Jennifer Stoloff

I know I shouldn’t be shocked but I am shocked every time at how patronizing and tone deaf some of the comment you get are.

Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM

1. Dentist (fallback—cheaper than medical school). 2. Department store manager, laundromat owner/operator, fabric store owner/operator.

He [Mumford] complained, “I reach for you [now] and what do I touch? A housing expert. I call for you in the stillness of the night and what do I hear: The percentage of vacancies in Laubengang [garden] apartment houses in Germany compared with cottages.”

Lewis Mumford complaining about Catherine Bauer in a letter to her (he was married and stayed with his wife). (In Gail Radford’s Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era.) #goals #housing

The inability to actually engage with your arguments is frustrating to watch. They go so quickly to ad hominem! I shouldn’t be surprised.

Better late than never? But it always feels like these guys don’t pay any price during their most damaging periods.

Wait until they find out what the word for “single” is in French!

Everyone got in-state tuition for the first 5 years. I was able to make the case to keep it after that. I took a full time job after year 6(?) and my dissertation defense. Moved away but managed to finish up in a couple of years. Sociology at UNC-CH. A good advisor help me finish. /end

My PHD involved 2+ years of course work, comprehensive exams in two subject areas, a MA thesis that include a defense with a 3-person committee, teaching after course work (only one class a semester), then a dissertation with a 5-person committee. /1

I’m sure my senator Chris @vanhollen.senate.gov supports this but I don’t know if he’s on the record yet.

Has this person been to Northern Virginia?

Or his parents didn’t. 😢

". . . [T]he kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. . . . Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. . . . I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are, though of course I can’t – unlike Christians, for instance — say anything about the transcendental. . . . “Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”

Good morning to the understanding of hope expressed by Václav Havel in 1985 or 1986 (via Rebecca Solnit). havelcenter.org/2015/05/04/d...

We also got a second copy of a different book!

Jackpot indeed!

I’ll look into it!

Three paperback copies of Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan M. Katz.

@jfarrell.bsky.social ordered me a copy of “Gangsters of Capitalism” by @katz.theracket.news. It arrived in good time. Then the shipper said a book was lost in transit. We said fine, send it again, not realizing which book it was. Then two more copies of GoC arrived. Oops!

My favorite story of the year. Heritage does no real research and is essentially fact free. Now even more so!

Will try to come to part 1 at least but depends on work. At least the weather is more friendly.

I once saw a Lichtenstein retrospective and my reaction was a visceral loathing. I can quite explain it but maybe it was a reaction to his obviously theft of other people’s art.

We know from the horrific attacks in Australia that antisemitism threatens Jews around the world and the only way to end it is to working for collective liberation of all people.

Welp I can’t believe I missed last week. This week I will try.

There is some pretty calm on street riding to get to the finished stretch of the MBT that runs from Piney Branch and Takoma Ave to Fenton near Montgomery College. I’m a few blocks past that off of Sligo Ave.

I feel a little left out (kidding!). Hope to join after Thanksgiving. :) And my backyard is large and ready (in Silver Spring) and only a couple of blocks from the northern part of the MBT.

Hard to image Summers actually feels shame but he certainly should. Good riddance.

No comedy either.

I don’t have regrets—I wasn’t that interested in academia. I’m a social scientist and wanted to do policy work. I’m lucky because I’ve mostly been able to do that. My department was clearly disappointed in me. 🤷🏻‍♀️

PS both of my advisors were women so my experience was about the power of the advisor role, not other kinds of misconduct.

I was lucky I was able to change advisors somewhat late in my PhD program and that made all the difference (I was able to finish). I still went into “industry” but that was likely regardless.

The only thing I don’t like about this post is that I didn’t write it.