Marguerite Mayhall
@mkmayhall.bsky.social
Venezuelanist art historian, now studying the discourse on space & place, networks, bodies, & ‘the sacred.’ Interested in links betw prehistory, history, & consciousness. Thinking hard abt the ethics of AI. Knitter, spinner. I miss Caracas, though.
Even if all you are doing is choosing from options it offers without ever reading or thinking about the material. Anyway, more to come on this as I continue to "write my paper"/7
The Important Work | Jane Rosenzweig | Substack
Teaching Writing in the Age of AI. Click to read The Important Work, by Jane Rosenzweig, a Substack publication.
theimportantwork.substack.com
This is like a "choose your own adventure book". If you choose option A, it will do the next step for you, etc. This is not writing. This is producing text for a grade. Writing has value as a way to figure out what you think and why. If students see this possibility in a product that is/5
What Harvard has done with its writing center defies any kind of sense until you realize that students are rarely at the center of this kind of administrative action. It's an unfortunately common attitude at these sorts of institutions. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...
Harvard Administrators Don’t Care About Student Learning
I know, news flash, right?
insidehighered.com
Exactly. This is where theory is so helpful as a lens. (This is adding to not contradicting OP) So if you have a critical feminist lens, you understand that these are both the same project of marginalizing women and maintaining a binary that (white, cis, straight, wealthy) men are in charge of.
Dag.@3fecta.bsky.social · yesterday12 year old girls get genital inspections "for their safety" while wife beaters get endorsed for re-election. This whole protecting women and girls thing is a bit confusing.
"Today is August 4, 2026" There Will Come Soft Rains By: Ray Bradbury
ICE agents harassing a child and her family in Bushwick. Macing a woman in Inwood. Threatening a witness in a Lower Manhattan ER. These are just 3 examples of ICE agents targeting New Yorkers the past days, in what advocates are calling an uptick in ICE activity the past week.
"don't make enough money" is a fig leaf All those degree programs--social work, art, etc.--have disproportionately female student bodies. This is designed to make it harder for women to attend college--college education being a key factor in women's autonomy from men & left-leaning voting pattern.
The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 2d agoPresident Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/aaAEu6v
If you're still on Substack, you're helping platform fascists and their enthusiastic minions, such as Bari Weiss, whom they actively partnered with just before her move to CBS. Go check out @buttondown.com and @ghost.org instead. You can even migrate yours subscribers and subscriptions!
s. e. smith@sesmith.lol · 3d agoWhat if instead of starting substacks in twenty-fucking-twenty-six people learned to give one iota of a fuck about whether they want to associate themselves with nazis.
Zuzai. Not at all. Nothing newer than autocomplete and spellcheck gets anywhere near my work. I translate like it’s 1999. zuzai.org
Zuzai, a new word, indicates the absence of AI
About the word zuzai, coined to denote things made or done without artificial intelligence.
zuzai.org
New: We found 50 cops who misused Flock cameras and other license-plate readers for personal purposes, often to spy on their girlfriends or ex-wives. He "watched every single move I made. ... Who do you turn the chief of police in to?" wapo.st/3S6rTuo
She left her ex. He secretly tracked her through a network of policing cameras.
Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems.
wapo.st
For me, LLMs are clearly powerful machines, but everything about their construction and deployment in society by the people constructing them appears oriented around achieving a political project that deeply conflicts with my values or a vision of a future I want to live in and dont have a choice in
NERV IRB Coordinator@professormusgrave.bsky.social · 4d agoThis is what is driving me nuts. So many posters around here keep haw-hawing about R’s in strawberry and clearly have NO idea that these are extremely powerful machines *already* that we have not yet figured out how to utilize fully. If we stopped development today, they’d still be astonishing
Rejecting LLMs isn’t about rejecting their utility or failing to be aware of their power —it’s about rejecting that political project; born out of an awareness that any use of these machines at all promulgates that project and assembles me into adjacent responsibility for its commission.
Evidence for textile making in the Paleolithic changed the way we think about the period, and the discovery of dyed, twisted flax fibers in 2009 is direct evidence for Soffer’s theory. Those Paleolithic female figurines are rich texts. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/s...
Olga Soffer, Fashion Maven Who Studied Caveman Couture, Dies at 83 (Gift Article)
After working for a department store, she switched to archaeology and made important discoveries about prehistoric clothes and gender roles.
nytimes.com
Trust, I’d argue, is the most important thing we have as scinece communicators. People come to us because they trust that *we* have done the work to figure out what is true and what isn’t and we can explain it to them. Once that trust is broken, it’s really hard to get it back.
Great reporting from our student journalists at the Duke Chronicle on increases for the most highly paid Duke employees in the wake of unnecessary massive layoffs: www.dukechronicle.com/article/duke...
As cost-cutting began, Duke’s highest-paid employees took big raises
Tax filings reveal administrators, including President Vincent Price and Provost Alex Gallimore, saw their compensation rise in fiscal year 2025. Managers of Duke’s endowment and standout athletics co...
dukechronicle.com
Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking": hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mani... 11/
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking
The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.
hermit-tech.com
The fact that it’s poisoning Black people is not seen as a negative to these folks.
SpaceX won’t remove all of xAI’s unpermitted turbines for another year | TechCrunch
SpaceX is building a new power plant for xAI's Colossus data centers, but it won't remove existing, unpermitted turbines for many more months.
techcrunch.com
Very excited that this piece I co-wrote with @carlafehr.bsky.social is finally out. Please share widely! www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care...
Students as Conscientious Objectors to Gen AI (opinion)
We should listen to them—and treat their objections with respect.
insidehighered.com
In the future, people’s fate will be dictated by which side of the camera they are on.
I Got a Free Meal From a Private Chef—Who Filmed It All to Train Robots
A German startup sent a camera-wearing chef to my apartment. In exchange for a free lunch, I let them record every chop and stir to train future humanoids.
wired.com
No, it's not okay to use genAI for research- or writing-adjacent activities. Those actions are also part of writing and thinking and research! Don't fall for the con of genAI boosters. Hang onto your humanity. 2/ buttondown.com/surekhadavie...
The 'I only use AI for...' fallacy
Hallo friends, and welcome, new readers! I hope you’re managing to navigate safely whatever weather challenges may have come your way this year. In today’s...
buttondown.com
Earlier this month, a New York Times journalist was watching “The Sheep Detectives” when FBI agents showed up at his door with a subpoena. Last week, a judge had some questions. It didn’t go well for the Justice Department. My dispatch from the NYT hearing: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...
The Subpoena Detective: A Dispatch from the Times Hearing
On jets, journalism, and a judge
lawfaremedia.org
I'm innately hostile to the casual dismissal of AI data center concerns (water, electrical or anything else) as hyperbole primarily because these are fascists who have actively and enthusiastically dismantled regulatory autonomy and the public should probably be more freaked about this than they are
Impossible to put into words how useless Gmail search is. No wait, these guys did it!
*whispers* you know we can do this cultural debate about art thing all the time, right? Websites and news organizations used to have culture critics on staff whose entire job was writing about books, movies, and TV. People read them and then discussed them. We have the technology to do this again.
Henry Giroux: "authoritarian movements always understood something many defenders of liberal democracy continue to underestimate: Education is never peripheral to politics. Schools & universities shape public memory, moral imagination, civic literacy & capacity to distinguish truth from propaganda."
Truthout@truthout.org · last wk.Contemporary proponents of “institutional neutrality” fail to grasp that universities have never been outside politics. buff.ly/GUvxlyU
Jon is a beautiful, thoughtful writer and it was an absolute delight to talk to him for this piece. We need to get him here on Bluesky! Check out his Substack, Burnout Culture at substack.com/@jonmalesic
They do that already, because just as you don't need an LLM to generate bad spellchecker suggestions, you also don't need an LLM to generate sub-par educational materials. There are plenty of "educational" publishers who'll do that all day long. 59/
Both my parents are teachers. My brother is a teacher. I teach every now and again. Teachers do a lot of repetitive, unrewarding work. They also do a lot of difficult, creative, extremely important work. 57/
