Aquesta setmana / this week!

Many thanks to Núria Silleras-Fernández for including me in this special issue of eHumanista on pleasure and pain in the medieval and early modern Iberian world -- and in such good company!

www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/volumes/66

Post from Andrew A.N. Deloucas @aandeloucas.com: In line with discussion about the job market, the latest majors being closed at Syracuse University: Nine majors "sunsetting": • Classical civilization • Classics (Greek and Latin) • Digital humanities • Fine arts • German • Latino-Latin American studies • Middle Eastern studies • Modern Jewish studies • Russian ALT

The First University in the Nation to Build a Center Dedicated to the Creator Economy Syracuse University is creating something that doesn't exist anywhere else in higher education. The Center for the Creator Economy is the first academic center of its kind on a U.S. college campus. Led jointly by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Martin). Whitman School of Management, the center reinforces Syracuse University's commitment to bold, forward-looking academic leadership. By aligning strengths in entrepreneurship, media, communications, athletics and digital infrastructure, the University is charting how higher education can prepare students for the 21st-century economy.

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

The way Altman talks about parenting is really revealing I think. Whether it's sales pitch or deep rooted philosophy, the ordinary tasks of living and working are just too unfathomably hard to imagine trying to do. They want you to conceive of the labor that makes you a person as impossible.

Concerned about ICE's $45 billion plan to convert warehouses into immigration detention centers? This is what they'll look like inside. From ICE's plan for the Social Circle, GA facility. Each little dot: a person. www.socialcirclega.gov/home/showpub...

muse.jhu.edu/issue/55472

I'm very grateful to Emily C. Francomano, Sol Miguel-Prendes, and @albertlloret.bsky.social for their thoughtful responses to _Alone Together_ in the latest issue of La corónica. It's hard to express the feeling of being read with such sensitivity and critical acumen. I learned a lot about my book!

i’ll end this little brainstorm by just asking what it is, exactly, that the MAGA right likes about the United States, since it explicitly rejects those things that make this nation distinctive — its pluralism, its revolutionary heritage and egalitarian aspirations, and its republican institutions

The stories weren’t played together on A1, but they probably should’ve been.
We’ve come a long way as a planet from the Arab spring days when tech bros touted themselves as harbingers of freedom.

Yesterday morning kids were sent running from their bus stop in panic because ICE showed up. This guy at today’s ICE Out of Lindenwold protest is a must watch 😭. @maddow.bsky.social

At this point, we should treat almost all the media coverage about AI consciousness, ethical consequence, personhood etc as downstream from AI corporate marketing and comms efforts. It’s all they have since the gloss wore off the initial excessive claims.

give me the ferments
and free my soul
I’m only eatin yogurt
at the super bowl
I’m RFK

Just a quick update from the Twin Cities. (Please forgive the unsolicited message). THINGS ARE NOT BETTER IN MINNEAPOLIS. The media is mostly moving on, Trump is focused on other stuff, BUT NOTHING HAS CHANGED ON THE GROUND. More than 2,000 DHS thugs continue to roam the streets, abducting people 24/7, assaulting legal observers with impunity, and routinely denying 1st, 4th, and 5th amendment rights. Drones and helicopters are overhead every day. Hundreds and hundreds of terrified families have not left their homes since mid-December ... relying on the community to bring them food and help with rent and other necessities. (Those people are NOT violent drug cartel sex offending murderers, as DHS would tell you. Most are legal residents or citizens.) If anything, things have just become more stressful and intractable (think trench warfare as a suitable metaphor): The resistance is better organized and numerous, but DHS has become more clever and better at disguise... and the county sheriff's office is increasingly supporting them . Do not let anyone tell you that Homans (the new person in charge of the occupation) is making anything better. Do not let anyone tell you that 700 ICE agents leaving the city has made much of a difference; the remaining force (again, ~2,000) is still larger than the entire city's police force (which is legally unable to do anything). Please call your congressional reps ... especially if there is any chance the administration might listen to them.

A desperate plea sent to me by a Minneapolis resident who's been on the front lines since the beginning of the ICE occupation:

Instead of just outright banning killer robots in the classroom, we should be having discussions about the *ethical use* of killer robots

Unmarked car, no lights or police insignia. Masked armed men leap out. Victim not in the act of committing any crime. This is not how a serious federal law enforcement agency acts in a free society.

How is this not supposed to be a “right wing paramilitary force loyal to the regime”?

An entire community of thousands, here legally, having been demonized with deranged lies about eating pets, is about to be arbitrarily DECLARED illegal so they can be forcibly ethnically cleansed. I don’t want to hear one more fucking word about comparisons to Nazi Germany being overwrought.

Alex Pretti’s last words were “are you ok?” said the woman next to him who ICE also pepper sprayed in the face.

Minnesota: "School officials say the [5-year-old] child was used as bait. They say [ICE] agents made little Liam knock on the door to ask to be let in in order to see if anyone else was home."

Social media post from the White House with a dark, just flat-out sinister image of RFKj with meme font saying “WE ARE ENDING THE WAR ON PROTEIN” Seriously the picture is fucked up

You can say Merry Protein again

Fuck Bari Weiss, fuck bootlicking regime propaganda

The more we say to young people "everything that needs to be known is already available to you via this convenient chatbot" the more we signal to them that their brains are vestigial...no need to work on your reading, thinking, or writing skills, machines can do that better. Go scroll.

LLM's provide a simulacrum of what it looks like to "know" something. ChatGPT can not "know," only humans can "know." And "knowing" is a mysterious, precious, unfolding thing...and it used to be the reason why many people went to college, because they wanted to experience "knowing" new things.

Grok says safeguard lapses led to images of 'minors in minimal clothing' on X By Reuters January 2, 20267:40 PM GMT+1Updated 1 hour ago Illustration shows xAI and Grok logos xAI and Grok logos are seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Jan 2 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's xAI artificial intelligence chatbot Grok said on Friday lapses in safeguards had resulted in "images depicting minors in minimal clothing" on social media platform X and that improvements were being made to prevent this. Screenshots shared by users on X showed Grok's public media tab filled with images that users said had been altered when they uploaded photos and prompted the bot to alter them. "There are isolated cases where users prompted for and received AI images depicting minors in minimal clothing," Grok said in a post on X. "xAI has safeguards, but improvements are ongoing to block such requests entirely." "As noted, we've identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them — CSAM is illegal and prohibited," Grok said, referring to Child Sexual Abuse Material. Grok gave no further details. When contacted by Reuters for comment by email, xAI replied with the message "Legacy Media Lies". In a separate reply to a user on X on Thursday, Grok said most cases could be prevented through advanced filters and monitoring although it said "no system is 100% foolproof," adding that xAI was prioritising improvements and reviewing details shared by users.

This is a thread of major media outlets falsely anthropomorphising the "Grok" chatbot program and in doing so, actively and directly removing responsibility and accountability from individual people working at X who created a child pornography generator (Elon Musk, Nikita Bier etc)

#1: Reuters

I learned a lot from this reflection on investigative journalism and Bari Weiss's spiking of the "60 Minutes" CECOT story.

“We’re locked up in 1000 ft2 cages. There are 32 people in each cage, and 8 cages inside the tent. The lights are like stadium lights; they’re always on, they’re never turned off or even dimmed. It’s very cold, the air conditioning is very strong. There are a lot of mosquitos.”197 Individual previously detained at “Alligator Alcatraz” “We didn’t have access to any sort of media. There are no televisions or newspapers. We didn’t have the ability to practice our religion; there are no bibles. We were locked up in the cages for almost 24 hours a day. We couldn’t have any visits, not even our lawyers or family members.”198 Individual previously detained at “Alligator Alcatraz”

From Amnesty International:

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.