I'm an academic librarian and I remember this happening 10 years ago with MOOCs. A lot of people who should have known better were convinced that MOOCs were definitely the future of the academy, and anyone who didn't get on board was missing out.
You don't hear much about MOOCs anymore
I want my search engines to retrieve specific pieces of data, not craft qualitative statements!
Google AI summaries when searching quotes include literary analysis from Reddit
Sometimes I Google a portion of a quote, and I’m so glad that now Google gives me questionable literary analysis from Reddit in bold highlighted font, front and center, instead of, you know, just the complete quote or the source.
Watched the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet, and for a 30 year old unabridged adaptation of a 400 year old play, its humor and pacing somehow seems perfect for social media memes in 2026?
You basically ran a library in fifth grade, lending Goosebumps books to the entire class!
I think a lot about how there were so many things to read (newspapers, magazines, paperback books) just lying around everywhere when I was growing up. I became a fan of a lot of things because it was so easy just to pick something up and see what it was about.
The paper has been a shell of its former self for a long time, but now that even that shell is being carved up for parts. It's infuriating.
Bezos carries a lot of the blame, but also the Graham family fell for his benevolent billionaire bullshit when they made the sale, and he's been boosted for years by an army of toadies who have written unsourced articles about how Bezos "really cares about the paper."
The Post was one of the success stories of the Trump 1.0 era, and somehow its leadership managed to completely squander the good will and massive subscription influx they earned, chasing weird AI curios and clickbait op-ed writers instead.
We probably learned it at the exact same time then!
(Actually I think I learned CATAMITE from my high school’s production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which is kind of messed up)
English words I learned reading fantasy novels that I’m annoyed are not accepted by the NYTimes Spelling Bee:
ABATTOIR
ATTAINT
CATAMITE
I am sure this will be a list in progress.
Fair! And JustWatch is often unreliable at the beginning of any given month, when rights change or expire.
Stuff like this makes me miss when Netflix rented physical discs and just had everything.
JustWatch is the site to use. The streaming services are not necessarily trying to trick you; lots of services have the rights to movies in one country but not another
Other formats have their place but no one should read a book called "The Dragon Reborn" at the beach during summer vacation in hardback, get over yourselves.
I grew up reading Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin mass market paperbacks. They cost like $5 and were all 1500 pages and fell apart under their own weight the minute you opened them. It remains the best format for a book.
What the fuck, no one asked me about this www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...
Wikipedia: Encyclopedias should practice editorial neutrality!
Century-old subject encyclopedias: Your favorite composer was, let's say, "melodically insignificant."
Grove has harsh words about the composer Domenico Campisi
Every so often the Grove Dictionary of Music absolutely throws some poor obscure 17th century composer under the bus
The beacons are lit! Gondor calls for aid!
Hell yeah, Philip, now repeat it 400 more times while the chordal structure slowly shifts.
One of my college roommates friended every Hatfield and McCoy on Facebook in 2005 and let them fight each other on his profile page, and I think we should have shut down all social media after that.
Anyway, some people support progressive ideas in the abstract but turn into irate conservatives the minute their lives are affected in any way. Not sure what to do about that! It sucks that political allegiance in 2026 exists more as set of vague cultural signifiers than as real moral values!
NIMBY commenter leaves a NIMBY comment
90% of the city's population votes Democrat. It's statistically likely this commenter is the sort of person who has a "hate has no home here" yard sign and votes blue no matter who, etc.
There are real debates to be had about the inefficiencies of the city's housing voucher system, or if the city is more interested in good short-term numbers than fixing chronic problems, but these people aren't really interested in those debates, they just don't want to interact with poor people.
One of the things I have learned living in DC is that there is a class of nominally "progressive" people who also believe they have a right to never have to interact with a poor person. www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...
Chris' Top 15 movies on Letterboxd
Current Top 15, although I move some of these around like every day
A lot of “impressive but flawed” movies in this year’s crop (Sinners, Bugonia, The Secret Agent), but there’s nothing I recoil from as much as Emilia Pérez or Wicked, so I’ll consider that a win.
