Spent the weekend cleaning my home office, and after a lot of hemming and hawing I decided not to throw out my grad school notes yet. Not ready to let go, though I don’t have much time/energy/desire(?) to work on my own scholarship.
Teaching was way more my thing, and the early stages of research!
No cheating, reskeet with the most recent photo of your pet
I’m sorry but you just wrote my New Year’s resolution for me: positive orgy of idly curious decadence for the whole of 2026
When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.
Even as someone with a Ph.D. in English and experience as a writing instructor, I worry that these exposures will chip away at my voice and style. I can hardly imagine what it must be like to be just developing one’s writerly voice in this environment!
Even without the tools baked into their word processors and email, a lot of what they might read on a day-to-day basis is AI-generated, from emails they receive to social media posts to the AI summaries and huge swaths of AI-generated articles that turn up with every Google search.
“The reorganization strips away the specialized, tailored advising that our students rely on. It burdens research scientists with reams of paperwork previously handled by experts. It will degrade the quality of our graduate programs, many of which are ranked at the top of their fields.”
The bluegrass virtuoso brings back the spirit of Tiny Desk's early days: fewer microphones to capture "the way these instruments are meant to sound." n.pr/3KD1SiI
Congrats, Alex!!! Fine taste indeed
I think about the consistently misunderstood case of the Luddites. They were extremely advanced machine users (go try to use a spinning Jenny!), but they recognized a technological regime that displaced expertise (and payment) from the artisan to the tool.
In a stroke of good timing, my article excoriating the metaverse (and taking shots at spatial computing) was just accepted at Games & Culture. How do these companies make implausible and undesirable futures seem inevitable? abstract posted here!
Happily plunged back into Area X, with its ever-shifting always-porous often-creepy species and spaces, and oops now I’m rereading the whole Southern Reach series.
In other words, if you haven’t already, go read Jeff VanderMeer’s Absolution!
Editing this zine was an immense privilege. I work with the most incredible graduate students—John Mollet, Emily Theus, and Dorothy Wu—whose creativity and breadth of knowledge never ceases to amaze me!!
We can’t wait to share this special ephemeral object with y’all 💗
posters, stickers, know your rights flyers, lithographs, broadsides, zines, slogans, these little shards of art are our tools too
Don't forget to register for the Yale Gilder Lehman Center's conference next week on Universities + the Histories of Race, Science + Medicine. I'm speaking, along with @ayahnerd.bsky.social, @jowiph.bsky.social, Carolyn Roberts, David Blight + more!
macmillan.yale.edu/glc/2025-ann...
SAME. But maybe all the recently fired military leaders and officers will be on our side defending democracy during the next Jan 6?? As always, I teeter between brutal despair and rageful (+ naive?) optimism
This sounds as incredible as it does horrifying…I wish I were in your class!
🎉 As the editor of @yalereview.bsky.social, I'm so proud of our team and our brilliant contributors:
This year, we received *two* nominations to the National Magazine Awards, for criticism & fiction. Congrats to @brandyjensen.bsky.social, @dsparis.bsky.social, Ayşegül Savaş, & Anna DeForest! 🎉
this letter in the LRB on Karl Polanyi is a useful quick explainer of the present moment—helpful framing for talking to relatives etc
@londonreview.bsky.social
We are very much on the same page! General strike is my favorite option, though
Today at Yale: Rachel Cusk will deliver the 2025 Finzi-Contini Lecture. Don’t miss your chance to hear this brand new, never-before-presented work!
A revised version of the talk will later grace the pages of @yalereview.bsky.social 🖋️📚
whc.yale.edu/light-woman-...
Not *so* naive but also foolishly optimistic enough to hope is the only way I can function anymore
Endowment tax + slashing overhead on federal grants is designed to cripple the university. This weakened university is going to be even more susceptible to the efficiency claims of genAI. All of these moves further concentrate wealth and power in the private sector. Don't capitulate in advance.
Best of luck!!!! I hope it’s also in a location you love 💗
It may not be activism but access to information, resources, names of people who *are* organizing around issues that are new to you, and lists of actions that anyone (including people who’ve never done any activist work) can take is a pretty big deal!
SECOND: FREEZE THE SENATE.
Call on your Dem senators to engage in political hardball. Blanket opposition and using procedural tools like rejecting unanimous consent and quorum calls to gum up the works.
100% but I bet your teaching and advising is bringing a glimmer of hope/joy to your students—your presentation on Monday was a very welcome (if temporary) antidote to despair for me and the WHC environmental humanities grad fellows
Ok this made me CACKLE
