“What, uniquely, does #writing do? It compels #thought. It compels #thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can.”
Don Curren 🇨🇦🇺🇦@dbcurren.bsky.social · 2h ago“The problem with #writing with #A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs.” www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/o...
When I read Jean Cocteau's diary from 1950/51 I always wondered how his house in Milly-la-Forêt looked like inside. I didn't imagine leopard-print wallpaper, I think:
Cocteau's House in Milly-la-Forêt: Where the Poet Found Peace | Gazette Drouot
A multifaceted artist and a personality as whimsical as he was elusive, Jean Cocteau—poet, illustrator, playwright, and filmmaker—owned only one home, which...
gazette-drouot.com
Been screen reader and keyboard shortcut testing some of our platforms today and let me tell you listening to a screen reader is utterly exhausting and also you really need to write decent alt text.
"Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy" by Randi Weingarten, an American labor leader, attorney, and educator who has served since 2008 as president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), an affiliate of the AFL–CIO.
Why Fascists Fear Teachers by Randi Weingarten: 9798217045419 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
A rousing defense of public education as the cornerstone of American democracy, by the woman attacked by the far right as “the most dangerous person in the world” Attacks on schools and teachers...
penguinrandomhouse.com
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 7h ago“Teaching educators about AI is a ‘moral imperative’, said Randi Weingarten, the AFT president.” “And without outside funding, it was a choice between taking big tech’s money or doing nothing, she said.”
Slight point about LLMs at unis: how can students guarantee that their teachers/professors aren't using LLMs to grade them?
It was always strange to call the genocide in Gaza a war, but it's even more bizarre when there is a ceasefire and Israel has killed 1200 Palestinians since then. Even if the Guardian doesn't want to use the term genocide "war" doesn't capture one sided slaughter of civilians
In my experience (and that limits a lot here), most authors don't have much say on the covers, they are presented with several options but they aren't even the only ones to choose as there are others within the publisher who have a say and whose words have more weight than the author's. So ...
Paul Cooper@paulmmcooper.com · 13h agoNot sure how to feel about this historian of Indonesia using a very visibly AI image on the cover of his upcoming book. If he's telling the truth then he's been conned by this "Indonesian artist". And if not...
It's also (charitably) an example of how difficult it is to keep this stuff out of your work. It's not just enough to reject the technology yourself - you have to rigorously inspect every supplier you use, every freelance artist, every image or piece of stock footage. It's exhausting
It's an example of how just one drop of AI in your work brings the whole thing into question. If you're happy using it on your cover, did you use AI to write this? Research it? Can I trust that your primary source quotes are real?
'You'll choke too' - an aerial embroidery landscape inspired by all the wildfires happening right now... I'm upset every time I smell smoke outside and somehow we have people starting them maliciously too! But we all breathe the same air so they'll choke too (1/2 - see thread for close-ups)
There is an interesting question in this piece full of interesting thoughts: How much influence does fact-checking have, how common is it? The instances in which I've fact-checked a text were AFTER the book was acquired, i.e. when it was too late. The book got published, discreetely altered so ...
Rachel Malik@rachelmalik.bsky.social · 2d ago‘The irony is that thousands of academics are losing their jobs right now, for reasons that are entirely financial, without anything to do with knowledge or Truth, though will do incalculable damage to the overall social system on which knowledge depends’
The Publications Office of the European Union published a paper on land degradation and desertification today that I'm now skim-reading. It's shocking to me to ... The link leads to a page where you'll find the abstract and the download button: publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/h...
"It’s a public health crisis of intellectual health, and most governments don’t seem minded to do anything about it. (...) While we’re waiting, if nobody is going to do it for us, for now, we’re going to need to do what we can for ourselves. (...) We used to live in a world where the only way to ...
Languages Direct@languages-direct.com · 2d agoCould a couch-to-5k for books get you back into reading? buff.ly/Zx1Nt4C #langsky #xl8
Great and helpful thread by Dean Barker on where to find ancient Greek editions of the Odyssey:
Dean Barker@deanbarker.bsky.social · 5d agoThis is a great project! A few options for you: 1. Pairing the new translation with the Loeb edition (2 vol.), which has facing page English prose translation. Used copies abound! (cont.) www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...
'rare books experts are increasingly worried that these artefacts may be under threat of destruction by generative AI companies seeking to feed their ravenous technology with new texts.' First they came for your monograph, then for rare books. Where next: wholesale destruction of archives?
‘More than just objects’: Australian booksellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI
Secondhand booksellers believe they may have been caught up in the AI supply chain that sees old books scanned then destroyed
theguardian.com
💯 So much this 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽 Can I recommend/plug “Between Two Rivers” by @moudhy.bsky.social to really highlight this point — we humans, connecting to humans in our deep past, who in turn were also connecting to humans in their deep past — through storytelling. The machines can *never* do this.
Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 4mo agoI think one of the reasons generative AI is so deeply grating is that storytelling was an adaptive trait that made (and makes) us human. I'm writing my communication book chapter now and this struck me- not in a present sense but in a deep time sense.
I'm about to finish The Wave in the Mind, a book of essays by Ursula K . Le Guin. Also reading Journey to Edge of Life by Turkish novelist Tezer Özlü.
I generally like reading what Emily Wilson has to say and the reading recommendations at the end are interesting, too: 📚
EMILY WILSON@emilyrcwilson.bsky.social · 4d agoHere's a recommended book-list-interview, for a UK publication. For everyone who has had enough of discourse (as I certainly have): it has a tiny mention of Nolan as the hook, but then we move on to some reading. www.countryandtownhouse.com/culture/emil...
I'm reading "Christian Beginnings" by Geza Vermes, it's exciting and I'm glad I found it (probably on this site).
Don Curren 🇨🇦🇺🇦@dbcurren.bsky.social · 4d ago
Popped into Ibraaz. Left with more books than intended
I'm looking forward to David Henig's travels in Germany BY TRAIN a lot 🤗 I hope he shares much as the combination of "trains" and "Germany" in one phrase promises entertainment!
David Henig@davidheniguk.bsky.social · 4d agoAnyway being the fashionable type my own odyssey of a train holiday starts next week. Although as this will be in Germany it might just end up being one very late running train.
There is a funny effect of those two decades in which Great Britain and France didn't see eye to eye: Artists had to forego their continental Grand Tour and stay on their island! (Weren't there any exceptions?) THOMAS ROWLANDSON & HENRY MERKE An Artist Travelling in Wales, 1799
It's summer break on the podcast! The next episodes will go up in September. To make it up to you a final episode is out one day early: history writing under the Han dynasty and its relation to philosophical "schools" like Confucianism and Daoism. historyofphilosophy.net/podcast/chin... #philsky
From the abstract: "We find that even when LLMs are prompted with expert feedback and asked to only make grammar edits, they still change the text in a way that significantly alters its semantic meaning."
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 5d agoFantastic paper demonstrating how LLM editing is gradually distorting our writing and the way we think to write: arxiv.org/abs/2603.18161
Ancient history has had a long issue with this sort of thing—constructing bounded groups/entities that just weren’t there (including e.g. ‘Ancient Egypt’). The more thoughtful recent work has been taking it apart.
Seth L. Sanders@nabalkattu.bsky.social · last wk.To be clear, these groups were not 'nations' but the kind of thing our history has the most trouble with when it is, in James Scott's words, "Seeing Like a State": non-bounded, collaborative, polyglot populations. Riding the tides of environmental and social change, they changed history in turn.
