. Thompson (1938). Available on the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/...

required course next semester.

For the larger class I have a "reading club" time every class where they share their commonplace books with 2-3 other students and talk about the reading before we do a whole-class discussion, which also seems to reinforce it. That said, both my classes are electives. Will see if it works with a +

I've been doing versions of @ryancordell.org's commonplace book assignment (posted on @annakornbluh.bsky.social's Against AI site) and it's been working really well and is fun to grade. I did notice that a number of students who were perhaps not planning on reading dropped the course quite quickly.

In the metal-type era, the way European punchcutters tracked the flow of straight lines, curves, ascenders, and descenders is strikingly similar to Chinese calligraphy’s sense of structure and strokes, so called 间架结构.

Antwerpse boekenwinkel brengt Tiktok-lezers samen: “Veel lezers voelen zich niet gezien in traditionele boekhandels” Met Purple Petals is Antwerpen een boekenwinkel rijker. Uniek is dat die zich uitsluitend richt op de populaire Tiktok-gemeenschap van boekenliefhebbers. “Er was echt een gemis aan dit soort aanbod in België.”

New bookstore opens in Antwerp, focusing on #Romantasy and the #BookTok community #BookHistory

www.standaard.be/media-en-cul...

OMG

There’s nothing I love more than learning a material culture origin to a common word/phrase—little linguistic skeuomorphs—so just imagine my delight reading about the "tapered or wedge-shaped bars" that added spaces into linotype text

literal SPACE BARS y’all! babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=um...

Friends in academia, especially those with admin experience! Other than hires, what "big asks" have you proposed for your units in the past when it looks like there might be an opening from higher admin?

A picture of me holding Geoffrey Bilder's festschrift in a print copy. I have a goofy smile.

Creating this festschrift reminded me of a basic truth: you can do something nice for someone whenever you want. Don't wait until people are dead to praise them. Don't hold out for someone else to do it. Nominate people for prizes. Write someone a note of appreciation. Today's the day.

You cannot have a ‘university’ that isn’t wide-ranging and generalist. The whole point of a university is exactly that.