I don't know if others have already cited her in this context, but Tonia Sutherland's Resurrecting the Black Body feels even more urgent. www.ucpress.edu/books/resurr...

Thank Julia for filing this suit and getting the tool shut down almost immediately 👏🏽👏🏽

My Family Fled the Iranian Revolution. In the West’s War for “Freedom,” I See Another Crusade. As the US- and Israeli-led war in Iran continues into its second week, Arvand Khosravi, an Iranian American born in Paris, considers how we got to this moment.

www.vanityfair.com/news/story/m...

“UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has shown that deep reading, defined as sustained immersion in a text, builds the cognitive circuits required for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking in ways that skimming, scrolling and short-form video simply cannot.”

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Tweet that reads Leo Xander @STALLEON Stop taking social media so serious. Nothing here is real. Look at this chicken V - it is bigger than the car

I think about this tweet every time I feel something online start to curl its annoying little grip into my head

This hell isn't even fresh

Why do I have to pretend that I'm going to print something in order to save it as a PDF. Why do I have to engage in a little ruse.

Put me on that raft again; the first time didn’t get it done.

I want to hate-read the whole thing but can't get past the paywall :-(

The humanities cannot simultaneously be useless and moribund and also so dangerous that they are worth legally restricting.

aw, well, this is kinda sweet...
sllc.umd.edu/news/rachel-...

Cutting down the manuscript word-count to fit the journal requirements🤦🏽

Mambo No 5 by Lou Bega
None of Your Business by Salt-N-Pepa
Don't Tell Me by Madonna
Wannabe, Spice Up Your Life, Stop by Spice Girls
Smooth by Santana
Independent Woman by Destiny's Child

The Misuses of the University - Public Books Have the funds that might have trained the next generation of scholars at the nation’s first research university have been blown on ostentatious new buildings?

“The professor thinks about the trustees who approved this ostentatious facility, knowing they’d pass the bills for upkeep to future deans. He’s no fiduciary, but he wonders how responsible that is.”

Every ocean disaster story is either "they did everything right and planned perfectly then 1800 one in a million things lined up in a row to kill them" or "they rowed out 4 miles into a category 2 hurricane in a rubber dinghy with no life vests while drinking brandy from the bottle and drowned"

or just read Jack's book

bsky.app/profile/jack...

i'd kindly ask people to read American history & see, for example, where abolitionism and the 20th-century civil rights movement or even more recently moral mondays (just in the united states) came from

we don't have to accept right-wing framing (that they relish) of all religion as authoritarian

Signed away my privacy forever as a 14 year old on Instagram in 2012 yet obsessively shred my physical mail as if it’s 1980 and I’m being monitored by Soviet spies

fun fact: the people at Jawaharlal Nehru University did a research project and there is a proven correlation between which of these countries is doing more over the border shelling and which country most recently lost to the other at cricket.

American sports rivalries are nice and all, but India is about to play Pakistan in a world cup cricket match and the loser is probably going to try and start a war with the winner for the next 3 days so there's that

Trump Administration Announces That We Don’t Know Where the Sun Goes at Night After deciding carbon dioxide does no harm, it was the logical next move.

"The sun might be on the back of a big beetle—a dung beetle, maybe. (The EPA will work to determine what kind of beetle.) Where is the beetle going with it? Will the beetle bring it back?

Or maybe the witches take it." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

No hell hot enough, no guillotine sharp enough

And to you!

Happy Valentine’s Day

Kristen Bell Nah GIF ALT: Kristen Bell Nah GIF

Has this person ever been to a Costco? Safeway? Publix?

I’m beginning every panel I chair for the rest of my career with this frontal attack…

If Bad Bunny can cover the history of Puerto Rico, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, hemispheric consciousness, as well as contemporary life and politics in under 14 minutes, you can do your 15- or 20-minute conference presentation with time to spare.

"Appeasement is being coordinated while resistance is not." The perfect encapsulation of what has clearly become the systemic failure of higher-ed leadership