Hampshire College is closing, and hundreds of staff & faculty are facing sudden job loss without severance.
Donate to the community-led Emergency Relief Fund to provide direct financial assistance for laid off workers' immediate needs, including housing, food, and other essentials ⬇️
When billing more than $2000/hour, a firm might actually ask people to do the work rather than pass it off to a machine.
I'd note also that he is punching down at other scholars he just met at a conference. What a waste of a tenured line (and perhaps Notre Dame should just hire Claude to do his job).
My photo shows a Paleo-Babylonian clay tablet inscribed with cuneiform text, still partially enclosed in its original clay envelope. The clay is pale orangey-brown in colour displayed against a grey display case background. The outer envelope has been broken open, revealing the inner tablet beneath. Both surfaces are covered with densely packed wedge-shaped characters, which record a contract for the sale of a house purchased by Mannum-balu-Samas at the price of 1/3 shekel and 15 grains of silver. This is followed by the names of the numerous witnesses including the mayor Sin-magir and the courier Apil-ilisu. The same text is repeated on the envelope in the event of a dispute, which was broken to inspect the internal document. It is dated 32nd year of Hammurabl's reign, 10th month, c. 1750 BC. The clay envelope measures 87 mm (height) × 55 mm (width), while the inner tablet measures 64 mm (height) × 43 mm (width). On display at the Museum of Antiquity in Turin. Collection number MAT 740.
A 3,750 year-old contract for the sale of a house recorded on a clay tablet, still in its original clay envelope!
Museo di Antichità, Turin
📷 by me
#Archaeology
In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we spoke about AI becoming as divisive as DEI, the prevalence of scholarly slop, and how Bluesky poisons academic discourse. Evan Goldstein: You’ve described the Substack series as “intentionally provocative.” What — or who — were you trying to provoke? Alexander Kustov: I started using Claude Code and other agentic tools, and I was impressed with the possibilities and functionalities. Yet I still hear a lot of negativity about AI from colleagues who haven’t used those tools. The vast majority of folks in academia still think AI is that chatbot interface from a couple of years ago that hallucinates and cannot really do anything. But that’s not what I saw on my computer. I’d written short items about AI, so I thought to try to see whether Claude could assemble that and create a coherent, substantive post. It did a pretty good job. I just posted it. Then I realized it was a big thing.
Kustov: If we look at the best agentic models right now, they can do most quantitative social-science research tasks better than most professors globally. All of the kind of caveats here are important. What made a lot of people upset about this statement is that they interpret it in a very America-centric way. People were thinking about their colleagues at Oxford and R1 research universities. But I was born in Soviet Russia and went to undergrad in Europe. I have seen a lot of human slop. It should not be a controversial statement to say that agentic tools can do better. The value of qualitative research is going up because that’s something that AI cannot do well — ethnography and actually interviewing people in person, especially in hard-to-reach places. If you are gathering new data that is not yet publicly available, that’s the highest value that you can have as a professor and as a researcher. But I just came from an International Studies Association conference. I saw so much poor research that, if anything, I’m more convinced that my original point is correct. Too many people with Ph.D.s, with tenure, are producing work that is not contributing to human knowledge.
Meanwhile, the Chronicle has decided to interview Dr Kustov, who repeats his claim that AI agents do "qualitative social science research better than most professors globally"
Imagine having tenure and stability, and choosing to shit on his colleagues in a time of great instability for academia.
As a matter of principle, you can either have a dinner that celebrates the First Amendment or you can have a dinner that features Donald Trump. You can’t have both because the president holds the freedom of the press in contempt. www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump...
Lol
Worth reading. I don't agree with everything here, but I do think a lot of it is thought-provoking, esp. this: "You cannot build a lasting institution focused on human development in a system that primarily rewards credentials and career advancement."
"If I take your race away, and there you are, all strung out. And all you got is your little self, and what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Are you still smart? Do you still like yourself?"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S7z...
Let me summarize simply: they know they will have to pay too many descendents of the enslaved, so let's kill the project.
I see people attributing the murder of Cerina Fairfax to "mental health struggles" and I attribute it to domestic abuse.
Illinois signed on to this lawsuit so I hope providers are prepared to explain their plans to resume care, stat.
Paragraph 4.
“Everybody’s using AI for everything nowadays, and if you don’t, you’re a misfit outsider who should be stoned to death in the town square, and then resurrected virtually from your data so you can be stoned to death in the virtual town square, for infinity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...
The Strokes ended their Coachella set with the song "Oblivius", highlighting US involvement in the overthrow/deaths of Patrice Lumumba, Omar Torrijos, Mohammad Mosaddegh, Juan José Torres, Martin Luther King Jr, Jacobo Árbenz, Salvador Allende, Jaime Roldós, and destruction in Gaza and Iran.
I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.
It’s hard to express how important Iris was to ACT UP’s scientific development. She was the catalyst who started it all. Iris Long, Scientific Mentor to AIDS Activists, Dies at 92 www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/h...
Read along! Be entertained and terrified, all at once.
This seems to presuppose that the person will not file their taxes.
Literally the content of many introductory econ courses at the University of Massachusetts!
I really don't know what to tell folks if they think any of these proposed reforms from Yale, or anything that we can possibly do here at UW - Madison, will change the Narrative™️ from the right in American politics about universities. We're a century into this stuff. We're not the problem.
Sid Rosenberg @sidrosenberg19 X.com Figures! Mr. Met ran away from ME last season!!! And he's hugging the Mayor! Mr. Met is an Antisemite!!!!!!! katie honan @katie_honan • 6d Mr. and Mrs. Met (@MrMet) meet Mr. @nycmayor
Sid Rosenberg O @sidrosenberg19 X.com Just when you thought things couldn't get worse we found out today that Mr. Met is a raging antisemite!
Sid Rosenberg • @sidrosenberg19 X.com This was me at Citifield last season being IGNORED by Mr. Met! Yesterday Mr. AND Mrs. Met were hugging and kissing our Antisemite Mayor @NYCMayor! Easy to conclude that Mr. Met is an Antisemite!!!!!
Sid Rosenberg @sidrosenberg19 X.com l'll be 59 on Sunday:) For the first time ever I'm sporting a Yankee jersey as I make my way to the Bronx. The official transition from a life long Met fan to a Yankee fan is now underway. Like my friend @CGasparino once wrote "Go Woke, Go Broke!" The Mamdani Mets are too WOKE for me! See ya at the Stadium soon fans!
Absolutely dying at right-wing radio host Sid Rosenberg getting so angry that Mr. and Mrs. Met hugged @mayor.nyc.gov that he started calling them antisemites and became a Yankees fan.
When they said "AI will increase productivity" I didn't realize they meant "AI code will crash the social media networks on which I procrastinate, forcing me to actually do my job"
Three people you don't want to get into a public beef with are Kendrick, Isaac Chotiner, and The Pope
fox just had a banner referring to mamdani's planned grocery store as "trader zo's," and one must admit that's a good bit
Has anyone connected Vance's recent provocations to the release of his new book (with title stolen from bell hooks!)? It feels too strategic to be a coincidence. A good day to buy bell hooks' Communion from your independent bookstore.
