Nathan K. Hensley

leveraged, partnered, advanced, precise — somehow even more grotesque when the numbed, bullshit jargon of corporate marketing, already nihilistic, is transposed into the domain of state murder

one of my grandparents came to Fresno from OK during the dust bowl too! 💪

would gladly consider it a donation omg

shifting my life savings from the nuclear-war-is-imminent polymarket to the one that says nobody does even one day of jail time for this burn after reading-level crime

Screenshot of a course description that reads: Surviving the Textpocalypse. The advent of generative AI has been described as a ¿textpocalpyse," with chatbots producing content ranging from ¿AI slop¿ to missile target suggestions. As literary scholars and as people in the world, how do we survive? This course, paired with a humanities graduate seminar, will explore this question through theories of resistance, refusal, and reimagining; and through practice by gaining knowledge about how genAI works. Our goal is to implement strategies of survival and worldbuilding.

Pretty excited for HOW TO SURVIVE THE TEXTPOCALYPSE, the seminar I'm teaching at @emorycollege.bsky.social next fall with @shsalter.bsky.social (and with a nod to @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social for title inspo)

[gyre widening]

Anyway, this is the climate crisis.

The New Miami Gold Rush

incredible that this article, which describes billionaire hedge fund managers & tech magnates all fighting each other to buy $50 million compounds inches above a rapidly rising ocean, doesn't mention climate change or the coming reinsurance crisis but i guess what is journalism

It’s true that the CV gets VERY impressive, VERY quickly, with this patented new scholarly productivity hack™️!!!!!

i've been on hold with total enlightenment customer service for six hours already --starting to think i'm not going to get through!

Hoping to activate my LLM-simulated academic persona & set it to autogenerate scholarly outputs, which other LLMs can then process so other bots can make yet more outputs based on those, & so on, until students can at last access the glorious final product via Grammarly & achieve Total Enlightenment

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Screenshot of a 3hr old post from the GW Hatchet: “BREAKING: GW sold its Virginia campus to Amazon Data Services, an Amazon subsidiary that manages the company's data centers, for $427 million on Friday. The deed, obtained by The Hatchet, authorizes ADS to develop the campus into a data or information technology center. STORY TK”

GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn

Maybe we'd still have our jobs, too!

"I hope this comes to an end soon so I can be with you, and if it does not, I will carry you in my heart."

the physical illness i feel when scrolling over a self-righteous lecture about Petrarch, Thomas à Kempis, and the sacred office of the university whose main takeaway is that there should be a new center for right wing thought on every campus

I think the outside voices are the ones directing them who to fire next

this is a framework for capitulation to fascism, with some fancy medieval citations thrown in to smarten it up and give it a gloss of moral seriousness

#Hagerstown There is a (short) public comment period now: actionnetwork.org/letters/emer...

for what it cost for our allies to shoot down three of our own planes by accident in a murderous illegal war we could have funded the NEH at 150% of its historic peak funding for a year

sorry I was in a full day seminar about biodiversity collapse and climate change did I miss anything🙃

APPENDIX, from Action without Hope Sobs in Middlemarch Sobs in Middlemarch (1871-1872). All page numbers refer to the Oxford World's Classics edition (ed. Carroll). 1. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed. (4) 2. Celia colored, and looked very grave. "I think, dear, we are wanting in respect to mamma's memory, to put them by and take no notice of them. And," she added, after hesitating a little, with a rising sob of mortification, "necklaces are quite usual now; and Madame Poinçon, who was stricter in some things even than you are, used to wear ornaments...? (u) 3. Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her knees, buried her face, and sobbed. (40) 4. "I beg your pardon, if I have said anything to hurt you, Dodo," said Celia, with a slight sob. She never could have thought that she should feel as she did. (45) s. "No; but music of that sort I should enjoy," said Dorothea. "When we were coming home from Lausanne, my uncle took us to hear the great organ at Freiberg, and it made me sob." (61) 6. I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone. (180) 7. I will write to your dictation, or I will copy and extract what you tell me: I can be of no other use." Dorothea, in a most unaccountable, darkly feminine manner, ended with a slight sob and eyes full of tears. (187)

182 Appendix 8. It was in that way Dorothea came to be sobbing as soon as she was securely alone. But she was presently roused by a knock at the door, which made her hastily dry her eyes before saying, "Come in." (191) 9. "But you do forgive me?" said Dorothea, with a quick sob. In her need for some manifestation of feeling she was ready to exaggerate her own fault. (197) 10. Dorothea was silent, but a tear which had come up with the sob would insist on falling. (197) 11. "Oh, poor mother, poor father!" said Mary, her eyes filling with tears, and a little sob rising which she tried to repress. (238) 12. At Freds last words she felt an instantaneous pang, something like what a mother feels at the imagined sobs or cries of her naughty truant child, which may lose itself and get harm. (239) 13. When Sir James entered the library, however, Mr. Casaubon could make some signs of his usual politeness, and Dorothea, who in the reaction from her first terror had been kneeling and sobbing by his side now rose and herself proposed that some one should ride off for a medical man. (267) 14. Lydgate rose, and Dorothea mechanically rose at the same time, unclasping her cloak and throwing it off as if it stifled her. He was bowing and quitting her, when an impulse which if she had been alone would have turned into a prayer, made her say with a sob in her voice- (272) 15. For four hours Dorothea lay in this conflict, till she felt ill and bewildered, unable to resolve, praying mutely. Helpless as a child which has sobbed and sought too long, she fell into a late morning sleep, and when she waked Mr. Casaubon was already up. (451) 16. This was too much for Dorothea's highly-strung feeling, and she burst into tears, sobbing against Tantripp's arm. But soon she checked herself, dried her eyes, and went out at the glass door into the shrubbery. (452) 17. But Dorothea's effort was too much for her; she broke off and burst into sobs. (462) 18. Still "I do wish it" came at the end of those…

283 21. [B]ut Rosamond did not go on sobbing: she tried to conquer her agitation and wiped away her tears, continuing to look before her at the mantelpiece. (558-59) 22. "Oh, what sad words!" said Dorothea, with a dangerous tendency to sob. (594) 23. "I have never done you injustice. Please remember me," said Dorothea, repressing a rising sob. (596) 24. She looked at him silently, still with the blank despair on her face; but then the tears began to fill her blue eyes, and her lip trembled. The strong man had had too much to bear that day. He let his head fall beside hers and sobbed. (659) 25. But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life. (707) 26. "My poor Rosamond! has something agitated you?" Clinging to him she fell into hysterical sobbings and cries, and for the next hour he did nothing but soothe and tend her. 734) 27. She could only cry in loud whispers, between her sobs, after her lost belief which she had planted and kept alive from a very little seed since the days in Rome (739) 28. [Dorothea] lay on the bare floor and let the night grow cold around her; while her grand woman's frame was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child. (739) 29. But she lost energy at last even for her loud-whispered cries and moans: she subsided into helpless sobs, and on the cold floor she sobbed herself to sleep. 740) 30.... and in looking at Rosamond, she suddenly found her heart swelling, and was unable to speak—all her effort was required to keep back tears. She succeeded in that, and the emotion only passed over her face like the spirit of a sob... (745) 31.... and while her hand was still resting on Rosamond's lap, though the hand underneath it was withdrawn, she was struggling against her own rising sobs. (747) 32. He took her hand and raised it to his lips with something like a sob. (760) 33. In an instant Will was close to her and had his arms round her, but she drew her head bac…

Here is every sob in *Middlemarch*, thirty-three in all. Today is a good day to reread them. Solidarity all, thanks to Adam for making the shirts.

They’re moments when one wounded or defeated being reaches out to affect another, when subordinated figures change the social architecture in which they operate (they are almost always, for Eliot, women). In that way, sobs can create space for change in a world that feels otherwise beyond redemption

In the very sadness of those failures, however —the gutting, impossible feelings of living in a broken world— Eliot paradoxically finds spaces of connection, tiny ways that defeated people can find each other and join together. The “sob” is one such circuitry of connection in the novel: +

Eliot’s great novel is in many ways about how to live in a world that is unbearable: one that thwarts your desires for change and channels hopes for a better life into dead ends of mutedness, error, and failure.

The world is a grotesquerie of violence, stupidity, and loss, but Adam made shirts of the original serial cover of *Middlemarch*, and they are gorgeous.

“My hope is that the faculty remaining at this university who value these things — creativity, human judgment and practices of discernment, care and aesthetic appreciation informed by principles of the common good — can find one another and work out ways to preserve the practices that to my mind continue to count as education,” Hensley said. “I have faith that we’ll do that,” Hensley added. “Students, I know, can tell the difference between real thinking and the fake kind, and I’m confident that at least some of us will continue to work toward the real thing.”

Anyway I appreciated having brief space to try to describe the kind of university that might be worth preserving— or that we'll have to build again from the ruins of the ones we're all in now. I do think students will join us.

Plagiarism is bad, academic dishonesty is prohibited, but we just bought you a license to "brainstorm" essay ideas and "summarize" readings, etc. It is confusing, and (as I say in the piece) I think has been deliberately made to be so.

Students, Faculty See Potential, Concern After GU Announces AI Rollout After Georgetown University announced it is implementing generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools and curricula, students and faculty remain concerned for the university’s endorsement of the…

the both-sides framing of this reaction piece on GU's forcible onboarding of AI systems into the scenes of research & learning is frustrating, if understandable from the perspective of students trying to get perspective on a topic on which conflicting institutional signals are being sent.

You can look up “summers memo” and there is a Wikipedia page, etc. Summers and others said they were joking and it’s “satire.”