in 1977, Roland Barthes declared grammar to be a form of fascism
today the fascists are the enemies of grammar
12.03.2026 18:32
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in 1977, Roland Barthes declared grammar to be a form of fascism
today the fascists are the enemies of grammar
She is also asking for a movement to make K-12 classrooms intellectually satisfying, inclusive, and stimulating curiosity for all (if I understand right). That movement needs to include all educators (as well as higher ed), and it relies fundamentally on trusting the expertise of teachers.
"surfaces"--is that what it's doing with experts' work?
How about having students read whole books that the teachers choose, because we trust them?
Airdrop 50,000 copies of Middlemarch with parachutes attached over every campus in America and then over the western half of Brooklyn
This is like if the Red Skull fought Dr Doom
Manuscript is a rent strike?
If you give Einstein your credentials to log in, then it can access ALL of your campus portals: your financial accounts, transcripts, email, health records, &c. because all of that is under one umbrella. Literally the only way to your LLM is through your campus login. The security risk is massive.
One day in the future, this is going to hang on the wall of a museum exhibit people visit in silence.
This letter from faculty and grad students in Natural Language Processing at CU Boulder is 🔥 "The annual expenditure of two million dollars could and should be reallocated to initiatives with tangible benefit for our campus communities."
artistic poster of a wolf and a hand and garlands of wildflowers; the text reads "March rent financial mutual aid needed. Supporting 11 families. Current goal: $7,000.00. Venmo: @Emma-Torzs"
Twin Cities' horrors continue though media has moved on. Families are still in hiding (schools w/virtual options till April), ICE still abducting people w/disregard for law, ongoing need for rent relief. Here's one hyper-local effort from my trusted colleague. Please RT even if you can't donate.
Pretty much what we've been doing in the English department the whole time.
more like student-tuition-powered AI
Also of note: the Arts and Humanities permanent budget was cut by $1 million a few years ago, and CU Boulder has cut funding for masters' students.
CU's decision to help stem OpenAI's cash flow problems by creating more of its own cash flow problems by paying them $2 million per year did not involve faculty or any shared governance.
I'm doing this right now with Middlemarch. I love it.
I made copies of the intro for my students and have been handing out extras like an evangelist with bibles to anyone who shows up at my office. A colleague (who then bought the book!) wrote to thank me for "the most useful teaching book I’ve bumped into in a long time."
Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.
CALL FOR PITCHES
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.
We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.
Details below!
Being a professor is like Picture of Dorian Gray except it’s the students who stay young and full of life while you decay year after year in front of them
👏👏👏👏👏
If college were free, or even affordable, students and parents might not feel like they need to get college credits in high school.
Wild that there was an open lane called "what if we just explain things clearly to people?" and he's the first one to ever fill it
@degette.house.gov
This semester's syllabus diatribe: And don’t even think about using AI to read, either! If you’re not going to read the sentences written by George Eliot, to struggle with them and to parse them with your own brain, then what even is the point of being in this class?
Who knew that Des Esseintes had a penthouse in Ann Arbor?
All while tomorrow there will be a series of planned power outages across the Denver/Boulder area to prevent wildfires in the high winds after one of the warmest, driest falls we've ever had.
This is the reason I hate Christmas.
Standing on my desk right now.
