This is a fascinating and harrowing essay, though there are elements of it that I would question.
This is a fascinating and harrowing essay, though there are elements of it that I would question.
Honored to be on John Wilson’s end-of-year book list, and alongside Adam Roberts to boot.
Final grades turned in! — which means that complaints about final grades will be incoming in 3 … 2 … 1 …
Sometimes you can have what seems like a good idea for a class and you can put a lot into it and it just doesn’t really work out.
‘The future is already here - it’s just not very evenly distributed,’ science fiction writer William Gibson famously declared. But this is even more true about the past.
This essay by Ted Underwood is one of the most constructive and clear things I’ve seen on the relation between traditional humanistic scholarship and the use of machine learning.
UPDATE (cause you can do that on micro.blog): People like Underwood and Andrew Piper and my buddy Chad Wellmon are doing such interesting work, and I really wish I could join them in it … but it’s too late. Too much of a learning curve for me, and not enough time left to write the books I already know I want to write. Sigh. I really feel that I’m missing out on something cool.
I have been teaching American undergrads since 1982. My experience is that millennials don’t read any more or less than their predecessors, and don’t think either better or worse.
Here’s the thing about voice recognition on iOS: sometimes it transcribes what you say with perfect accuracy, and then at other times it makes so many errors that you spend three times as long correcting the errors as you would have spent typing your thoughts out with your thumbs. But you never know in advance which it’s going to be.
Well, I have deactivated my Twitter account. Let’s see if my resolve holds this time. (On two or three occasions in the past it did not.)
People born within a certain three-month period:
Like, why should I ever been seen in public NOT in a baseball cap?
I’m thinking that from here on out I’m gonna imitate Steve Reich’s commitment to the baseball cap.
Two things to be learned from this story:
For Americans today, faith is negotiable, politics isn’t.
“Today I consider [The New Yorker’s] reporting one of the four essential things to read to understand the state of the nation, the other three being The Atlantic, the New York Times and the Washington Post.” Sure. Nothing from the West, South, or Midwest. Nothing from the Right or the Left. Four liberal-centrist periodicals from two cities tell you all you need to know about this country. www.theguardian.com/commentis…
My son helping me get perspective
Goodness
This is some righteous stuf by @sullydish. (Please click through for the whole thing.)
“We haven’t stopped appealing to trans-political truths and ideals, but we’ve stopped believing that anyone who isn’t on our own side could possibly mean it.” — Damon Linker
This is my sixth Texas autumn, and by far the most colorful. I suspect the key is that we’ve had a month of cool, dry weather preceded by a month of exceptionally wet weather. (No filter on any of these.)
One last time: please read my review and then read Andrew Delbanco’s extraordinary book.
“That may be why River fans targeted the Boca Juniors bus: because this was a game they could not lose.” — Rory Smith
