‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

Okay, rereading Wuthering Heights, as one does, and does anyone else see its traces in The Secret Garden?

Macbeth: SHIT

That critique of the government extracting resources from PR. The power poles.

Seeing that was Blue, not Beyoncé—brb, my aged body is transforming to dust and floating off into the ether.

My only contribution to this discourse is to ask how are they gonna say “Jay-Z and his crew” instead of saying Beyoncé’s name when she’s on the screen?

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The Early Republic Tracker The Early Republic Tracker documents instances where the federal government is removing facts and stories essential to the public’s understanding American history from public historical sites, muse…

Please circulate and share this important resource: thepanorama.shear.org/2025/04/09/t...

It’s 2026. There is a measles outbreak in the prison for babies

Quilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.

Reaching for the Advil right now.

Hitler, Jews, and the Holocaust Hitler blamed Jews for Germany’s problems. Over the years, the Nazis targeted Jews with increasingly evil treatment, leading to the "Final Solution" — mass extermination. We visit the Auschwitz-Birken...

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day — and with masked troops in our streets, law-abiding neighbors being disappeared, a president othering and dehumanizing entire communities in our country, and big mysterious prisons awaiting his scapegoats, history is speaking to all of us.

Noted!

I revise my previous response—maybe canapé or cocktail forks for olives and things like that?

Oh, maybe canapé forks

🙂

Oyster forks?

This is a decaying lecture hall with several hundred seats, surrounded by several classrooms and professors' offices. An exit leads northwest.

… it was shocking how much the literature we covered in your class directly tied into medical outcomes today (was happy to bring lots of ammunition to those class discussions).”

I was so happy to have gotten this email from him after he transferred!

From a student who took Early Am Lit with me: “I learned so much about literary analysis and also quite a bit about how intentional certain aspects of our country were shaped. I was at a summer premed program at Stanford this summer, and for our health disparities…(cont’d)

The ‘Crisis of the Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing. All of higher ed now suffers the attacks of politics and technology.

This was published in the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s. If you work in education & were, reasonably, taking a break, maybe you missed it.

Don’t miss it.

This poem went on my holiday cards this year.

Find me a piece of ed tech from the past thirty years that's genuinely more about student learning than it is about extracting more labor from fewer teachers. Can't be done!

We did the same thing!

🫠

AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don't Exist -- And They're Being Cited in Real Journals Academic articles from authors using large language model are creating an ecosystem of fake research that threatens human knowledge itself.

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

Or maybe it was communicating with you as a reviewer. Either way, that experience exposed me to your scholarship. I can’t say enough good thing about those kinds of editorial fellowships for grad students.

I worked on some of your articles and it’s how I became a fan of your scholarship!

And I’ll just say, by doing that work I helped some very senior scholars save face.

Just thinking about all of the rigorous fact checking and verification of quotations and citations I did while working on *ESQ*, *Poe Studies*, and *Legacy*, all those years go, and how I uphold that same rigor when I teach, and how in both contexts it is crucial.