Sari Altschuler

Thank you!

Before Disability – Penn Press

I guess this makes it real! Here's the page for my second book Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship - forthcoming with @pennpress.bsky.social in June 2026.

www.pennpress.org/978151282951...

Looks great!

This may be of interest to #MedicalHumanities folks (& we'd appreciate a repost) @ucdhumanities.bsky.social @tlrhub.bsky.social @oxmedhum.bsky.social @durhamimh.bsky.social @desfitzgerald.bsky.social @sarialtschuler.bsky.social @riacheyne.bsky.social @aryaray.bsky.social @the-polyphony.bsky.social

Remember, everything is part of the same story.

They need to destroy our democracy and crush dissent because letting billionaires take over the government in order to steal from us isn't popular and a functioning democracy wouldn't allow it.

Tyranny requires your fear, your silence, and your compliance.

Democracy requires your courage.

DOGE in practice: Disabled Army veteran who has 4 kids and did 3 tours overseas is fired from his job at Bronx VA hospital

Senator Markey holds a microphone in front of a crowd

Picture of the Treasury Department

Senator Markey holds a microphone in front of a crowd holding resist and we will not be silenced and no one voted for Elon Musk signs

Nobody Elected Musk sign

Tonight we rallied outside the Treasury Department as members of Congress were denied access to the very building where Musk’s minions have been allowed to root around in American’s personal data. No one elected Elon Musk. Dems must vote no on all nominees & fight to stop this.

It’s important to know that a lot of productive activity is happening in person and offline, too.

Not all of it can be broadcast online, but we’ve had hundreds of people showing up to our trainings, mobilizations, and more.

Keep going. Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters.

THIS.

Call your representatives today. They are counting, and it matters.

Jim Acosta announces on air that he's leaving CNN and says, "it is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant ... don't give in to the lies."

Wonderful!! Huge congratulations!

Clinician as editor: notes in the era of AI scribes Every clinician has a strategy. Between patients, before going home, late at night—clinical notes must be written. They are essential for recording patient visits, ensuring continuity of care, arriving at accurate diagnoses, and facilitating communication between doctors, as well as providing medico-legal protection and enabling reimbursement. But these notes are increasingly burdensome to write, thanks in part to the electronic health record (EHR). Artificial intelligence (AI) scribes—computational systems that record clinical encounters and produce narrative summaries—promise much-needed help.

More new work! This one, in the Lancet, about what clinicians can learn from the humanities when confronted with AI scribes, is a collab w/ @sarialtschuler.bsky.social, Ian Huntingdon, and @mariaa.bsky.social. Also, a new area for me. And a 🧵 obvs 1/

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Just because you can go from Boston to NYC and back in the same day doesn’t mean you should.

Featuring @swarthmorecollege.bsky.social and @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social collaborations!

So interesting to think with practicing clinicians (and @sarialtschuler.bsky.social and @mariaa.bsky.social) on how AI scribes are shifting roles and skillsets, and how ideas from the humanities about narrative and editing are what's required

Clinician as editor: notes in the era of AI scribes Every clinician has a strategy. Between patients, before going home, late at night—clinical notes must be written. They are essential for recording patient visits, ensuring continuity of care, arriving at accurate diagnoses, and facilitating communication between doctors, as well as providing medico-legal protection and enabling reimbursement. But these notes are increasingly burdensome to write, thanks in part to the electronic health record (EHR). Artificial intelligence (AI) scribes—computational systems that record clinical encounters and produce narrative summaries—promise much-needed help. Indeed, in many settings, health-care organisations are already adopting this technology. Nevertheless, AI scribes arrive at a moment when the note has already been changing, with legislation increasingly granting patients access to their medical records. Given AI scribes’ promised disruption, it is crucial to consider what clinical notes are and what we want them to be. Both the clinical encounter and the record of it are fundamentally narrative affairs: the clinical encounter unfolds as a story and the note documents that story. Early 19th-century patient records were long, detailed narratives about particular patients and their histories. But these records promise and limitations. became increasingly succinct. Forms replaced paragraphs, and shared terminology replaced personal anecdotes; as historian practice of narrative medicine. John Harley Warner explains, there was a shifting “narrative preference for what was universal and precise over what was This trend continues in notes today with their dispassionate style and specialised terminology, ready to be packaged for health-care coders and billers. A few decades ago, efforts to recentre narrative, especially narrative medicine and narrative-based medicine, emerged to address the depersonalised style of modern medicine exemplified by such notes. So much of medicine i…

biases—particularly troubling given medicine’s ongoing research and care disparities. AI-generated summaries can also hallucinate details, making up disturbing interactions if words or phrases resemble training data patterns and inserting inaccuracies. AI can introduce insensitive, incorrect, offensive, or stereotype-based language, gender misattribu- tion, and even diagnostic errors, a set of problems that will be magnified by automation bias—the bias to accept AI decisions and text as more authoritative than human ones. There are also unique challenges posed by the clinical encounter for AI because of, as machine learning researcher Juan Quiroz and his team put it, the “complex nature of the clinical environment and clinical conversation”. In his experience as a practising clinician who is piloting an AI scribe, one of us (IH) has noticed that AI scribes can miss information from longitudinal clinician–patient relationships and non-verbal communication. They sometimes make speech-to-text transcription errors, confuse the clinician’s story with the patient’s, include details not appropriate to the EHR, use potentially judgemental language, omit important details, add plausible but incorrect information, and overstep their purview, making diagnostic suggestions rather than generating summary. Accents make the speech- to-text transcription less accurate. Most AI scribes today work in limited languages. Some of these issues may improve, but the fundamental problem remains: open notes emphasise notes as interpersonal narrative just as AI scribes seek to automate the task. To counter these risks of automation, clinicians using AI scribes should view their new role as note editor—a transition best supported by training in editorial and narrative skills. Most immediately, seasoned clinicians will need to reduce transcription errors, odd word choices, extraneous details, and disclosures inappropriate for the record as well as adding missed details and often rewriting AI-ge…

So excited to see this collaboration with brilliant colleagues published in the Lancet today!

Here's our discussion of the humanities skills (esp. narrative + editing) healthcare practitioners will need in the age of AI scribes. @iandarin.bsky.social @mariaa.bsky.social @laurenfklein.bsky.social

Some people believe that not voting for Kamala will somehow punish Democratic leadership when it will actually punish abortion seekers, LGBTQ people, immigrants and their families, and, yes, anti-war activists

Really grateful to Hester Blum, Hunt Howell, Paul Kelleher, Ross Knecht, Chris Parsons, Zach Samalin, and Jesse Schwartz for helping me think through the twists and turns along the way.

This is a composite of three images. The top left shows a picture of the cover of PMLA (journal) with an orange flower. The bottom left image is the beginning of the notes section which features the thanks described above. And the right hand image features a hand on the first page with the title "Babo's 'Mute'-ny: Deaf Culture and Black Testimony in Antebellum America" followed by the first few paragraphs, which can be found at the link in the main post text.

Not everything you write feels equally good or important, but I’m really proud of this essay, which is probably the best thing I’ve ever written.

(a little look into the book I'm finishing on disability, race, and citizenship)

www-cambridge-org.ezproxy.neu.edu/core/journal...

Americanist friends, look at this amazing Vietnamese- American Emerson by Tammy Nguyen on display right now at the ICA!

Working on a mappy book? Apply for the The Smith Center First Book Workshop in Map History! It's a two-day, in person workshop at the Newberry Library for 3 book writers to help get some great books in map history published! Apply and learn more: newberry.slideroom.com#/dashboard/p...

Journalism professor’s six-word mantra is a blueprint for how news outlets should cover the 2024 r... NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen implores newsrooms to organize 2024 campaign coverage around the stakes of the presidential contest — not the horse race.

From CNN today: "Journalism professor’s six-word mantra is a blueprint for how news outlets should cover the 2024 race."

Not the odds, but the stakes.

If anyone is wondering what it has been like to live and work at a public university in Florida for the last few years (and why I quit my job), here’s a piece I wrote for the LRB about the DeSantis admin’s war on education: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

@dfontaine.bsky.social!

This is next week!! @sophievasset.bsky.social and I can't wait to host all these brilliant people in Paris @IEAdeParis! (hybrid)

Register here: forms.gle/16mJNc6PZfeP...

My neighborhood is perfectly captured by the vanity plate I just passed: RNADNA.

"This forceful suppression of the structural and public dimensions of health tracks closely with the rejection of frameworks that identify the public health crisis of structural racism surfaced by the 'twin pandemics.'"

"At best, the federal uses of health shift the burden from the government to individuals; at worst they are outright eugenicist."