This weekend I gave a presentation to a group of mostly college-aged folks and had a little line at the beginning of my slides that described it as an "AI-free presentation made by a human, for humans" and I had to pause for clapping at that part
you love to see it
They can toss a tin can with people in it all the way round the moon so it lands in a predetermined spot and be waiting there for it when it comes back down but they can't tell you what your prescription insulin will cost this month when you go pick it up
huge thank you to everyone involved in this mission for reminding us of the best of humanity and I am tremendously glad it all went off as planned
space is pretty cool and so, in many cases, are people
Hello, I made you a feed of your cats watching the Artemis II splashdown bsky.app/profile/did:...
The real story of smallpox vaccination begins not with Sarah Nelmes (the milkmaid in question), or Jenner, or James Phipps, or Benjamin Jesty but with Turkish folk practitioners of variolation, enslaved people like Onesimus, and Indian variolators.
There would be no vaccination without variolation.
omg
those astronauts who are parents?
THEY CAN LITERALLY TELL THEIR CHILDREN “I LOVE YOU TO THE MOON AND BACK”
Have watched some snippets of the DOGE boys' NEH testimony.
What strikes me is the *jarring* mismatch between their pose—the cultivated attitude of disdain and contempt—and their bumbling, incompetent responses.
That pose is SO easy to read. It's not condescension. It's not fear. It's insecurity.
Nice to have some good news
This is the Republican Party now.
Men are weird
Adam Johnson: I wrote about how the US and Israel carried out an attack on an Iranian girls school on par with the OKC bombing and US media relegated it to a back page story. No evening news segments, no front page stories, it made A11 in the NYT then everyone moved on.
We’ve got to keep the Epstein victims and survivors centered while we pursue transparency and accountability.
Their stories must be told.
Some dream director/book adaptations:
Guillermo del Toro's Shadowbeast
Peter Jackson's Warcraft
Robert Eggere's Witch of Blackbird Pond
A quote from me - “it’s pretty insulting to see scholarship used this way when the academic humanities are currently under attack from every possible angle — as though the actual people who do the thinking and produce the scholarship are reducible to their work itself, and can be removed entirely from the equation”
Went on record saying, essentially, “AI sucks, fund the humanities” today
Tell me a random fact about yourself that sounds fake but is 100% true.
As I recall, I ended up tracing the quotation to a reference to an obscure Chinese-language journal about, I think, agriculture, in Taiwan from decades ago. Which almost no one, of course, can easily consult. I decided not to use the quotation.
source: Jonathan Manthorpe, Forbidden Nation: A history of Taiwan (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), p. 111. He was not able to give me the original source, however.
I did find this, but it only quotes Manthorpe too.
www.geostrategy.org.uk/research/tai...
2 / 3
I've got a quotations list and this same thing been frustrating. Academics quoting other academics. I am currently trying to trace the source of this one:
Taiwan is outside our empire and of no great consequence.
—Kangxi emperor in 1683
which I saw here:
thediplomat.com/2020/12/has-...
... 1 / 3
Well this is good news. There has been a big increase in people listening to their phone video or audio without headphones. It's SO annoying. Glad to see I'm not alone in being annoyed! Most people are—7 out of 10.
metro.co.uk/2026/03/04/m...
My wife says I like The Pitt because "where else do you see competent people in positions of authority trying to help?"
Well, after that who will have the nerve to answer!
A carpenter and a union steamfitter
As a professor, providing accommodations doesn’t impact me at all, and it helps students out. The fact that anyone cares about this is baffling to me.
But then I remember that the country is currently run by eugenicist freaks and they’ve just found a new group to hound.
This seems bad
Feeling grateful today that we don’t get carried off by giant birds anymore
Since 2025 I've been sending out a brief quotation from the past every day, relevant to current affairs, using Substack.
It's free, and will stay so unless it gets to be too much work, which looks unlikely. No need to subscribe, either!
Here you go:
quoteofthedayforthesetimes.substack.com
The Impact Map or Federal Cuts Tracker Map is finally live‼️
Check the 🗺️ out theimpactproject.org/the-impact-m...
Explore how federal cuts are affecting your state or community and share this WIDELY 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
Just discovered it was our guy’s 100th birthday yesterday, so he probably sent us those balloons from hell
Who can reply: anyone, nobody, people who can be normal about it.
trying out a new feature, lmk if it works