I thought I might read that Vanderbilt or whatever report on why the humanities are bad now and within half a page I was very angry. Gonna vent and criticize here going in order of the bits I highlighted. First of all, very simply, any faculty member who sits on a body convened by some senior management at an to write a report addressed to senior management as a whole should be aware that these people have an interested agenda that is bad for all the substantive goods of higher ed

today I explored a new nerd domain. there's a small african grocery store around the block from me, they had a tree in front half cut down, leaving a chunk of the trunk on the ground. I went in and asked if I could have it, they said sure. tonight I went up there w/ a dolly and some straps, tied it to the dolly with one, wrapped the other one around the end and duckwalked it home, maybe 500 feet? I had to stop many times to rest and to give my hands a break cuz the straps were biting but I got it done. I measured and the log is between 65 and 70 inches

There's an expression something like "if there's a nazi at the table and five other people sitting there who know he's a nazi making polite dinner conversation with him, then there's six nazis at the table." One might quibble with details like 'are they all REALLY nazis' but the heart of the point seems true and very importantly so. If that's correct, and I think it is, then I think this applies to everyone in both major political parties in the US. The only way it wouldn't would if there's some important difference between being in the same party and

Today's been a whole thing. (Small potatoes but my potatoes kinda thing.) I've not been sleeping great cuz of a mix of the time and light change from daylights whatsits time. I got up early to walk to the bakery to get pie for my kids cuz it's Pi Day (GET IT?!), went back to bed but didn't sleep so hot. Eventually got up, did various chores, went to work, did lots of email stuff - low-medium degree of taxing and very low degree of satisfaction - and didn't get to any of the stuff I was excited to work on (mostly reading a stack of cool shit). Then I had

Spotify has a transcript of that shitty Chibber interview so you can check it out without listening, saves much time and reduces psychic damage. It's even worse than I expected. The views it expresses are only plausible to someone who overestimates the similarity of the rest of society to internal dynamics in elite universities, which in context is very funny because basically a PMC mistake from someone who likes to eyeroll 'omg the PMC.' The 'analysis' of higher ed is basically vulgar idealism: this idea and that way of talking took hold. Zero mention

I talked to my mom today. She was being treated badly at her retail job. She got fed up and quit on the spot. I'm very proud of her. She said a manager called her and was like 'I can't believe you'd do this to us!' and she went 'you know how you fire a lot of single parents?' He goes 'yeah, when they violate the attendance policy.' She goes 'well, I'm firing the company for not living up to its core values.' 'What?! You can't fire the company.' 'Sure I can. I just did. I fired the company. I quit.' and she hung up on him.

I read some of that Tooze interview and am gonna think out loud a bit about some of it here, mostly dropping links, as usual I assume this is probly not of interest to anyone but me and a handful of nerds cut from the same cloth. I'll add that I'm not a Tooze reader myself. I'm not sure if I'm in his target audience of left-liberals and policy-oriented leftists and even if I am I just don't have anything like enough time to read so I've not gotten to his stuff. [shrug.]

afaict Tooze is basically what Tony Smith calls a liberal egalitarian, Smith's

This is probly obvious and I'm just slow on the uptake but I think part of what's going on w/ conversations about AI and writing instruction is that a student can either use AI or learn to write and there's not really a middle ground there. The technology impedes learning writing If I use a hydraulic jack to lift weights in a gym, I'll learn about using a hydraulic jack, but I simply won't develop the skills and capacities that actual weightlifting develops, other than very minimally by unracking the weight plates. AI use is like that relative to writing.

There are bigger outrages but a senior historian writing that historians are less productive and innovative now (and suggesting maybe the field should thus be radically reorganized or even ended) with no real discussion of material conditions is *bananas* insidehighered.com/opinion/blogs/… Dude just retire already

Jha's op-ed follows Biden administration talking points basically to go 'you can safely forget covid.' This has at least two basic kinds of moves. One is to try to get people to overestimate their personal safety. As part of that, he says is that one booster a year is sufficient. In a report published in May, the CDC said that after 6 months the effectiveness of the vaccine against hospitalization falls to 24%. If Jha had any interest in helping people make informed choices, this is the kind of thing he'd talk about. cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7…

13yo and 9yo relayed a conversation they had with one of their grandmas via zoom. The idea was 'say you had a genie or god-like powers, where you couldn't do mind control or whatever but you could change big picture things, what would you do?' The grandma said 'I'd make people naturally more kind.' 13yo thought that was weird, and was like 'well, the first thing I'd do is stop climate change, that seems obvious? maybe trash capitalism too, because that seems like a widespread problem?' I'm just nodding like 'oh, hmm, huh, interesting.'

Several things make me very angry about Catherine Liu's 'I'm socialist but culturally conservative' routine. One is that the class vs demographic identity categories thing misunderstand both class and identities. The working class are the vast majority in this society for every demographic group. Most black people, immigrants, trans people, etc, are workers. The implication that workers are always Joe The Plumber or whatever is super condescending to loads of workers. I'm angry about another aspect of this condescension, which is the whole 'workers

Angela Nagle's article on why leftists should support migration restriction is terrible garbage in its politics and it's also poorly researched. I wouldn't think it's worth engaging but people in milieus I care about for some reason are engaging her. So, some thoughts. First, as counterpoint to her repugnant call for stricter use of E-Verify people should read this by the National Employment Law Project. s27147.pcdn.co/wp-content/upl… The gist: lots of negative effects in the penumbra of e-verify, and a clear alternative=confer legal status. I'll that I wish