new productivity hack: use work time wisely, because the baby might wake up again in an hour, and then again an hour after that, and then again an hour after that, and then again an hour after that, and then again

"An essential state role, parallel to provisioning basic services like education and healthcare, is endowing a wide open aesthetic field of form and meaning and collective sensibility." www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...

How Defunding the Arts Wrought Civic Disintegration

What Was America?: Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era tackles United States’ most ambitious cultural project: the bicentennial.

artnews.com

The proposition of sentience or intelligence is part of the AI Industry’s agnotology gambit. Just as Big Tobacco funded red herring research to flood public discourse with doubt, so this industry poses inane talking points as existential questions and even funds research into them.

Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 2d ago

I can’t stress enough that this notion of if and when It will gain consciousness is Bible fanfic. It’s not real.

used one of these until 2017

Pnut Man@pnutman.blacksky.app · 2d ago

Good morning to everyone who used this before

“Elgin Community College staff notified Flock in October 2025 that they wanted to cancel their contract and have the cameras taken down. Within a day, Heinrich said, Flock rejected the request and refused to uninstall the equipment on the basis that the company had not breached their agreement.”

To protect immigrant students, a Chicago-area college told Flock to remove its cameras. The company refused.

Elgin Community College resorted to covering the surveillance cameras with trash bags and zip ties. Public records show that federal immigration authorities have accessed Flock data at other Illinois ...

wbez.org

UIUC is seeking candidates for a 1-year Sawyer Seminar postdoctoral associate whose research focuses on the economic, political, or technological challenges confronting US universities in the past and present. Incredibly timely and you'd work with great people! networks.h-net.org/jobs/70532/u...

Seen in Wicker Park

bluesky! i have finagled time this fall to do some structured reading on AI and internet histories. assume i'm aware of all the classic texts and the very recent ones. what are your favorite off the beaten path reads here? historical scholarship preferred

The “literacies“ framework is as intellectually bankrupt as polarization right now. We will keep using it because when you’ve got one hammer and the NSF social science funding has dried up everything looks like a nostalgic managerial class nail.

Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · 4d ago

"To fight back, Americans need to learn the counterspy techniques of C.I.A. officers: using multiple sources to check information; testing those sources regularly for reliability; never getting complacent and trusting one source without thinking."

'That was the last time she heard from him. David Sopys, 46, died 31 years after his own father died at the same age from the heat. “He was a ‘95 heat stroke victim,” Tanja Sopys said about their father. ”So he died the same way — from the heat.”' jesus

cam rodriguez 🔎@camrodriguez.bsky.social · last wk.

@elviamalagon.bsky.social and I have been tracking and covering heat-related deaths all summer, and for good reason— at least 16 people have died from heat exposure in Cook County, 13 in Chicago, mostly on the South Side. That's the most in at least a decade. chicago.suntimes.com/health/2026/...

lately have been encountering a lot of "feedback will be provided at least 24 hours prior" and "discussion questions must be posted at least 24 hours prior" for my packed monday schedule and can i just say, as a person with a life and family outside of grad school, spending sundays like this sucks

A truly stunning set of children’s books for the book historian or printmaker in your life. We just got a full set for the library @skeuomorphpress.org

kudos to Peter Bentley at the excellent makerlab at @edfuturesinstitute.bsky.social who put me onto the Open Press Project openpressproject.com where you can get your own 3D-printable model

Open Press Project – The 3D-printed printing press

Use printmaking for your art whenever and wherever you want. This little 3D-printed press fits into your backpack and gives you the ability to print outside, on vacation or in your living room! We are...

openpressproject.com

History Dept @ University of Texas Austin invites applications for a TT assistant professor, specializing in modern history of science, technology, & medicine. Committee will consider applicants who specialize in any scientific practice in any part of the world since 1600. Deadline Nov 30 #HPS

NEW: We’re reporters, not teachers. We have no business running a private school. But to show you just how easy it is to start one, we decided to test the process ourselves.

Almost Anyone Can Start a Private School. We Put This to the Test.

Our reporting has shown how easily people — some with questionable backgrounds — have founded their own private schools in barns, strip malls and other places. That led us to an experiment: If the hur...

propublica.org

Just announced: The Uptown Theatre has been added to the Chicago Architecture Center's Open House Chicago. "Visitors will enter though the main lobby and take a short guided tour of the auditorium. No photography will be permitted." 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Oct. 17 and 18.

Uptown Theatre

The Uptown Theatre is the crown jewel of theater developers Balaban and Katz and renowned movie house architects Rapp and Rapp. Built in 1925, the Uptown is the largest freestanding theater in North A...

openhousechicago.org

Something that's surprisingly useful is asking my students to draw their research papers. They make all sorts of interesting diagrams and some always say they find it clarifying in unexpected ways (realizing a side point is the main point kind of thing). Low tech, done in class, no outsourcing.

My cofounder Rich and I are making a bold attempt to become the Car Talk of software (enterprise or not, AI or not) which means we need YOUR MOST EMBARRASSING CODE AND CAREER QUESTIONS (anonymous is fine). docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Ask Aboard

On The Aboard Podcast, Rich Ziade and Paul Ford discuss how AI is changing software development—and everything else. We're introducing a new segment, "Ask Aboard," where listeners send in questions ...

docs.google.com

With both the Cubs and the White Sox playing in the MLB Wild Card Series today, here's a baseball-themed cover from CTA Transit News, the CTA's employee newsletter, from March 1968. www.instagram.com/p/Dd674z8Grkw/

My department is hiring an Assistant/Associate Professor of Public History! I am on the committee so please let me know if you have questions and please feel free to share! Job ID 303951. campus.kennesaw.edu/faculty-staf...

Found while flipping through CTA Transit News v. 38 no. 9, 1985 today: the product model for the classic "Mr. Clean" campaign was an employee of the @chicagocta.bsky.social. We've digitized these volumes and you can flip through them yourself in the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/ctat...

couldn't choose one, here's my list: - black in blues, imani perry - plantation goods, seth rockman - in the shadow of liberty, ana raquel minian - african pharmakon, nana osei quarshie - the tablet computer, elizabeth r. petrick

cmrn knzlmn@ckunzelman.bsky.social · 2w ago

If you are a graduate student in the humanities (construed as broadly as possible), what is the MOST EXCITING book published in the last five years to you? Please repost if you’re not a graduate student!

Come to think of it, Bluesky is like the Chicago or Philly or Pittsburgh of social media. Clout chasers don't tend to seek it out, and they don't fit in when they try, but that's primarily because we're not all that relevant to a wide audience, which we must make peace with

2023: White Sox lose 101 games 2024: White Sox lose 121 games 2025: White Sox lose 102 games 2026:

I’m teaching a workshop this weekend about how historians research. #Skystorians, what are your favorite or most important research tips and tricks? What is your favorite method for finding archives and archival material?

i have a blanket rule with myself to avoid the daily because michael barbaro used to steal my team's candy but as a new mom, i made an exception to listen to this episode and wow, am i now angry

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 3w ago

Today in luxury surveillance.

It is breathtaking. Like many things these days it is hard, but necessary, to figure what is a continuity and what is a rupture. EdTech has always been a private sector parasite feeding off the public sector. The rupture is AI EdTech is experimenting on the rich instead of the poor.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · 3w ago

It is not easy to shock me with the mendacity of EdTech entrepreneurs. But I had to take breaks from these testimonials to what is actually happening inside Alpha Schools.

I think I’ve underestimated how radical it is to be an “actually, we don’t need more data” guy in the age of AI

we passed!

sara m. b. simon@sarambsimon.bsky.social · 2mo ago

genuinely something special about this summer, during which baby and i get to join comps prep book club zoom each friday afternoon to discuss the 7-8 history books we read this week

And so, I think that part of what draws some tech workers into doom-coded strains of GenAI hype is an unacknowledged desire to recapture the sense that they're special people working on world-changing things. Doom narratives make their work seem important, puts their bosses in front of microphones.