Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.
Jeff Kessler
@jckessler.bsky.social
Senior Lecturer at UIC. Union agitator, parent, Victorianist, digital media critic, grammarian, & writer. PhD, Indiana Univ. Co-Editor/Author of "Writing for Inquiry and Research" https://tinyurl.com/55wxre5x
Reason number 19,208,138 we love librarians:
Lisa Rabey@pookiebear.net · 2d agoOK. Since I'm a librarian and I must ORGANIZE ALL THE THINGS, I took all the titles mentioned by @tressiemcphd.bsky.social, @ali-alkhatib.com, and the Library Freedom Project and put them in a single list on bookshop.org: bookshop.org/wishlists/53.... (I did not coin "data politics," Tressie did.)
Great thread
Bhaskar Mitra | ভাস্কর মিত্র@bmitra.bsky.social · last wk.Last week I presented a keynote at #SIGIR2026 titled "Emancipatory Information Retrieval: Towards Critical IR Theories and Practices". Slides: bhaskar-mitra.github.io/files/emanci... I went in nervously excited but several people appreciated talking openly about this topic. A quick thread. 🧵 1/
The cross-platform enshittification of search functionality is such an infuriating exercise of authoritarian creep. They would like to kill the inclination to find information & enforce satisfaction with be fed information.
When friends write about things and authors you love thinking about: disjunctionsmag.com/articles/ai-...
“AI” is a Candy House
Jennifer Egan’s prescient reclamation of human sensemaking
disjunctionsmag.com
Quick thread on this...
Scott Horton@robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 2w agoMark Zuckerberg's assistant at Meta, Josh Felker, who was responsible for Meta's "digital experiences for kids," was arrested after admitting he tried to sext a 13-year-old during an undercover sting. nypost.com/2026/07/20/u...
Furious that Chris Nolan would disregard historical accuracy in adapting The Odyssey by making a "movie" with "cameras" instead of memorizing the entire story and then going on a nationwide tour to sing it to us while tripping on ergotized barley
Starting in September, I’m teaching a year-long series of online classes on Henry James. You can take them individually or as a sequence. I’d love for you to join us. Scholarships are available. All the details are here: garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/why-we-lov...
i love those eyes! relatedly, this is my favorite slide from my culture industry PPT 🎄
So when you get LLM output with links or citations to scholarly work: those citations aren't there because the model consulted them and they actually represent the source of the information. They were included because they look like what should appear near that kind of text.
An experiment with ChatGPT as an illustration for an upcoming presentation asking it to identify actors/actresses who appeared on ER and then want on to bigger things. Its error rate was significant. Because I'm a weirdo who has watched it all the way through 3 times, I caught them all from memory.
In 2020 @yaelrice.bsky.social and I authored this article to dispute this kind of pseudo-scientific research, which regularly gets press attention, precisely so that others don't have to cope with the tedium of refuting it. Here's the refutation you need! hyperallergic.com/how-scientis...
How Scientists Use and Abuse Portraiture
Many scientific studies assume that the features of painted faces are the facts of the flesh-and-blood countenances to which they refer. This assumption is not only false; it is preposterous.
hyperallergic.com
Hallie Rubenhold@hallierubenhold.bsky.social · 3mo agoHere we go again. Every so often tech makes an incursion into history, completely ignores that history is a rigorous discipline with a methodology, and then claims that a mystery or issue that historians have grappled with can be solved with an algorithm. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
When people ask, "How can I promote my art when the world is going to shit" I hear that as, "How do I have the right to make art when the world is going to shit" And... We need art more than ever during such times. You need to be making art more than ever during such times.
Q: How will this new technology benefit overworked faculty? A: By allowing Skynet to relieve you of tasks tedious enough to merit paid employment, you can free up time for unremunerated pursuits.
Frequently Asked Questions About Our Innovative New EdTech Collaboration
“With a free Skynet Edu account, students can gain the career-readiness needed to navigate an exciting future in which they will be hunted by a remorseless, ...
buff.ly
The AI data center / compute boom and crunch is really fucking up a lot of things: www.404media.co/the-ai-compu...
The AI Compute Crunch Is Here (and It's Affecting the Entire Economy)
Venture capitalists can't subsidize cheap AI forever, and the hunger for more compute is affecting the labor market, the gadget market, and electricity prices.
404media.co
Teaching makes my research better and research makes my teaching better
Lots of faculty who "don't give extensions" are breathing a sigh of relief rn. www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...
DOJ Extends Web Accessibility Deadline
Public colleges now have until next year to ensure their web pages and mobile apps are accessible to people with disabilities in accordance with recent updates to the ADA. Disability advocates decried...
insidehighered.com
Skip the article about/from the employees of the Yale corporation and read this from SUNY Geneseo www.geneseo.edu/enrollment-m...
The College Affordability Crisis is Real, but the Media is Looking at the Wrong Schools
Sturges Hall (Photo by Keith Walters ’11) Opinion By Costas Solomou, Vice President, Enrollment Management Published by the Office of Enrollment Management When Yale University released its Committee ...
geneseo.edu
When you attempt to scale the beneficent effects of tutoring, those effects go away. Feels like this would be pretty obvious to anybody who has ever been or had a tutor. The 1-to-1 instructor to student ratio is definitional.
Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · 4mo agoBreaking: Sal Khan, an MIT engineer and Harvard MBA who has no background in education, nor much curiosity about it, still knows next to nothing about the industry he perpetually fails to disrupt.
UIC English is hiring 3 NTT faculty, part of our United Faculty Union. professional writing, english language learning, literature/culture generalism. hmu w questions! uic.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...
Lecturer - English
Position SummaryLecturers in the English Department teach a 3/3 load. In addition to teaching, lecturers are responsible for attending required staff ...
uic.csod.com
To my surprise I got invited to be on a panel here called "The Problem of AI" and took the opportunity to try to shift the discussion from boosterism & normalization, however "thoughtful and deliberative," & toward the political economy of higher education nathankhensley.net/uncategorize...
This is an incredible resource and reference. 45 (!!!) examples of successfully bargained language, with every type of institution represented.
AAUP@aaup.org · 5mo agoCheck out this new report published today providing the first in-depth, industry-wide examination of how #academicfreedom has been written into collective bargaining agreements across American higher ed. 👀 This report is useful for anyone hoping to collectively bargain meaningful AF protections.
This is exactly how my class discussion started. These are graduate students, btw. A lot of students really take my courses for writing instruction and not content. So the issue of finishing a draft comes up. Turns out they cannot write (or read a long text) because they have every notification on
John Warner@biblioracle.bsky.social · 5mo agoWhen FYW students told me it took them 3-5 hours to write a draft of a 750 word piece, I had them track interruptions from their phones and some said they had more than 60 notifications per hour. I let them draw their own conclusions on what to do after these observations. Only some chose silencing.
I like this quick and pithy infographic for students. (Higher-quality version here: www.jessicacalarco.com/teaching-res...)
AI Isn't A Ticket to an A — Jessica Calarco
I teach a freshman seminar on kids and society. For their first project, my students create an infographic that aims to clarify a common misconception about “kids these days.” For reasons I’ll outline...
jessicacalarco.com
Kate Lowe (she/hers)@kateontransport.bsky.social · 5mo agoCritical thinking is under serious threat from large language models/AI. Uni administrators are too prone to accept tech hype! (plus it can be wrong, steals IP, has devasting environment/energy impacts). @jessicacalarco.com made a great one-pager I share with students (plus effective model of comms)
Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM