Laura Smithers

Sierra Avalanche Center Backcountry Avalanche, Snow, and Weather Information for the greater Lake Tahoe area

The forecasters for our area: www.sierraavalanchecenter.org

Adjunct pay/working conditions AY25-26 This form is part of a project to crowd-source pay and working conditions for people who teach and research in colleges and universities during AY2025-2026. This form is for people paid by the course ...

Well, let's give it a shot again and see what we get.

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

The Claims of Close Reading - Boston Review Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical.

I wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University

www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

evergreen

Sue Kesey, Who Helped Bring Probiotic Yogurt to the Masses, Dies at 86 As the co-founder of Springfield Creamery, maker of Nancy’s Yogurt, Kesey got her start courtesy of the Grateful Dead.

Read the story of Nancy's Yogurt, still a family operation, and Sue Kesey, "the steady center of the operation—the one person, in that troupe of yogurt-making hippies" who made the business a success.
Who was "Nancy? How did the Grateful Dead save the company? *gift*
www.wsj.com/business/ret...

Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker At eighty-two, the troubadour had another album coming. Like him, it was obsessed with mortality, God-infused, and funny.

“As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one’s life or one’s work,” Leonard Cohen said, in 2016.

You can add up all the enjoyable pursuits of LLMs and the work productivity hacks and none of them, separately or together, will be more important than AI’s ecological costs or political disruption.

“We” is more important here.

Every time admin talks about "future-proofing our degrees," I die a little inside and then remind them that critical thinking is the only skill that does this

run universities like a business, they said. really open them up to market efficiencies

Universities aren’t often spoken of as ‘brands,’ but Warwick leans into that idea. What does thinking of a university as a brand unlock—and what can it achieve when done well? Seeing a university as a brand unlocks coherence and confidence. A brand is about more than design, it’s about identity and consistency. When you align your values, your story and your impact, you become more than a place, you become a movement. At Warwick, brand isn’t just a communications tool, it’s a strategic asset. It helps us attract brilliant minds, forge global partnerships and create a distinctive space in a competitive world. When done well, a brand doesn’t limit, it liberates.

What drew you to the world of higher education, and how do you see its role evolving in society today? My journey from the world of luxury into higher education has been one of purpose and transformation. After years of working with global brands, I was drawn to higher education as the next frontier of influence, a space where knowledge, identity, and opportunity intersect. Universities aren’t just places of learning, they are platforms for societal impact. Their role today is to be both anchor and catalyst: rooted in rigorous teaching and research, yet agile enough to respond to global challenges and cultural shifts. How has your background in the luxury sector shaped the way you approach storytelling and brand building at the University of Warwick? Working across premium and luxury sectors—fashion, real estate, travel and beyond—taught me the value of emotion, detail, and differentiation. In those worlds, a brand isn’t just a badge, it’s an experience, a feeling, a story that lives in people’s hearts. At the University of Warwick, I’ve brought that same mindset to higher education: crafting narratives that are both strategic and human.

I can't quite believe it, but, it appears that the person responsible for this at the University of Warwick has had a Vogue photoshoot about the rebrand, explaining his 'journey from the world of luxury [goods marketing] into higher education' vogue.sg/university-o...

“Toto’s ‘Africa’” by Ernest Hemingway At the airport the young man heard far-off drums echoing in the night. He imagined the young woman in the plane sitting still, hearing whispers of ...

Hemingway's birthday is tomorrow, and we'll be posting our usual cavalcade of new and classic parodies of him and his work. To help kick things off, here's the piece that started it all. #HappyBirthdayHemingway www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/tot...

Shakespeare Makes Me A Slower And Better Reader | Defector One advantage I have always held in the literary arts is speed. I am a fast reader and an even faster scanner. I can draft quickly, churning out hundreds of words as if turning on a spigot. It’s an…

Kelsey McKinney tackles the Shakespeare play that's always troubled her most: 'Love's Labour's Lost." defector.com/shakespeare-...

This is of course what they’re doing and also nightmare fuel

what if you could just lie down in a box and have your best friends slowly lower it into the earth

Would you turn over your wellness to Artificial Intelligence? Before you balk, hear me out. What if your watch could not only detect diseases and health issues before they arise but also communicate directly with our doctors to flag us for treatment? What if it could speak with the rest of your gadgets in real time, and optimize your environment so your bedroom was primed for your most restful sleep, keep your refrigerator full with the food your body actually needs and your home fitness equipment calibrated to give you the most effective workout for your energy level? What if, with the help of AI, your entire living environment could be so streamlined that you were immersed in the exact kind of wellness your body and mind needed at any given moment, without ever lifting a finger?

“What if you could optimize without effort” is one of the prevailing questions of ai boosters, and I am always left wondering: what is the point of achievement without effort. www.marieclaire.com/beauty/artif...

In a new documentary, Paul Reubens, the creator of the iconic character Pee-wee Herman, comes out as gay. Our critic Wesley Morris discusses Reubens’s relationship to being closeted, and what it means for artists to publicly come out.

Watch the full video on YouTube: https://trib.al/fnFKS5G

Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World It’s a universal modern-life experience to talk about something and immediately see an ad that seems like it must be a result of that conversation....

"The truth is simpler, and not at all alarming: your phone only seems to be listening to you because it’s collecting data about every word you type, every website you visit, and, through GPS tracking, everywhere you go in the physical world."

This is an idea as vastly dumb as every person needing to learn to code. University admin so uniformly lack the intellectual and moral courage required of this moment, incapable of making an argument for their own existence.

Jesus. It's so totally totally didn't have to be like this.

University administrations are fully captured by corporate interests; we will never know the full extent of the inside deals that have plugged AI into every layer of University software contracts.

EMPHATICALLY AGREE

...Read connects the dots brilliantly; she demonstrates how many people involved in MLMs, people like Leonard Read, were free enterprise radicals: rabidly anti-communist & fanatically convinced that everyone should be participating in capitalism and its 'wealth crusade.' And Americans fell for it."

"It’s so intensely frustrating because this prosperity people were enjoying was thanks to the New Deal taxing the shit out of the wealthy and the hard-fought union contracts, often paid for in blood, that created the conditions for the minimum wage to be an actual living wage...

Amtrak state-sponsored services set ridership records in April The Borealis train saw ridership increase by 227 percent from May 2024 to April 2025 while Amtrak Virginia saw its highest ridership recorded for the month of April.

People want to ride trains.

"The Borealis train saw ridership increase by 227 percent from May 2024 to April 2025 while Amtrak Virginia saw its highest ridership recorded for the month of April."

www.masstransitmag.com/rail/article...

Print in black and white featuring two joyously leaping white women in swimming costumes with their bscks to the viewer

Joyous' by contemporary UK printmaker Sarah Morgan #WomensArt

On a remote Australian island, the birds are so full of plastic they crunch Seabirds have been fishing plastic from the ocean and feeding it to their chicks, researchers say. One bird was found to have ingested nearly 800 pieces.

Skal vi bli enige om å drastisk redusere plastforbruker vårt nå, folkens? It's crunch time. wapo.st/433SbQM

Opinion | Europe Built Trains. America Built Highways and Regret. (Gift Article) As Europe embraces the night train, the United States seems to be sleepwalking into a transport dead end.

"Europe Built Trains. America Built Highways and Regret" opinion piece by @danzep.bsky.social.

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/o...

Am I the Last Fat Person in America? - Dame Magazine What if I were the last fat person, walking through a world where my body is an anomaly, a relic of an era long past? Billboards and magazine covers show only one kind of figure—streamlined, uniform, ...

Whew. “If I really am the last fat person, I’ll fight to stand tall in this body. Not as a relic, but as proof that there’s another way to exist. I’ll try my damndest to hold my ground because I’ve learned that living authentically—in whatever body you have—is its own kind of freedom.”