#thanksRalph isn't going to do it

more than anything this conversation feels like it's happening on Facebook in the 2010s and that's just not where we live anymore

students have been kidnapped for writing op-eds, people have been shot in the street, a war's been started

give me *your plan* to denazify the government or piss off

anyway, scolding plus threats on exactly this self-appointed grown-up model is tried by about a million pundits and would-be pundits every year

maybe this is the year it works, idk

I don't know many people who refused to vote for Harris because she was "insufficiently opposed to Netanyahu's genocide" (whatever that actually means; does it mean "committed to arming" it?)

but if I had to guess, I'd say that at least some of those who did might have been grieving family members

I guess I think "they respond positively to promises, negatively to threats" goes for voters too

which suggests that Democrats might need to do more than threaten "their" voters with Republicans

Not that there aren’t US roots but people here are not infrequently surprised when I tell them that the same issues drive discourse in Canada, Quebec included, and they shouldn’t be

I'd like to see more writing on how far-right-wing nationalism in Europe, the UK, Canada and the US have converged on a few favourite imaginary terrors, of which Sharia Law coming to your small town is one and trans people using bathrooms to destroy science and civilization is another

there's no academic freedom in Texas's public universities

but there's no academic freedom wherever a billionaire or a state governor can exercise a veto over what gets researched or taught and be confident that university administrators will enforce it -- whether the rationale is morals or markets

you can add western civ to the list of things that are far too radical for western civ defenders

so the western canon is political, after all

I feel like this death squad could have been a drone

so far

finally, a machine that can go slightly faster than a person for no reason

is it done like a deal or done like dinner

is it a divine form or more of a transcendental category

the concept of the deal

twitter becoming reality was a big step back for reality

so clamorous, imposing and infantile, so unworthy of time

it's such a specifically online ugly-clever mode of speech

"the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism"

"cultures and indeed subcultures"

"inclusion into what"

it's as if someone shook blue-check twitter and organized whatever fell out into numbered points

Quillette All Stars Reunion

I’m sorry, I’m gonna need the name of the diner where they’re saying that

it’s useful to read the words you write before publishing them, so that if they’re obviously silly, you have the opportunity to ask how that came to be, and perhaps address the cause

[puts hand to earpiece] we’re getting reports of a third guy

“some groups say a revolution was more diverse than two guys”

that’s some kind of editorial caution, there, AP

It is strange but true that great demand for teaching (or more generally, for content) can coexist with deep hostility to research; IMO part of it is that these come from different places, part of it is that cutting-edge research is often seen to put some of the best-loved content in jeopardy

My professors were a tiny part of my life at twenty, and I’m one of the tiny subset of students who became one myself

All of this said I still think it is indispensable, when you are actually in a classroom, to presume that the people in front of you can and may wish to learn, and that for the most part they are young and will change in ways you have no ability to foresee and will in all probability never know

that’s not everything but it’s what I can recall outside on a sunny day