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• Post #4488562

  An obstacle in convincing people that LLMs writing history or any nonfiction is a bad thing is that there’s a widespread misperception that history is just a collection of facts on a page. This predates bots; I remember suffering through some techbro telling me historians were obsolete in 2011. But the transition to treating everything as “content” has taken away the idea that there’s intent or argumentation behind it. It’s all become value-neutral, which is yet another reason we’re seeing the c...

• Post #4270357

  I’ve had this t-shirt quite literally for half my life, but its time has come. The neckline is falling off; it is so thin in places that it’s almost like tissue paper. You let everybody know of my amazing taste in alt comics. Good night, sweet prince.

• Post #4270356

  @jnl

• Post #4270355

  Sometimes I sit back and kind of marvel over the fact that I have this whole career as a software developer. I worry I don't value it enough. It didn't happen by accident, but it was a sudden pivot: in less than a year I had a new career after devoting my 20s to trying to become an academic. The other day I was talking with my manager about long-term promotion tracks for me (Engineering manager? Product architect? TPM?) and it sorta hit me that at some level I didn't th...

• Post #4270354

  Excellent writing from Matt Seybold on Disclosure Day, the alt-right's relationship with science fiction, "sovereignty as a service," and the inability of Democrats to let go of the past. "Disclosure Day thus dramatizes the fantasy of retro-neoliberalism which has stultified contemporary American liberalism, most egregiously establishment figures in the Democratic Party, many of them one-time architects of the Washington Consensus. If we all abandoned the plat...

• Post #3540138

  I got angrier and angrier as I wrote this for Dame Magazine. The collapse of this country’s civic morality dovetails with the cruelty and corruption that dominates policy. The rest of our institutions are being dragged down by or are abetting it. That’s the thing on my mind this 4th. I hit on the importance of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the end because we desperately need a symbolic, public break with the depravity of this period. It’s no substitute for criminal accountability, bu...

• Post #2474369

  Reupping this piece because it’s so good. https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2026/05/07/renee-good-trump-ice-immigration-mothers-day-activism-victoria-livingstone

• Post #1943178

  Reading this and having a grim chuckle. Some of it is at my alma mater's expense; my OSU experience was decidedly mixed, so of course I'll read this uncharitably. But at a deeper level past my own peculiar schadenfreude, it's bleak to look at this because it says some very bad things about university administration. This is small-g graft. The university president tried to allocate university resources to a woman for a PODCAST (and it must be added, an especially shitty l...

• Post #1943176

  Has anybody seen anything like astroturfing in support of data centers? Supportive Facebook groups, influencers suddenly jumping on the bandwagon, anything like that? Asking for a friend.

• Post #1943174

  This got published a couple of days ago and snuck under the radar. I’ve been thinking about the TVA a lot and why we need something like it today for climate change: regional planning to make our communities more resilient. But that in turn led me to where the TVA went wrong. https://scalawagmagazine.org/2026/04/dirty-energy-and-the-lost-promise-of-the-tva/

• Post #1943173

  Larry David should do Hot Ones

• Post #1943172

  Reading through a manuscript for a university press as a reviewer (not a thing I normally do, but it's on a subject I care a lot about) and I'm struck by both how much I enjoyed this kind of research, the difficulty of doing it, that part of me misses it, and part of me is relieved to not have to. The idea of slowly writing a monograph and conducting all of this in-depth research sounds amazing. It's really fun. But the reality of doing it inside academia is that it&...

• Post #1826349

  I quit a project last week. What I was initially told was that I would be editing lesson plans; what I learned was that ChatGPT would write the content and I would structure the lesson plan (“do this activity here,” “share with a peer”, etc) and fact check it. To me, it’s like a microcosm of what’s wrong with the way we use AI. For me, the hardest part of curriculum development is the pedagogical part: thinking about the best way to structure it takes me the greatest amount of time. LLMs save m...

• Post #1150662

  This sounds really innocuous, but Teen Vogue just axed their whole politics desk — everybody working on it has been laid off. This is devastating: it was a publication with a lot of reach and it was consistent in how it spoke out against this administration. https://www.vogue.com/article/teen-vogue-is-joining-voguecom

• Post #978033

  Ok, I concede, I do actually wish to go where everybody knows my name.

• Post #978032

  @jnl I get so exhausted with this thinking (what you describe) because it’s so self-defeating. You can’t build anything permanent except for a set of standards that push people out; you can’t have movement elders unless they’re in perfect lockstep with the vanguard; nobody gets to join unless they sprang forth fully formed from the head of Zeus.

• Post #978031

  @jnl I can see it now and it’s the message we need in 2026

• Post #978029

  It’s beginning. (Pumpkins, sun gold tomatoes, Juliet tomatoes, basil, piri-piri peppers)

• Post #978028

  @jnl Cookies are meant to be soft and chewy and it's a sign of the dangerous times we live in that they come in any other form.

• Post #978026

  Summer Zeb is slowly emerging from his protective cocoon of sweaters.

• Post #978025

  Had the pleasure of getting to interview Caroline Tracey her new book Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History. https://newbooksnetwork.com/salt-lakes

• Post #978024

  This is exactly why Mastodon didn’t “take off,” this guy is equating the fact that AI hype artists get shouted down with the fact that people of color found this place really fucking hostile and racist. https://social.coop/@scottjenson/116352800579635299

• Post #978022

  Had the pleasure of getting to talk with David Perry last week about his new book The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook. I wish I'd had this book six years ago when I was just starting out as a freelance writer! https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-public-scholar

• Post #978021

  Democrats love to talk about affordability but they really don't seem to have a playbook beyond hoping that Trump tanks the economy and they get elected behind it. Their rhetoric is just...bloodless. You need to find ways to inspire people. I wrote about what they could learn from FDR here for Dame Magazine. https://www.damemagazine.com/2026/04/07/fdr-economic-strategy-democrats/

• Post #937917

  Some memes you need to save in your phone because it will just keep coming up again and again.

• Post #734373

  Now if anywhere had a *hostile* reaction to this, it was LinkedIn https://hcommons.social/@zeblarson/116238880276207080