Noodlings

Weekly Varia no. 19

Posted on March 25, 2023March 24, 2023 by Josh Nudell

This was the first week back from Spring Break, which means that the semester kicked back into gear. My bracket is truly busted, the NBA playoffs are right around the corner, and I have been spending a few minutes most evenings getting ready for my fantasy baseball draft next week.

But between the usual run of activities, I also found myself thinking about a line from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

I am perpetually enamored of the idea of book clubs, but I don’t usually participate in them, probably because I don’t like relinquishing the control over what I read and I find that either I love a book enough that I want to pace my reading or I dislike it enough that I don’t want to finish. However, a few weeks ago my wife and I decided to start a paired read where we read an agreed upon amount over the course of the week, which we can then discuss over a bottle of wine on the weekend. Our first read is Midnight’s Children. A line from this week’s section struck a chord with some of the other topics I’ve been thinking about recently, which meant that we spent a few minutes mulling its meaning:

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all of the time.

The sentiment holds even truer in this age of social media. This is not to denigrate context or perspective, but I also find it easy to get overwhelmed. Too easy. Context and perspective is important, but everyone needs to remember to close their eyes from time to time, too.

This week’s varia:

Pasts Imperfect features ancient marijuana (and other psychoactive substances) this week.
Charles Kenneth Roberts has a blog post highlighting how “quiet quitting” in an academic context is better defined as faculty burnout because the old academic social contract are being broken. Where, before, academics traded relatively low and periods of extreme work for perks like job security, control over their work, and respect (for instance), those perks are rapidly retreating.
Studies Weekly has revised school materials to comply with new Florida laws. The new materials strip all reference to race from lesson plans on Rosa Parks, rendering the episode toothless. Rosa Parks was told to move (for no particular reason) and she should be honored because “she did what she believed was right.” Removing any mention of Jim Crow laws and racial animus that sparked the confrontation is bad enough, but it almost bothers me more to see the latter sentiment being taught. She ought to be held up as an exemplar because her act of civil disobedience was part of a long struggle for equity in a deeply unequal society. The fact that she believed it right is true enough, but it also elevates the virtue of the individual actor following their beliefs to the highest order of good. Not only does this obscure the boycott that lasted for more than a year after Parks’s arrest (and the expansion of the White Citizens Council and violence that accompanied that boycott), but if all you have to praise Parks with is this sort of anodyne pablum, one might deploy the same argument about belief in what one believes is right about any number of genocidal sociopaths. This is in fact one of the exact examples I give my students about the importance of specificity in writing.
A public charter school (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) in Florida (checks out) popular with Christian Conservatives removed its principal after sixth grade students were shown a picture of Michelangelo’s David, on the grounds that the image was “pornographic.” I think the teacher also made a pedagogical mistake because she felt compelled to tell the students that the image was “not-pornographic,” which only drew attention to the nudity and accelerated the snowball—especially in the current political environment. (Speaking from experience: I assign material with nudity and sex in it in a college setting, but don’t usually focus on those aspects, except one semester a couple years back when I fumbled my discussion of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break in class, which led a disgruntled student to accuse me of assigning “pornography” to the class in the course evaluations.) Dan Kois in Slate has an interview with the chair of the school’s board in which he admits that the problem is that Michelangelo included the naught bits, in so many words. It is almost as though the people most interested in “Classical Education” want nothing of the sort, but use it to give cover for a desire to impose their own small-minded world view on everyone else.
Frustrated with book bans, a Utah parent challenged school libraries including the bible, not on separation of church and state grounds, but because the book contains numerous lewd and “pornographic” episodes. Which, yes.
Ibram X. Kendi has a piece in The Atlantic about how “intellectual” (like “academic”) is a term often coded traditional and conservative in ways that support the white status quo, writing “Intellectual neutrality of the sort pushed by those wishing to create a veil of historical amnesia that allows bigotry to endure.” I have seen some fair critiques of this piece that Kendi is creating something of a straw man that casts him as the first “non-neutral” public intellectual (Howard Zinn’s autobiography is titled You can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train, for crying out loud), but I think there is something deeper to the issues that he’s pointing at, both in the sense that his antiracism is a re-articulation of Zinn’s thesis and because the age of social media is creating a crisis of identity for the public intellectual. I’m not entirely satisfied with Kendi’s answer, but he’s asking an important question.
The Guardian has a piece focusing on the Met Museum’s acquisition practice and their ties to looting. The article uses the Met as a jumping-off point to a larger conversation about ethical museum collecting and the repatriation of artifacts.
Jason Kehe in Wired has a curious profile of Brandon Sanderson in which he profiles the author seemingly determined to answer the questions of whether Sanderson is a “good writer” and if the answer is “no” (as Kehe seems pre-determined to answer) why is he so dang successful without being a household name. The profile is strange for a bunch of reasons, not only because he seems disappointed by the lack of story that he found in reporting the piece (as Sanderson pointed out on Reddit), but also because the essay is laced with belittling commentary about Utah food, some Mormon cracks, and befuddlement at the people who like Sanderson’s books. I (and, frankly, Sanderson) will be happy to tell you that the strength of his books is not the style of his prose, but the books often contain thematic elements (Mormon, yes, but also more broadly human) with more heft than Kehe credits and given that best-seller lists are always filled with lists of reliable and entertaining books that are not lyrically-crafted makes the framing of the article about whether Sanderson baffling choice in its own right.
In Politico, a piece profiling The Federalist Society, detailing a worrying trend that I have also seen floating around online: skepticism about democracy. In this case it is not only Democratic victories, but also a disdain for Trumpism that drives the shift.
Ron DeSantis asked state lawmakers to allocate $100 million to the budget for the “State Guard,” a unit supplemental to the State National Guard for use at the discretion of governor. But he is also proposing to arm this force and grant them police authority beyond how other states use equivalent units.
The latest in strong-arm political tactics, an Indian court sentenced Rahul Gandhi, an MP and opposition leader, to two years in prison for defamation, based on a speech at a political rally in which he quipped that there are many corrupt Modis in India, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The case was brought by another politician from the ruling party, Purnesh Modi, who claimed that the statement defamed the “Modi community” (there is no community named Modi).
A piece from NPR about how Silicon Valley Bank’s reliance on the usually-secure Federal Bonds to cover its assets became a liability over the last year.
Starting April 1, Twitter is phasing out legacy verified status, while also allowing subscribers to hide their blue check marks of shame.

Album of the Week: Dessa, Parts of Speech (2014)

Currently Reading: S.A. Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Emma Southon, Agrippina, Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

My wife informs me that this picture captures our respective personalities. I look tired and resigned, while Merlin is taking up as much space as possible in an attempt to be cute.

Elder Race

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Josh Nudell

It’s always a shock, when I look on them the first time after waking. I forget how their stock and mine have diverged since the first colony ships left Earth. She is closer to baseline than I, but then the second great rise of Earth culture was one of grandiose ambitions and a refusal to accept limits, even the limits of human form. I am much altered from my ancestors, within and without, and these post-colonial natives have changed little.

Nyrgoth Elder was seven feet tall, gaunt, clad in slate robes that glittered with golden sigils, intricate beyond the dreams of tailors. Lyn imagined a legion of tiny imps sewing that rich quilted fabric with precious metal, every tiny convolution fierce with occult meaning.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race belongs to a long tradition of Science Fiction that doubles as speculative anthropology, and this book would be right at home among the Hainish novels by this sub-genre’s master, Ursula Le Guin.

The book opens with a chapter told from the point of view of Lynesse Fourth Daughter, the younger daughter from the ruling house of the small kingdom of Lannesite who has taken it upon herself to seek out the sorcerer Nyrgoth Elder in his isolated tower in order to invoke an ancient compact that he would help in a moment of need. Her mother might not be moved to act, but a threat is indeed upon the world.

The second chapter introduces the central conceit of the novel.

The ancient being Lynesse calls Nyrgoth Elder is a man named Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist and the last remaining member of Earth’s Explorer Corps on Sophos 4, part of a mission to study how the first wave of human colonists had evolved in the thousands of years since their departure from earth. As a good* anthropologist, Nyr commits himself to non-intervention, but that line becomes harder and harder to hold to through the lonely centuries, even with his Dissociative Cognition System—a technological device that allows him to set his feelings aside to deal with later—activited.

Both characters undergo the same set of developments, but their experience diverges quite dramatically, since, as Arthur C. Clarke’s third law goes, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Nyr cannot explain his scientific understanding of the universe without Lynesse interpreting it as magic. Tchaikovsky’s achievement in the novel is to represent both the wonder and bafflement coming from both sides, especially in the chapter in the middle of the novel where both narrators relate the epic tale of the last time Nyr ventured from the tower, riding to war with Lynesse’s ancestor, at least in the version the Lynesse tells.

But where Lynesse is driven by her quest reminiscent of traditional fantasy stories with a young, naive protagonist, Nyr’s struggle is an interior one, against both the feelings of being an inadequate anthropologist since he is now intervening in the evolution of the subject population and the crushing loneliness of centuries isolated from every other human being.

“Forgive me, Elder. If not the monster, then there is some other foe in the world that causes you concern?” The thought was dire, and yet there was something weighing on him, and surely one did not become a great sorcerer without making great enemies.

And so she wanted to know why I looked sad, and I explained that it was basically a long-term mental state and that it was all under control, but that didn’t seem to be what she heard. And of course they don’t have a precise word for “clinical depression” or anything like that.

In contrast to these themes, the plot of Elder Race is quite simple. A quest pulls Nyr from his castle to investigate the rumors of an insidious plague that threatens life on the planet. He isn’t really supposed to intervene, but nevertheless agrees to help Lynesse. But the origin and nature of that threat, let alone any question of whether they are going to triumph, are not the focus of the book. It it is a perfectly competent plot, but one that does not go much for subtlety or misdirection. Instead, Tchaikovsky layers these two dissonant perspectives atop this simple narrative in order to explore more fundamental themes of human experience.

Elder Race is a short read (about 200 pages), and I loved every bit of it, enough so that I suspect that I will be seeking out his other work in the not-so-distant future.

ΔΔΔ

My reading remains ahead of my writing about books. Since my last review post, I finished three books other than this one: Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction, a manifesto about the importance of biological diversity, Lee Child’s Tripwire, which is a perfectly competent thriller that shows every sign of Child’s formulaic process, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives, which was thoroughgoing Nobel fare: a family story that traces the consequences of colonialism in Tanzania before and after World War 1. Inspired by a run of recommendation requests (four in the past two weeks), I also just re-read Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members.

Weekly Varia no. 18, 03/18/23

Posted on March 18, 2023March 18, 2023 by Josh Nudell

This week was Spring Break. I have never been one for “spring break” trips, both because of personal inclination and financial considerations. But, this year, we used the break for the second trip to bring wedding festivities to our family. Members of both of our families met up in Las Cruses, New Mexico, which we used as a base for exploring the Organ Mountains, White Sands, Mesilla, and other local attractions. I would particularly recommend the Zuhl Collection at New Mexico State University, which contained just a spectacular collection of petrified wood and fossils.

The combination of travel and family meant that my break hasn’t been as restful as I had hoped, but it was restorative in other ways. One of my brothers made it to this trip and I hadn’t seen him since before the pandemic started because the last two planned attempts were both disrupted by COVID. Likewise, we were able to visit friends in El Paso and see their first child who was born last year. Despite having every intention of maintaining a modestly productive routine I mostly spent my downtime at our AirBnB reading such that I finished three books and part of a fourth within the week. I can feel the words starting to burble beneath the surface again, but they’re not ready to burst forth just yet.

Now I’m back in chilly Kirksville. Yesterday I finished grading my outstanding assignments and this weekend I will be spending the time between naps putting the rest of my course materials in order for the coming week. In other words, a pretty normal weekend.

This week’s varia:

Judge Kyle Duncan spoke at Stanford where, conservative commentators claim, he was “cancelled” by student protests. Students did protest at the event by asking him pointed questions, but they also settled in to allow him to deliver his prepared responses when he decided to pivot to question and answer and proceeded to berate the students who asked questions. Mark Joseph Stern suggests that this was Duncan’s intent all along, as an audition that would raise his profile onto a short list for the Supreme Court under the next Republican administration. Ken White (Popehat) is disgusted with everyone involved in the incident. I’m inclined to side with him in the sense that responding in kind to deliberate provocation is entirely counter-productive, which is why I have been developing a non-engagement policy on social media.
Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell fame has a design column at The Nation. The first installment explores the rise of what she calls “griege” (gray + beige) aesthetic. She argues that it has become the dominant mode because of a confluence of factors, most notably the digital unreality of online realty and that many buyers are looking for an investment and thus are thinking about resale before ever completing the purchase.
A home Zillow valued at $417,000 on the Outer Banks of North Carolina fell into the sea last week, leaving a 21-mile long debris trail. This marks the fourth such home in the last 13 months. The effects of climate change are already here.
The Biden Administration is pushing for TikTok to be sold or else face a ban in the United states because of its link to the Chinese Government. This story follows the comments from a TikTok spokesperson, but it also came out this week that the company had used the location data of US journalists to try to determine who had been talking to them.
Pro Publica has video and a story about the rise of Teneo, a conservative influence group funded by Leonard Leo. I am always struck by the conspiracy-minded nature of these groups, where they justify their own conspiracy by claiming the existence of a preexisting structure among their perceived enemies. Of course their examples rely on faceless archetypes rather than concrete examples because such a conspiracy doesn’t exist.
Police departments have not been defunded, but, like in many other sectors, large departments are suffering from staffing shortages. This is leading to departments like that of New Orleans to realize that they need to re-tool their mandate so that they can focus on the worst types of crime and other, less dangerous, responsibilities can be passed to non-police agencies.
Federal regulators saw problem after problem at Silicon Valley Bank more than a year ago, but acted too slowly to correct the problems. Embedded in that same story is a note about how SVB grew expansively after the rollback of the Dodd-Frank regulations. Correlation is not necessarily causation, though, and this story implies that existing regulations should have caught the problem. I am still inclined to believe that there were overlapping causes of SVB’s collapse, including regulatory failure, the particular spending practices of venture-capital funded startups, a sudden tightening of the bond market, and the particular makeup of SVB’s depositors that had an unusually-high percentage of very large accounts that made the bank vulnerable to runs.
Former President Trump took to social media to say that he expects to be notified of an indictment next week, including in the statement comments to his supports akin to the ones he said on January 6, 2021. The little commentary I’ve seen indicates that this stems from a probe into the Stormy Daniels payoff, but this could well be rampant speculation at this point.
The city of Newark performed a ceremony to inaugurate a sister city arrangement with the Hindu nation Kailasa, which doesn’t exist. Kailasa was invented by Swami Nithyananda, an Indian scam artist on the run from rape charges.
A Maine resident is appealing a rejected vanity licence plate “LUVTOFU,” saying that he’s a vegan.
ChatGPT Starting To Think Journalist Could One Day Be Capable Of Independent Thought (The Onion).

Album of the Week: Jukebox the Ghost, I Got a Girl EP (2022)

Currently Reading: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives

Compressed Iron, from the Zuhl Collection

Pyritized sea life from the Mesozoic era

Weekly Varia no. 17, 03/11/23

Posted on March 11, 2023March 10, 2023 by Josh Nudell

This was a big week for me because my first book was officially released. I will have an update on what comes next for my writing soon enough, but, first, I have to get through this semester. This week marked the end of the first half of the spring semester. Flowers are starting to pop up around Kirksville, but I mostly didn’t get to enjoy them because I was busy trying to finish a round of grading so that I had one less thing to do over the next week. I didn’t quite meet my goals because my week filled up with meeting after meeting as everyone tried to squeeze in one more thing before break. Still, I got close enough that I should be able to take a much needed few days off over the next week.

This week’s varia:

Pasts Imperfect this week came early to align with Purim. The lead story is Jordan Rosenbaum unpacking the history of Hamantaschen, concluding that the traditional cookie is indeed symbolic, but comes from a different part of the figure of Esther and represents neither Haman nor a hat.
Javal Coleman writes in the SCS Blog about being the only Black person in a Classics Department. This is a great piece about belonging and the modern propensity to define black people as outside rather than the ancient tendency for inclusion. I read this when it first came out two weeks ago and meant to include it in a previous wrap-up but failed to do so.
Matt Gabriele brings an old blog post to Modern Medieval, in which he critiques the idea of a meaningful distinction between “public” and “academic” scholarship in terms of what we are actually doing (rather than genre conventions and tone). He notes that this is a blog post. from 2015, but is again timely in light of a recent New Yorker story dredging up last year’s controversy about “public history,” which had the former president of the American Historical Association, James Sweet, airing his grievances against trained historians who engage the public online. The piece is not worth linking to, but, like his jeremiads last year in his presidential column in Perspectives, Sweet’s willingness to air his grievances against younger, tenuously-employed generations is a dispiriting omen about the future of the profession given that a) he is hardly the only senior scholar to feel this way, and b) far from confronting the fact that the field is under attack—thus foreclosing an academic home for those people he lamented were simply Tweeting away—it gives more fuel to those people doing the attacking.
Bill Caraher weighs in on ChatGPT. I appreciate his willingness to express what he does not know, and see some sense in his suggestion that ChatGPT and similar products might be able to replace remediation for students who understand the material in every way except the writing. I’m not sure I agree in whole, but he’s right that there is a cost for both the student and the teacher when you need to take time doing what is effectively remedial work, and I have often found that campus writing centers are only so helpful when students need this sort of foundational help. He followed it up with a thoughtful post on paywalls, publishing, and AI aggregation.
Paul Thomas has a discussion of ChatGPT, but through the lens of citation in the sense that it (and the new I.B. guidelines) has added another layer to the cognitive load that comes with citation. His position here is also rooted in the chaos of trying to teach and unteach nitpicky citation style (rather than hyperlinks, which would only work for some fields, even at a future date), which prompt students to get distracted from the process and meaning of citation in the name of accurate formatting. I’m certainly sympathetic to that frustration.
A new study is claiming that there was no exacerbation of mental health crises during the pandemic, which they concluded by excluding from the study lower-income countries or study the effects on younger groups or anyone who was already prone to mental illness. This might be correct within the bounds of the study, but only by generalizing so much that it masks a more accurate representation of what happened. This also might speak to the human capacity for resilience and forgetting. For my part, I’m still waiting for the period of lockdown boredom I was promised.
Elon Musk is reportedly planning his own town in Texas. I don’t like giving the man air time, but something about the Wall Street Journal headline (I can’t read the whole part because I’m not a subscriber) touched a nerve. Company towns are not utopias, and we should be very wary of the latest return to a Gilded Age labor environment, alongside…
Arkansas became the latest state to facilitate child labor.
From NPR, a story about a Medicaid requirement that if a person receiving treatment under the program dies, the state government is supposed to recoup the amount spent from the estate. Some states do this in a pro-forma way and collect almost nothing or set relatively high income thresholds, while states like Iowa contract the task out and aggressively recoup the costs—including by seizing the home. Even with carve-outs for spouses and disabled children that can defer collection, this seems to be an exercise of cruelty in the name of fiscal responsibility.
More and more companies are admitting that the recent “emergencies” are excuses to increase prices even when it is not strictly necessary to keep up with rising costs, and prices in these situations tend not to go back down.
Silicon Valley Bank, a bank that services many tech startups, collapsed after a panic this week. SVB pursued “Venture Debt,” where provides money for those startups, but the companies were spending much more money than anticipated. Not for nothing, this collapse also follows just a few years after another round of banking deregulation.
The BBC has decided not to air and episode from the latest David Attenborough program because it includes themes of environmental destruction and they fear right-wing backlash. Not only is this a travesty, but Attenborough’s work has featured these issues for years, so it isn’t as though this is a new development.
RIP Tevye the Milkman.
Some Toblerone packaging is going to have to drop the Matterhorn from its packaging because the company is moving part of its production to Slovakia, thus violating Swiss rules on “Swissness.” This AP piece has a neat trivia point, too, that the name is a neologism that blends the founder’s name (Theodor Tobler) with the Italian word for nougat (torrone).

Album of the Week: Moscow Philharmonic, Russian Easter Festival Op. 36 (Tchaikovsky Symphony no. 5 and Rimsky-Korsakov Russian Easter Festival Overture, a.k.a. grading music)

Currently Reading: Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (it was a long week of grading)

Hamantaschen two ways: cherry and poppyseed.

Libby in full fighting form (on her back, yelling)

Publication Day

Posted on March 8, 2023 by Josh Nudell

The day has arrived. By which I mean it arrived yesterday, but I was neck deep in grading and trying to avoid Twitter so I missed the publisher’s Tweet.

Not important.

The important thing is that my book has officially been released from the University of Michigan Press. This means that it is available for purchase and also to read as an open access scholarly resource. Academic books usually have short print runs, sell relatively few copies, and represent a deep investment of tens of thousands of dollars over the course of years to produce, even without lucrative contracts for the authors. This is why most publishers require authors to offset the publisher’s cost with grants and research funds in order to have their work appear open-access, and I am immensely grateful to UM Press for offering me the chance to participate in a new initiative to make a larger number of books accessible this way.

If I’m being honest, this day is more than a little intimidating. This book is a substantially revised (and improved) version of my dissertation research that began about a decade ago and that I carried on through both years of underemployment and the pandemic. I still managed to write the book I wanted to write and I am proud of the final product, but the circumstances under which I was writing created hurdles to getting there—on top of the usual anxieties like imposter syndrome. The little voice in my head who worries about how my scholarship will be received is pacing anxiously, slightly muting my excitement at having it out in the world.

But this is a concern for another day. Today, I am celebrating a personal writing milestone, and I hope that my book gives people a lot to think about.

Weekly Varia no. 16, 03/04/23

Posted on March 4, 2023March 3, 2023 by Josh Nudell

Every semester in an academic calendar has its own rhythms. Fall starts with energy and excitement created by a lengthier summer hiatus before usually turning into a race to Thanksgiving and a coda that is the final few weeks. Summer is both more frenetic thanks for the shorter terms and more laid back because everyone is working on a smaller number of courses at a time. Spring, by contrast, starts with everyone still not quite recovered from the fall, but is also divided more neatly into two separate arcs, one leading up to the spring break, and one from there to the end of the semester.

I like the shorter arcs of the spring semester in theory. But I have also been reminded again this week, the penultimate before break, that so much of exhaustion, stress, and burnout are bigger systemic problems, which has prompted me to dramatically overhaul the schedule for one of my classes in particular in order to align my expectations, what my students can handle, and the course outcomes. Fortunately, I overbuilt the latter, so I can do almost anything in the back half of the course and still meet every objective.

At the same time, though, I don’t relish the thought of adding this to my to-do list. While I don’t have an obscene number of students this semester (despite two of my classes being mildly over-enrolled), I am already teaching three new courses, with the one that I am now retrofitting mid-flight being the one I had expected to be able to leave on autopilot while I tended to the others. Naturally.

At the same time, I discovered just how many groups I’m involved in decided that we need to squeeze whatever we’re doing in before break, leading to quite a crunch on my time.

Reader, I am tired.

I’ll make it through this week and through the rest of the semester after that, but the feeling of exhaustion that swept over me when I resolved to make these changes reminded me of this piece about John Fetterman, depression, and the requirement for politicians to always be “on.” Despite the reputation that professors are callous, impatient, and disinterested in engaging with students, or perhaps because of it, I saw a parallel in always being on. I might be a dozen anxieties in a trench coat making things up as I go along (an exaggeration on all fronts, but with a hint of truth), but I am supposed to be approachable and welcoming to students, timely in my feedback on student work, prepared with my class material, and present in my classes (though I had a…memorable…professor in undergrad who was frequently absent with no notification), on top of being an expert in the content and a responsible colleague to my coworkers.

This week’s varia:

Hannah Čulík-Baird returns to blogging with a post that consists of two fragments, one on fragments as nodes of interconnection both horizontally and vertically and about academic voice. Full disclosure: I get a shout-out in the post as an inspiration for the return based on intermittent, ongoing conversations Hannah and I have had about academic writing and academic voice across multiple social media platforms.
Charles Roberts has a blog post pointing out that the issues of student engagement are the consequence of larger structural factors that professors are now being asked to solve without the training or support to do so. He has a note about how dispiriting it is to hear an accreditor devalue the teaching that professors do, which, yes. as I keep saying about ChatGPT, this sort of language is toxic and sets establishes dangerous misunderstandings that I think set students up to fail in the long run.
The International Baccalaureate program in the UK is going to allow students to use AI programs if they cite e.g. ChatGPT as a source. This is an unbelievably dumb policy that completely misunderstands what ChatGPT is. The director claims that they created the policy because he thinks it is more valuable for students to learn to critique essays that to learn to do it themselves, which I find is an absurd premise given that doing one at least to a certain level is required to do the other. I’m dreading how decisions like this are going to create headaches for me down the road.
Jonathan Wilson writes about the challenges of creating a one-size-fits-all (students and teachers) model for flexible deadlines. I also share his concern about the frequency of students using avoidance as the primary coping strategy for students in distress. In addition to avoidance leading to more avoidance, I often find that it causes work to pile up to the point that it is unmanageable and students will further avoid me because they’re convinced that they have to turn all back work in at once in order to participate in the class and earn my respect—no matter how many times I tell them otherwise and try to help create manageable timelines for getting their missing work in.
Given a new round of commentary about campus cancel culture, I saw circulating a Teen Vogue op-ed from 2021 that I missed at the time arguing that colleges and universities are conservative institutions—for many reasons, not the least of which is that the existing fiscal structure of the universities often demands a conservative approach to budgeting and, the larger the endowment, the more the entity functions like a hedge-fund with a vestigial educational institution attached. As a complete tangent, my favorite part of this article is not the content, but the form. This opening paragraph is exactly what I want to see in an introduction. It has a hook, context, and concludes with a clear, coherent thesis that organizes the rest of the piece. A+.
From the Vermont Digger: the girl’s basketball team from Mid Vermont Christian School forfeited their game in the state D4 basketball tournament rather than play against Long Trail because the latter team had a trans player. The school also applied to the state to be able to receive public tuition money while being exempted from anti-discrimination regulations. This is an abominable position, but one that is all too common these days. To receive public money, you should have to be in compliance with state rules on issues of discrimination.
The Montana state legislature is debating a bill that would ban anyone who received a COVID vaccine from giving blood. Opponents of this bill say that it will lead to an 80% drop in blood donations, thus creating a new public health crisis.
A Republican lawmaker in Florida introduced a bill requiring that any blogger or other writer who does stories about the Governor or other executive officials register with the state or face a fine. Just the latest proposal to curtail civil liberties in the name of strangling political opposition coming out of that state.
A white-supremacist Lutheran who believes that Hitler went to heaven and views the world in Manichean terms where either you believe in White supremacy and Fascism or you believe in Marxism is trying to gain control of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. This synod is already an extremely conservative denomination, but he wants to turn it into an alt-right organization. I hate it here.
Bari Weiss “reported” last month about a whistleblower at a clinic in St. Louis that offers care to transgender teens, ginning up an enormous amount of outrage and potential political action against the clinic. Parents of the patients, the patients themselves, and the clinic are speaking out against the allegations, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. After the previous four links, adding this one runs the risk of seeming like I’m beating a dead horse, but…
Two trains collided in northern Thessaly (Greece), killing more than 40 people. This is an awful tragedy and critics are pointing out that like the aging infrastructure that caused the crash in East Palestine, Ohio, the train network in Greece is in need of overhaul, even if some of the blame here falls on human error.
Pizza acrobatics are a sport. There are competitions, and the Washington Post profiled the 13-time world champion, Tony Gemignani. I’d personally rather eat the pizza.

Album of the week: The Barefoot Movement, “Pressing Onward” (2021)

Currently Reading: Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Nikolaus Leo Overtoom, Reign of Arrows

https://vtdigger.org/2023/02/27/mid-vermont-christian-school-girls-basketball-forfeits-playoff-game-rather-than-compete-against-team-with-transgender-player/

Hanging Out

Posted on March 2, 2023March 2, 2023 by Josh Nudell

Hanging out is about daring to do nothing much and, even more than that, about daring to do it in the company others….Regardless of the specific occasion, though, or of the amount of planning that has gone into creating it, the objective is the same: it’s about blocking out time and dedicating it to the work of interacting with other people, whoever they might be.

The fight for hanging out is the fight for inclusive access to scenes and places like the ones I have been description. and it starts with recognizing that hanging out at, or around, or in the context of work is, in essence, work.

I started my current job in a world shaped by COVID-19. We had a campus mask mandate, still, and students were coming off more than a year where their educational experience was shaped by trying to keep people separate from one another in the name of limiting disease transmission. One of the most pronounced effects of this caesura was the abandonment of study spaces in academic buildings. Even the library seemed abandoned that year. My building has numerous comfortable chairs and tables in little nooks that never seemed occupied.

By a happy accident, the exception to this general observation took place immediately outside my office where you could usually find several history majors in their final year occupying the four chairs. Sometimes they would be reading or working on papers, but other times they were just there to hang out. I never had any of these students in my class, but I got to know them pretty well and often offered informal mentoring. I liked that their presence made campus feel a little more vibrant—and I could always close my office door if they became too distracting.

Last semester their numbers dwindled to one. As much as I like that one student (another whom I have never had in class), the change me realize how much I missed their presence.

So I started hosting small gatherings.

I bring baked goods and offer them tea. These started as ad hoc affairs on Friday afternoons, that I have now made a standing part of my office hours once a week. There have been weeks recently where I have been too distracted to do much more than offer the food and drink and attendance fluctuates week by week, but there are 6 or 8 regular attendees and I have had several faculty members comment how much they enjoy seeing these gatherings. There is no agenda for these gatherings, nor expectations. Students can grab me for “regular” office hours activities, chat with me informally, read a book, or just hang out with anyone else who shows up. My only objective is to invite students into the building.

If I needed validation for these gatherings, Shiela Liming’s new book Hanging Out is just that.

At its heart, Hanging Out, subtitled The Radical Power of Killing Time, is a manifesto about resisting the encroachment of productivity culture. Rat-race culture is hardly new. Long before the advent of the internet, critics in the late 19th and early 20th century already complained that the pace of life was too fast, as Randall Monroe of XKCD once observed. However, Liming contends that the last twenty or so years have marked a dangerous acceleration of these trends, combined with the rise of media that allows us to simulate connection while simultaneously eliding the realities of physical space. Liming declares, “We were having a hard time hanging out well before COVID-19 came along and made hanging out hard” (xii). Thus, Hanging Out serves as a call to action, to reclaim the power to resist the the forces that grind us to dust.

The seven chapters of Hanging Out each centers a different type of hanging out—at parties, with strangers, jamming, on TV, on the job, at dinner parties, and on the internet—that allow Liming to tell one or more stories connected to her experience in that context. Every chapter is engaging enough, even if you have never, say, become friends and thus hung out with someone whose Food Network show replicates the experience of conviviality for viewers all over the country, or played bagpipe and accordion with not one but two bands in the Pittsburgh-area bands. But in each case, Liming’s broad perspective on hanging out reinforces the central message that hanging out can take place almost anywhere and the willingness to do so has a rejuvenating power.

Compared to the two examples above, Liming’s chapter on hanging out at work struck a particular note with me. This chapter blends two examples, working a bar job somewhere without much else to do and the academic conference. The latter part particularly struck a note with me, as someone who has a love-hate relationship with these events. Conferences are where academics go to present papers, network, and see friends. The share of the pie chart for each varies by the person. These can also be intimidating, isolating venues for young scholars, impossibly priced for contingent faculty, and places where “known creeps” like to turn the space hostile. Liming describes how the worst experience of her conference life spurred her to be more fully present at this conference and to commit to hanging out, those creeps be damned.

Liming describes this hanging out and the experience of rounding up an audience to hear a graduate student talk with a certain panache, but what she describes is not an easy thing to do. These can be big conferences with a bewildering number of famous and important people in your corner of academia, which can easily lead one to travel in your pack, prowling rooms and events to see if you know anyone there—and turning away if you don’t. I have presented to a room with only my panelists for audience members and delivered a paper immediately after a significant portion of the audience walked out of the room, their colleague having presented the paper before mine. I attended my first AIA-SCS conference (the big professional organization in my field) back in 2011, before the latter organization took its current name. While I started to acquire “conference friends” pretty quickly, it was only this year where I felt like I’d reached a critical mass of contacts that it seemed like I knew someone in any room I stepped into, and, even then, I met a ton of new folks or made physical connection with digital friends. However, the fact that I knew this many people made me feel all the more responsible for inviting other people into the space—especially since one of the first-time attendees was one of our undergrads. Because the reality is that hanging out in a space like this is how cross-pollination of ideas works. Nothing might happen over a coffee or drink or at that reception, but it builds out a rolodex that can result in anything from more hanging out, to an introduction to a friend of a friend, to opportunities to collaborate on future ventures.

“Hanging Out on the Internet” was the only chapter where Liming lost me, but only a little bit. She uses this chapter as an extended discussion of the Sublime, which she argues is impossible online because the digital works exists as a purely human creation. Further, she takes issue with “hanging out” online in two ways. First, the digital world creates the illusion of proximity in a way that ironically heightens the absence, while, second, the process of “searching” and curating one’s experience online is antithetical to the (sublime) power of physical chance.

I disagree with none of this.

However, hanging out in the sense that Liming calls for also requires reciprocity. I love physical mail, but a one-sided letter delivery is not much of a correspondence and I have found that the rise of digital technologies have allowed for the rekindling or perpetuation of friendships that started or bloomed in the physical world, but would have otherwise faded. These are not a replacement for friendships or activities in the analog world, but a valuable supplement to them.

The underlying message in Hanging Out is not that different from Oliver Burkemann’s Four Thousand Weeks or Jonathan Malesic’s The End of Burnout, but with a key twist. Where both Burkemann and Malesic focus on work culture, Liming wants us to consider seriously the work involved in not-work.

ΔΔΔ

I have once again fallen way behind on writing about books here, both because I am in the midst of another busy semester and because I haven’t had substantial-enough thoughts to share about a number of the books. For instance, over the last month I have read Archer Mayor’s Bury the Lead and Mick Herron’s Spook Street, both installments in series, as well as Brandon Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea, which is the first of his “secret” novels he ran a Kickstarter for last year. I might have something to say about Tress, but less as a novel and more about Sanderson’s larger Cosmere project. I also read Fonda Lee’s Jade War, which I didn’t like nearly as much as the first in the series (and not just for second book reasons, though I expect I’ll read the third) and Percival Everett’s Dr. No, which was amusing enough but didn’t elicit a particularly strong reaction from me. Ironically, this is how I feel about a lot of “literary” authors. On the other end of the spectrum, I read Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath right as the semester started and while I liked a lot of the ideas I found myself having a hard time engaging with the story, which might have also been a function of my brain space so far this semester. In fact, the only book in my backlog that I know I want to write about is Marissa R. Moss’ Her Country, which is a discussion of country music industry and the recent wave of female artists who took it by storm.

I am currently reading Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction an about to start a buddy read of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children with my wife.

Inventing Utopia

Posted on February 26, 2023February 25, 2023 by Josh Nudell

This week in my speculative fiction first-year seminar we have been working through a mini-unit on Utopias and Utopian thinking.

On Monday, I gave in lecture a “brief history of Utopian thinking” (I tried to name as many daily topics as possible like they were episode titles from Community). We started with a breakdown of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and the society therein, but then explored both earlier examples like the Golden Age of Man in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Plato’s Republic, and historical attempts to create these communities like the Shakers and the Oneida Community. That day concluded with a discussion of what utopias do, both in terms of social critique of the present and imagining a better future. We haven’t yet talked about Atlantis and Atlantean-type stories as Utopias because I (mistakenly) put it at the end of this unit, but the next time I teach this class, I’m going to move that day to put it more directly in dialogue with this one.

Then, on Wednesday, we read Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” This short story asks you to imagine a happy, pleasant city that can only exist because of the abject suffering of a single child. Everyone in the community is aware of this trade-off and the ones who walk away cannot live with that knowledge. The story prompted a lively discussion, drawing comparisons to the Trolley Problem and generally about the morality of Utopias that always require some sort of trade. Several students challenged whether the people walking away are any more moral than the ones who stay given that even though they are opting out of the benefit of the Utopia they are nevertheless still living with the knowledge of the child’s suffering. One student asked how the message changes if you can’t walk away, to which several responded that it suddenly becomes a dystopia. This was my favorite question, though, because Omelas can be read as allegory for modern society where the happiness of people in one part of the world comes at the expense of the suffering of people elsewhere, in which case individuals only have so much capacity to opt-out.

(We are going to return to this point in the class at the very end of the semester with N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” Now that I think about it, I might move the Utopia discussion to the end of the semester next time around.)

The assignment for this unit is a poster where the students work in groups to create their own utopia, as agreed upon by the group members.

This is a deceptively difficult assignment. It requires thinking through the consequences of the society that they set up and consider what makes it a Utopia. One of the things I stressed in our discussions is that a Utopia for one is not a Utopia for all (except in the fleeting moment of Hesiod’s Golden Age), so one of the tasks is to define who are the “in” group and who are the “out” group, with those definitions being entirely up to the group. The larger the society, the harder it is to think through the consequences of the rules, laws, and social norms. This is why it amuses me that one group is re-creating a Matrix to allow each person their own bespoke Utopia that exists only in their minds.

To be completely transparent, this assignment is my equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru, just with a different set of lessons that can be taken from it.

If I were completing this same assignment, I would start by considering the sources of human conflict, big and small. If we were able to eliminate scarcity, jealousy, and pain, that would eliminate most conflict. Something like the world imagined in Wall-E as a dystopian future after humans destroyed the world.

The issue is that the elimination of all of these needs strips away something essential to being human, I think. Put another way, I think it is not possible to both have humans and to have a true Utopia, thus short-circuiting the whole exercise. As Hesiod says in Works and Days, we live in an Iron Age where we are doomed to experience sickness and pain as our meat sacks move through the world. It is simply the price of being human. Thus, the best that we can hope for is to mitigate the suffering that comes from scarcity, jealousy, and pain rather than eliminate it altogether. And, to paraphrase a delirious priest in Brothers Karamazov, we already live in paradise, so we have all the tools of that mitigation if we’re willing to commit to the practice.

However, this impossibility is also why I really like this assignment, perhaps with some fiddling around the edges. Utopias are good to think with, and working through the potential issues as a group forces the students to focus on the process rather than skipping ahead to the product.

Weekly Varia no. 15, 02/25/23

Posted on February 25, 2023 by Josh Nudell

I looked at my course evaluations again this week. Week six of the semester is a strange time to check evaluations, but I had to compile summary evaluations as part of my annual review. Now, the utility of evaluations are deeply mixed in that they often reflect a combination of what the students believed that they should have earned and how much work they believe that they should have put in to earn whatever grade they did receive. I also find that any course policy that deviates from whatever normative practice the students are familiar with is liable to be met with polarizing opinions, which results in some combination of angry and enthusiastic comments.

My favorite ever comment was from a student who said that they should give me a raise.

Polarizing is how I’d characterize the response to Specifications Grading. A lot of students reported that it was challenging, but in a way that was both fair allowed them to do their best work in learning the material, which is exactly the intent. Others found it grossly unfair, either because they had to put in more work to earn the high grade they wanted or because it “prevented” them from receiving their high grade (presumably because they didn’t want to complete optional revisions).

This has led me to mull over whether Specifications Grading is the best match for any class with papers. I am committed to the system at least for this semester and it undoubtedly results in the students honing their skills. But it also requires me to give copious feedback if I want the students to be able to meet the higher standards in their revisions, and this is hard to do at scale. However, I also don’t want to give back either the expectations for what students should be able to achieve by the end of the course or the flexibility that students unused to my teaching style sometimes find disorienting (yes, the extension is free, there is no trick involved). At the same time, even while acknowledging that no one professor can resolve the deep structural issues that lie behind the student mental health crisis, I hate to feel like I’m contributing to making the problem worse.

Then again, I had a handful of comments that explicitly commented about how I made things better in this respect so I must have done something right.

This week’s varia:

Javal Coleman writes in the SCS Blog about being the only Black person in a Classics Department and how that isolation makes one question their belonging.
This week in Pasts Imperfect, Matthew Canepa writes about the god Mithra, who will be the subject of an upcoming conference on the deity, along with the usual roundup of projects (including a very exciting mapping project on Cahokia). This conference looks excellent, particularly in its focus on undoing the damage done to our understanding of the god through obsession with identifying a “pure” tradition or conviction about unchanging religions. This was also the focus of Canepa’s excellent monograph, The Iranian Expanse (2018).
Arie Amaya-Akkermans writes a letter about the devastation at Antakya. He reports a particularly powerful opinion that the Turkish government will likely rebuild some of the antiquities to demonstrate its diversity and sophistication even while allowing the people to suffer.
Another earthquake struck Hatay province, already devastated by the earthquake that killed tens of thousands several weeks ago. I have no words.
A school resource officer found a loaded gun in a fourth-grader’s backpack after it was reported by other students, to whom the student was showing the gun.
Florida is considering a “Classical” Christian alternative to the SAT, in the latest of DeSantis’ aggressive attacks on education. My worry about this sort of thing isn’t so much that it will work—as long as parents are looking to send their kids to top schools elsewhere in the country, they’ll continue to take whatever tests those schools require, and whether the tests are worthwhile is a separate question—but that the actions of DeSantis and the people around him are rapidly pushing the Overton Window about education in a way that empowers people not just in Florida, but around the country, to indoctrinate and bully students.
Roald Dahl’s publisher is aiming to release revised editions of classic books that sand away the rough, insensitive edges to the man’s writing. The move is an entirely absurd reaction to the so-called culture wars, in my view, and disingenuous. Give context to the text as was if you want to account for changes in culture, but moderating everything to obscure an author’s politics and make a cash grab at making a sanitized version for use in school does a service to exactly nobody.
The office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College used ChatGPT to produce an email sent to students about the Michigan State shooting last week. The message was predictably cold and lacking in any specific guidance on resources to help the students who, unsurprisingly, are not amused. I’m not at all surprised that university departments are using AI this way, given the widespread misconception that AI text generation can replace actual writing even as many of these same schools are considering draconian consequences for students who submit AI-generated work. We’re way past irony on this topic already.
The Science Fiction magazine Clarkesworld has been overwhelmed by AI-generated short story submissions—all unpublishably bad. The magazine’s editor Neil Clarke speculates on the reasons for this trend in a blog post that also points out in an update that he suspended accepting submissions while working on a solution since the first three weeks of February saw nearly five times the submissions of January, which itself was twice the volume of December and that had been the highest on record to that point. John Scalzi also points out that SFF magazines are vulnerable because they still pay authors.
NPR is the latest journalism platform to announce layoffs, noting a 20 million dollar drop-off in sponsorship revenue and pessimistic outlooks for a bounce-back in funding levels. I have my issues with some of how NPR chooses to cover politics in particular, but it is an absolutely essential part of the journalism apparatus given its mandate to cover events in every state. The erosion of journalism in this country is a disturbing (and accelerating) trend that is already showing consequences in the likes of George Santos.
The New Yorker Profiles Itamar Ben-Gvir, the poster-child for Israel’s recent swerve to the hard, hard right and an activist for Jewish extremism. Worrying stuff.
After the bizarre saga that is Twitter Blue, Zuckerberg has decided to one-up Elon Musk with a paid subscription plan for Meta platforms for the low, low price of $11.99 a month. Unless you are using Facebook on an iPhone, in which case it’ll be $14.99. This is under the guise of ID-verification systems to help people build their brands. This latest move makes me glad that I deleted my Facebook account more than a decade ago. I still use Instagram, probably more than I should and would miss some interactions if I were forced away but let’s be real: the Instagram timeline is practically useless already. I assume this decision counts on Facebook being indispensable for millions of people, and a go-to platform for many types of interactions—as I have been annoyed by on more than one occasion. At least Meta is actually going to verify identifications.
The “He Gets Us” series of commercials touting Jesus’ humble humanity is bankrolled by a right-wing evangelical organization that has donors from the likes of the owner of Hobby Lobby. Unsurprising, but wiping away the patina of respectability and inviting questions about motive.

Album of the Week: Kacey Musgraves, Same Trailer Different Park (2013)

Currently Reading: Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction (2021)

Weekly Varia no. 14, 02/18/23

Posted on February 18, 2023February 18, 2023 by Josh Nudell

Practically speaking, week five of the semester passed in the same blur as week four. There were substantive differences, but to the same end point, which has left me without the time or energy for posts between the weekly varia entries. It also left me grasping at straws for something to introduce this post. Out of desperation comes inspiration.

At the one-third mark of the semester, I am loving my course on ancient Persia. I structured the course around two interlocking themes, orientalism in our interpretations of Persia and continuity and change in the imperial structures of West Asia, including the development of religion and ideology. This course has also given me an excuse to dive into the rich recent bibliography on Persian history.

My most recent read was Matthew Canepa’s The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE (California 2018). Canepa traces the evolution of royal ideology and conception of where they sat in the world through their palaces, sacred spaces, funerary practices, and gardens, with a particular emphasis on points of disjuncture. That is, Canepa was more interested in change than in continuity, and in how subsequent dynasties competed with the ones that came before in establishing their own legitimacy. I particularly like that Canepa did not skip the Seleucids, but instead acknowledged their indelible place in the royal lineage of the region. I assigned several chapters to my students, many of whom are more familiar with modern history and thus found the discussion of ritual, cosmology, and monumentality disconcertingly anthropological. I will concede that this focus on royal architecture offers a top-down vision of the world, but placing them within a landscape over such a long continuous span I thought gave life to otherwise static monuments. The Iranian Expanse is a densely-packed, but immensely rewarding read.

This week’s varia:

Brett Devereaux has a long piece on ChatGPT and history classrooms, echoing a lot of the refrains given by a lot of us AI-skeptics about the purpose of essays and what the AI does poorly, which is a lot. I particularly like how Brett articulates the essay as a form and as a pedagogical tool. He offers a nice metaphor about an Amazon box for how the AI can mimic the essay container (sort of), but it can’t comprehend that what brings joy about the delivery is what is in the box, not the box itself.
Inside Higher Ed has a piece giving some higher ed context for Vermont State University’s decision to have a completely digital library and surveying the backlash to the decision.
Education researchers conducted a meta-analysis of flipped classrooms and found that the results were far less positive than its proponents often claim. Their findings dovetail with my anecdotal experience that many “flipped” models include more “passive” learning than most traditional lectures, but push that process outside of class where students will watch it at double speed or skip it altogether, leaving them unprepared for the “active” component in the classroom. They also note that “flipped” can mean any number of different things. This is also my problem with education discourse on Twitter: nothing is going to work in every class or for every teacher. Active learning leads to better results than passive learning, but there are a myriad of ways to reach active learning.
BBC Travel has a piece about a lost city under the sands…of California. Investigators have been uncovering the set of Cecille B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments, which he buried because the film set was supposed to leave no trace.
Corey Doctorow has a good piece on Google’s doomed and short-sighted attempt to chase the AI-search fad.
There are videos of Türkiye’s president Erdogan boasting about waiving zoning regulations that allowed construction companies to quickly build buildings in regions affected by last week’s earthquake that killed more than 44,000 people, one week out. One estimate puts the number of buildings not up to code at 50%. Rescue crews are still finding people alive more than a week after the disaster, but relief agencies are facing budget shortfalls for a number of reasons.
Legislators in Idaho advanced a bill that would more or less annex eastern Oregon into “Greater Idaho.” Eleven counties in Oregon have signed a petition in support of the bill, but such a change would still require both Oregon’s legislation and Congress to sign off on the plan.
Shortly before last weekend’s Super Bowl, researchers at BU released findings that their study of 376 former NFL players detected CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in 345 (92%), which points again to the game’s brutality.
One of the balloons shot down by the US Air Force last week might have been launched by a hobby group in Illinois. This makes me think of how much we don’t know about these balloons, which is then both the cause of and then a reaction to the hysteria.
The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News has revealed documentary evidence for the obvious, that Fox News continued to push election fraud stories because to do otherwise risked their bottom line if viewers switched to the even more shameless Newsmax.
The Onion does a New York Times (parody).
A gunman killed three Michigan State students just off campus before killing himself on Monday. There are too many guns.
Packers Sanitation Service has been fined after an inquiry revealed that more than 100 13–17-year olds were working overnights. Last week I had a story about an Iowa bill that would legalize this sort of work. I’m generally in support of people being able to take up economic opportunity of any sort, but nobody should be put in a situation where they are forced by circumstance to work in dangerous and exploitative jobs and these are the latest examples of a concerted effort to undo progressive reforms that curbed the worst excesses of capitalism in this country. Child labor is particularly concerning in that it also undermines the promise of an education that, at least in theory, would offer a pathway out of those circumstances.
A Mars Wrigley factory in Pennsylvania has been fined $14,500 by OSHA after two men fell into a vat used for mixing the ingredients for Dove bars. One wonders how active Willy Wonka has been in efforts to defund the agencies that regulate workplace safety.
The man who stole 200,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs in Britain is facing several years in jail. The headlines are more entertaining than the crime, though. He stole a truck, broke into the industrial facility, and drove off with the trailer before surrendering when he realized that he was being followed.

Album of the Week: Pixie and the Partygrass Boys, Snake Creek (2021)

Currently Reading: Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King; Mick Herron, Spook Street