For all that the media has spent years freaking out about what social media does to our brains, I don’t understand why there appears to be little effort to grapple with the fact that these chatbots are, for some not insignificant portion of the population, literally psychosis machines
Very excited by this, from @abigailnussbaum.bsky.social www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/12/the-...
Recognize and communicate clearly about AI, including developing and defending decisions informed by AI, as well as recognizing the influence and consequences of AI in decision-making
I've found the indoctrination in higher-ed!
www.forbes.com/sites/michae...
It’s useful to think about things like this in numbers of tenure track professors.
$33M is 358 assistant professors. Or about fourteen percent of the total number of full-time faculty at Michigan State.
Though Sabers and Utopias is ostensi- bly a book of political essays, Vargas Llosa is at his best when he is writing about culture. There, his essays have the specificity and insight born of lived experience. His tribute to his Chilean col- league José Donoso in particular stands out, compressing a great deal of emotion into a few short pages. Throughout their years of friendship, Vargas Llosa teased Donoso for defending Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and George Eliot’s Middlemarch “simply because his professors at Princeton had forced him to read them.” Donoso’s “knuckles would turn white and his eyes red,” Vargas Llosa recalled of their conversations. When he visited Donoso on his deathbed, Vargas Llosa teased him one last time, telling him: “Henry James is shit.” But Donoso “pressed my hand to force me to lower my head until it was at the same level as his ear,” and then exacted his revenge with three words aimed at one of Var- gas Llosa’s literary idols: “Flaubert, more so.” This exchange, of course, honored their friendship and the writers they jokingly dis- paraged. It is a measure of Vargas Llosa’s significance that one can imagine a parallel scene playing out in the early 21st cen- tury, when a dying writer would whisper to his friend: “Vargas Llosa, more so”—a statement whose meaning would lie not in whether it was true or false, but in whether it still mattered enough to say.
Mario Vargas Llosa has died at 89. In 2019, I wrote a review of an essay collection of his for The Nation which has disappeared from the web, so I'll share it here. It's not a bad obituary. It ended: [full pages to follow]
Oh, man. His politics were what they were, but his literary output is incomparable.
elpais.com/cultura/2025...
Maureen Dowd piece, "Lord Almighty Joe, Let it Go!"
Maureen Dowd headline: "The Dems are Delighted, but a Coup is Still a Coup"
Maureen Dowd on July 20: "If he doesn’t walk away gracefully right now, he will likely go down as a pariah and ruin his legacy."
Dowd today: Biden walking away was "a coup"
I remember the moment it hit me just how many of my favorite albums were produced by Steve Albini. It's also been heartening to watch him try hard and succeed to be on the right side of history on social media these last few years and speak up for everyone he could. RIP to one of the good guys.
Steve Albini twitter thread from 2023: I will always be the kind of punk that shits on Steely Dan Christ the amount of human effort wasted to sound like an SNL band warm up. "They spent three weeks on the guitar solo..." Three weeks of watching guitar players give it their all while doing bumps and hitting the talkback, "More *Egyptian* but keep it in the pocket..." "Their engineer invented a machine to play the bass drum..." Did he now. And yet it sounds like this. Look at yourselves. Calling them "the Dan." Go trim your beard.
steve albini mastered both the arts of producing and posting
this was such an amazing piece about Steve Albini, RIP to someone who learned how to grow and develop and change.
www.theguardian.com/music/2023/a...
"Rid of Me" and "Ys" are two of the greatest albums ever made. But providing a clean, clear model for white dudes to own up to their "edgelord shit," repudiate it, and start living a real life is something very few have ever had the courage to do. RIP to a legend: melmagazine.com/en-us/story/...
Since it’s apparently International Haiku Day, I might as well revive my long-dormant Academic Haiku series:
Internet outage
On campus. Who needs to work?
Certainly not I.