“The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.”
Edward Albee, born on this day in 1928
The Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC) setting a good precedent, affirming the right to refuse AI for both instructors AND students.
The whole "Resolution 2" in the linked document below is worth reading.
h/t @evenannaliese.bsky.social
cccc.ncte.org/wp-content/u...
Result! Just received from Grammarly:
"Hi,
Thank you for reaching out.
After careful consideration, we have decided to deactivate Expert Review while we reimagine how to make it more useful for customers and more respectful of the experts whose work it surfaces."
1/
🧪💙📚 🗃 #academicsky
Almost the 400th anniversary of the Cambridge bookfish!
“What are we pretending not to know today?”
—Toni Cade Bambara
When discussing AI and the labor force, we fixate on one question: Will it replace workers? For the performing arts, that’s incomplete, argues James Paisley. The deeper risk isn’t just job loss, but the erosion of creative agency and the transformation of artists into executors of AI outputs.
"Want to feel good about yourself? Use a chatbot. Want to find the truth? Go elsewhere."
Absolutely too busy to lead something for this, but this call for papers looks great...
> CfP: Topical Collection on AI Resistance, Refusal, Reclamation and Reimagining: Ethical Imperatives and Emerging Practices
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.
“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
Victor Hugo, born on this day in 1802
what even is the fucking point
“Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
W. E. B. Du Bois, born on this day in 1868
Now THAT's a headline.
"The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents"
fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...
"To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life."
~ T.S. Eliot
Belle Tout Lighthouse (1939)
🎨 Eric Ravilious
“AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data. Today, you don’t see AI in the employment data, productivity data, or inflation data.”
AI is TechGrift. Can we say ‘Theranos’, everybody?
OpenAI ”acknowledged in its own research that LLMs will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.”
You can’t trust chatbots.
“If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than AI. Authoritarian leaders & tech oligarchs are deploying AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity.”
The study points to using libraries and visiting museums as bringing these enormous brain health benefits ... who would have thought? Well, librarians and museum folk for a start ... www.theguardian.com/society/2026...
stupid strategy,, when university administrators are doing it for free!
So disappointed with the New Yorker Anthropic piece. No critical probing or context, just gullible parroting of a self-serving corporate marketing pitch. This needed a hard Chotinering
It's almost anti-Cartesian -- I've stopped thinking; therefore I'm a philosopher working at Anthropic.
"Assetization of academic content (and assetization in HE more broadly) constructs students and staff as a new kind of economic actor – an ‘assetizen’...with diminished educational and social rights as assetization becomes a governance principle in higher education.”
So, friends, then.
A compelling answer to the question of what we can do with our study of Shakespeare and the humanities.
Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue
Grief has a point, even as gut wrenching and consuming as it feels.
I cannot think of anything unhealthier for me right now, as I grapple with my mother's loss, than engaging with a chabot of her--neither human nor real in any meaningful way.
Not to mention, she would haunt me if I tried this.
Artists have always loved to sketch!
Sketch of a sparrow from Egypt dated c. 1479–1458 BC.
Some 3,500 years ago in Egypt, artists used flakes of limestone as sketchpads!
MMA excavations 1922-23, Deir el-Bahri. 📷 The Met www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...
#Archaeology
Important education message: "independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it."
A few profit and the most vulnerable pay
www.economist.com/united-state...
taps sign
"Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice and seek honorably to know and speak the truth are the only builders of a better life."
John Galsworthy, who died on this day in 1933
