Margaret Ray

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to ...

www.404media.co/this-app-war...

"I've been shopping for ways to get out of here."

A great winter poem. From @mbrrray.bsky.social's book Good Grief, The Ground: bit.ly/raygoodgrief

#poem #booksky #writing

You see all. I’ve also had more than one person ask me what my last name is. After saying hey Maggie Ray. Like I must be Billy Ray Cyrus. Especially if they’ve heard me pronounce a word with the pin/pen merger that gives away I’m from sort of the south 🙄

People like to tell me I’m one of these! (When they know me in my “Maggie Ray” format rather than “Margaret”) I think it’s bc it sounds like a name in a country song or something

Them, turning on the hose and spraying Benjamins into the fire: COME ON YOU HAVE TO TAKE IT OR WE'RE GOING TO GO BROKE

Breaking News: The EPA will stop considering lives saved when setting pollution limits and instead calculate only the cost to businesses.

that about sums it all up

Looking forward to reading at @northshirebooks.bsky.social in Manchester Vermont on Jan 23rd with poet Molly Johnsen! Come out for poems if you're in and around southern Vermont!
www.northshire.com/event/norths...

❤️🚙

Love this poem.

From @mbrrray.bsky.social's book Good Grief, the Ground: bookshop.org/a/862/9781950774845

#poem #books #writing

If someone says to you, "what are you doing about students' use of AI?" ask them, "do you think that this should be my problem? How good do you think my response can be? Should it not be up to legislators & administrators to defend against a commercial industry's attack on your child's education?"

How to turn off Google’s AI Overviews in web searches If you find Google's AI Overview more irritating than helpful, here's now to turn it off in Chrome.

Here's a simple way to disable AI mode in Google. I just did it, and I feel like a new, freshly showered woman!

www.engadget.com/big-tech/how...

Don't miss livestream of Winter Solstice at Newgrange, Sunday 21 December 2025

"For 17 minutes, direct sunlight can enter the Newgrange monument through the specially contrived small opening above the entrance known as the ‘roof box’, to illuminate the Chamber."
heritageireland.ie/winter-solst...

Writing Backwards | Columbia University Press Winner, 2026 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize, International Society for the Study of NarrativeFinalist, 2025 SHARP Book History Book Prize, Society ... | CUP

More details to come but…

🎉🎉 I just learned that my book has won the first ever Biennial Book Prize from MELUS, the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States! I’m over the moon! 🎉🎉

cup.columbia.edu/book/writing...

Poet's Note (from Poetry Society of America): "What drove me to write the poem...was the impulse...to make excuse after excuse for people who don’t treat us well because we’ve internalized that we’re just supposed to be grateful for the attention."

😞💔

"Reader, I Married Him"
Margaret Ray
#poetry

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

There goes the lucrative industry of international tourism, already fairly wrecked. The US was "the world’s most powerful Travel & Tourism market, contributing a record-breaking $2.36 TN to the nation’s economy last year" said the World Travel & Tourism Council in 2024.

Amazon Is the World's Biggest Online Book Marketplace. It's Filled With AI Knockoffs Authors say Amazon's knockoff book problem is leaving them frustrated — and making the internet worse in the process.

Amazon is making money off AI copies of books - and putting the onus on authors to prove they’ve been plagiarised.

Honestly, just stop buying books from Amazon. Get them from an actual bookshop or order them from a reputable book supplier like bookshop.org

www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Analysis: OpenAI is a loss-making machine, how can it survive? Don't call it a bubble! Loss-making monster OpenAI is on the hook for $1.4 trillion (with a T) in compute commitments. How can this go on?

"All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Google Gemini wants to "help you" read and reply to your emails."

And THAT, I think, is precisely why a liberal arts university education should be free and available to everyone, to give more people the chance to think about their education beyond only "how will this pay off for me financially." 9/9

the only people who get to treat school in that exploratory way are the people who can afford to. All this is to say that I deeply hear this complaint of yours, but I really think it surfaces is the way our economic system limits college to this narrow vocational, utilitarian function 8/9

I am a poet and a teacher (neither things I make very much money from), so of COURSE what I think school is for is to widen a person's view of the world: all the incredible rabbit holes of specific things to get interested in. But realistically, 7/9

A two-track system already exists (vocational school vs."college"), but more and more university administrations are insisting we treat college as merely vocational training (and students are too, but I don't blame students for this because university is so fucking expensive in the US) 6/9

I am, I admit, a poet, so, for me, those meaning-of-life things look like the arts and human community that forms around shared experiences: all things that aren't "lucrative" in any kind of career sense, but that ARE the things that save me, over and over, from despair. 5/9

Or college as a place that plants the seeds of things you might, with delight, return to years later (poetry, an interest in astrophysics, art, etc), the things that give meaning to life beyond the basics of survival. 4/9

If more people (though governmental policies and social support systems) had a financial cushion (in other words, if more people didn't have to use most of their conscious brains to worry about how to pay rent and buy food), then more people would also have the luxury of college as discovery, or 3/9

If we lived in a country where we people had enough money to live on (through UBI, or if higher education were free to all, or if rent was meaningfully capped, or or or), then that might relieve this pressure on university to be, essentially, vocational training school 2/9

I think what you're unearthing here is the primary way that the lack of meaningful social safety nets in this country undercuts the utopian vision of education as expAnsive (not expensive, though that's true) rather than vocational 1/9

This entire grift relies on convincing people that they don't know how to do the things they have always known how to do, and ironically, if it works, we will, in a very short amount of time, forget how to do all the things we have always known how to do.

this is a must-read for anyone in higher ed.