it's a monday afternoon at the end of july, of course we're writing syllabi against-a-i.com is here for you! and if you're a humanities teacher who's developed materials you'd like to contribute as we glow up for fall, PLEASE SEND! against-a-i.com

Thank you for your service🫡

David Colarusso@davidcolarusso.com · 3w ago

I'm on vacation, and last night I accidentally stayed up late building @e-dickinson-daily.bsky.social It posts a random Emily Dickinson poem every morning. This first post, however, is an exception. It's one of my favorites. Note: When there's more than one stanza, it posts a thread—like here.

functionally every single person on earth was seeing a night sky with brighter and clearer stars than basically anyone on earth can see today, until about 150 years ago, due to light pollution.

Scott “bell beaker” Cave@hellabarnes.bsky.social · 3w ago

what is the reverse historical dorito? the thing from the past that would blow our minds in a positive way

Click the link to read our first ever Book Talk! Book Talks include an hour of conversation between an author of a new book in Victorian studies with an interlocutor of their choice. Read the conversation between Nathan K. Hensley and Anna Gibson now! muse.jhu.edu/issue/57090

Still time to apply for the two-year Eamon Cleary Postdoctoral Fellowship in Irish Studies, working with my stellar colleague Professor @maebhlong.bsky.social in the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies @universityofotago.bsky.social…🍀

If you're in or around London on July 2nd, go hear @annagk.bsky.social talk about Dickens and compostional process!

Dickens Notes@dickensnotes.bsky.social · last mo.

Come hear Dickens Notes co-director Anna Gibson talk about Charles Dickens's working notes at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London on July 2! This is part of the V&A's free Lunchtime Lecture series.

Come join us! Te Herenga Waka is looking for a senior academic to join our climate change teaching and research programme - apply by Monday 22 June.

manual citations till I die 🤘

Dr ShinyGoth@ghostingdani.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Yes, I write my citations manually.

On the one-year anniversary of EMPIRE OF AI, I am so, so excited to announce The AI Resist List, a new project that documents examples of resistance to the AI empires around the world 😍 airesistlist.org

Books are amazing #booksky

Eviscerating thread… 🧵

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com · 2mo ago

Premium Newsletter: The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble 3.0, a massive guide to how the AI bubble inflated, big tech's failed AI plays, how NVIDIA findom'd every hyperscaler, and how the ROI debate is fatal to OpenAI and Anthropic. www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-haters-guide-to-the-ai-bubble-3-0/

Here @parergon.bsky.social our call is open for proposals for special issue 45.2 (2028) - please circulate widely! www.parergon.org/index.php/pa...

Please encourage any early career & NTT scholars doing fantastic work on Victorian poetries to submit to @victorianpoetry.bsky.social ‘s 2026 Early Career Prize — more info in the thread (have not had enough coffee, text of the call is embedded in a reply to the post linked below)!

Victorian Poetry@victorianpoetry.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Victorian Poetry invites submissions for its 2026 Early Career Prize. Please share far and wide! More info in the image / alt-text. Submissions due 3 August 2026.

single daffodil on George Eliot's grave today 💛

What a wonderful day at the V&A / National Art Library talking about Dickens's Compostional Process and ways of engaging wide audiences with his material archive. @dickensnotes.bsky.social is on Bluesky now too 😀

Cathy Waters@catherinefaver.bsky.social · 5mo ago

A slide of imperative verbs (addressed to himself? Or to the narrative?) gleaned from Dickens’s memoranda and notes as part of www.dickensnotes.com project and a session with the manuscripts themselves in the V&A National Art Library. Thanks to Anna Gibson and Adam Grener for a great workshop!

A slide of imperative verbs (addressed to himself? Or to the narrative?) gleaned from Dickens’s memoranda and notes as part of www.dickensnotes.com project and a session with the manuscripts themselves in the V&A National Art Library. Thanks to Anna Gibson and Adam Grener for a great workshop!

Reading people. Body language. Knowing how to connect with people totally unlike you and with different backgrounds and beliefs. Defusing tense situations. Gaining trust. High endurance, pain tolerance, and work ethic. Reaction time. Prioritizing order of execution. Anticipating people’s needs. Tons

April Glick Pulito@aprilglick.bsky.social · 5mo ago

what are the skills you find yourself still using the most from your bartending and serving days

My general feeling is that every summary tool shortcuts the library shelf. In grad school there were few things I adored more than finding a book on the shelf bc I inevitably found six or seven other books on proximate shelves that I didn’t even know I needed! Process is the point!

You’d think that teaching and writing about books wouldn’t be that high risk a profession… and yet!!

Dr Blair Williams@blairwilliams26.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Australian Census on University Staff Wellbeing results are out. Every uni recorded scores indicating high/very high psych risk. And in news surprising no one, "only senior execs and deans rated their workplaces as medium or low risk while all other staff groups reported high-risk conditions."

Pretty much every winter Olympic sport--including curling--feels like a death sport to me

Joseph Rezek@rezekjoe.bsky.social · 6mo ago

These guys are skiing *really* fast

By cancelling the Climate Emergency Response Fund, the government was telling us there was nothing to see here. The past week has shown they could not have been more wrong. We need a government that takes climate change seriously because it's only going to get worse. #nzpol

Cate Macinnis-Ng@loraxcate.bsky.social · 6mo ago

We had funding for these types of actions. It was the Climate Emergency Response Fund but the government closed that in 2024 so now there is no dedicated funding to prepare for future floods, slips, fires and other climate disasters www.treasury.govt.nz/information-...

I used to teach an autobiography of an AI engineer in my robots in literature class where he supposed that all medieval monks could imagine as progress would be a bigger pen and parchment, but we know that the monks were conceiving of worlds insane enough to melt your eyeballs out of your head

Nathan K. Hensley@nathankhensley.bsky.social · 7mo ago

This failed capacity to imagine the future is a logical result, ironically, of a generalized condescension towards the past. Whole sets of ppl have been told that the history of human culture doesn’t matter, & that for anything to be worthwhile it needs to be “new.” It is a special form of naïveté.

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case. "My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

I’d just like to remind everyone that the first iRex ferry would have just entered service had the coalition not cancelled them purely out of spite for the opposition, Wellington and the South Island.

Not sure why this dross, dated Dec 1, seems to be circulating now (and why it didn't cross my feed a month ago), but wow what a terrible essay. A few comments, in a short 🧵>> bigthink.com/the-present/...

The rise of AI denialism

Computer scientist Louis Rosenberg argues that dismissing AI as a “bubble” or mere “slop” ignores the tectonic technological shift now unfolding.

bigthink.com

It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 8mo ago

"We envision a resistance that is...a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction." "How to Resist AI in Education" by me & @cnygren.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...

When I went to college a hundred years ago (2000-4), my school was actively recruiting humanities majors, w scholarships etc. Institutions incentivize areas of study in order to grow them. And they underfund them intentionally to strangle them. It’s not a random natural phenomenon.

erin pineda@erinrpineda.bsky.social · 8mo ago

one of the great, pernicious myths perpetrated about higher ed—which media, higher ed administrators, politicians, and a number of faculty are complicit in spreading—is that humanities departments close due to some combination of cratering student demand and unjustifiable cost. It’s not true

My love for em dashes is as old as the hills and as mighty as my inability to make a transition between thoughts literally any other way and I will be damned if I let the clankers take that from me

In the Great Expectations country last Sunday, how’s this for a Dickensian scene @dickensfellowhq.bsky.social