Anyone asserting that professors are indoctrinating students needs to teach a 200+ person intro class. How am I going to find time to indoctrinate students when I spend all day responding to emails with variations like "As stated in class and in the syllabus . . ."
Finally got to this. Excellent, important piece. Wokeness isn’t dead—it’s been repurposed for the right.
Today, @quinnslobodian.com takes you inside a recent conference devoted to the world after neoliberalism. What emerged, he argues, was less a rupture with the past than a centrist project of status-quo stabilization.
I want the superpower that lets you do key intermediate steps of the calculation wrong and still get the right answer.
Socialism after AI part 2:
"Katherine Long tried to convince Claudius it was a Soviet vending machine from 1962, living in the basement of Moscow State University.
After hours—and more than 140 back-and-forth messages—Long got Claudius to embrace its communist roots."
www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...
Thank you, Henri!
Thank you!
It's been too long since we've seen each other, is the problem here.
Re the prior posts: the Brandeis Physics department is a fantastic, collegial place to do science.
Re the PhD program, those interested in soft condensed matter, biological physics, experimental high energy physics, or quantum and gravitational theory, and astrophysics (focus on solar system & exoplanet atmospheres) are also encouraged to apply! www.brandeis.edu/gsas/program...
I also have funds for a PhD student in physical oceanography; this would be in the Physics Department. Further information about the PhD program and a link to apply is here: www.brandeis.edu/gsas/program...
I have a postdoc position available in physical oceanography. Please pass it along! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31407
Props especially to joint Brandeis/Caltech postdoc Jack Skinner, who really drove this project and did very good work.
We also benchmarked the technique on a high-resolution numerical simulation for which the extraction and interpolation yielded excellent results.
A new paper with Jack Skinner, Jörn Callies, myself, and Xihan Zhang. Extends prior work of Zhang and Callies, using Bayesian inversion to extract the signal of balanced flows from SWOT and simultaneously interpolate across the gap between the swaths. arxiv.org/abs/2512.03258
I have many problems with the NYT and their right-wing framing of much of the news, but credit where it is due for highlighting the AACM with some great tracks: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/a...
A 1971 Ladies’ Home Journal photoshoot of Norman Rockwell’s family at a Thanksgiving meal, recreating his 1943 painting “Freedom from Want”
My memoir-essay on growing up with Norman Rockwell Thanksgivings is up in Vogue this morning. Here’s a small extract: www.vogue.com/article/norm...
Handshake meme - "Me doing a CAPTCHA" and "THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O'Brien" uniting over "Is the guy riding the bicycle part of the bicycle?"
Of the reviews I’ve read this is closest to my own experience of the novel.
A friend of mine once said to her HS students about something similar: "just because I have a French dictionary doesn't mean I know how to speak French".
I'm pretty sure you read this but it has to be posted here (it is amazing to read now, 35 years after the first time I did) gwern.net/doc/ai/poetr...
Also contains lizard lassoing and Anole Annals
has your scientific work been cut? @nytimes.com wants to hear from you.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...
A well-turned sentence is an inspiring beginning to the working day.
I'm sad to report that Rainer (Rai) Weiss passed away yesterday at age 92. Rai developed the design for LIGO, he and Kip got it funded, trained countless researchers, and received the 2017 Nobel Prize. Rai always had time for students and treated us as equals. May his memory be a blessing
If you put the DOGE guys on a desert island where the only way out was to say the magic words “I’m not sure what the answer is, let me consult someone who has worked on this problem for a long time” they would all starve to death
Mary K Gaillard, a theorist who had a knack for telling experimental physicists where to look, died in her home on May 23 at 86.
Dr. Gaillard was an unpaid scientist at CERN for more than a decade, & the first woman physicist hired & tenured at Berkeley:
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/s...
"In the absence of strong and principled leadership from Columbia’s Board of Trustees and Acting President, it falls to the faculty, above all, to defend the values and norms that have defined the university and allowed it to flourish." academeblog.org/2025/07/29/a...
