Last name is two words, one name: Hanley Cardozo. I teach writing and literature and study Victorian brutes. Website: khandozo.com
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NEW: Tenure-track position in History at UC Berkeley in the GLOBAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY. We are casting a wide net here: *all* periods, places, and fields are under consideration. I'm on the search committee, so do let me know if you have questions.
On September 1, 2025, we lost a true legend. Graham Greene, Oneida from Six Nations Reserve, walked on at the age of 73. Over the span of more than 175 acting credits, he gave us characters that were unforgettable, complex, and real. redpopnews.com/remembering-... #redpopnews
If you haven’t seen Powwow Highway, his role in it is small but powerful. I also really loved his turn on Reservation Dogs. The man could do so much with a moment.
73 isn’t young, but it’s too young to be gone. I’m really sad about Graham Greene, who elevated whatever he was in.
Rest in power, Graham Greene ✊🏽
I rank The Mouse and His Child above Frances, but it’s close
I’m worried for those folks, too.
I want this plus ease. How is it meant to be worn? How many inches of positive or negative ease do we see in the photo?
The web of dependence is complicated and placing weight on even a tiny segment can break the whole. I’m worried for small independent suppliers.
My overly large collection of yarn now feels like a kind of security.
With Joann’s closing, a lot of companies that had them as their biggest customer are folding in response. And tariffs are making it hard to get supplies.
The state of crafting right now is grim.
That sentence originally ended with “more,” but I guess autocorrect was not having it
No one deserves covenhood more than
I got obsessed with that song for a while this summer and then got even more obsessed with the video.
The recommendation was "how long you think it should take + 10%," which is almost the same as the equation I used for yardage when I was writing knitting patterns. (Yardage I used in the sample, scaled + 10%.)
I get it with some craft tasks, but yeah, more so with work. And of course, tasks expand if you give them room. One of my teaching mentors told me not to give myself too much time to grade because no matter how much time you give yourself, you'll always use all of it.
Is this a human thing that happens to everyone, or is it an autism or ADHD thing, or is it a thing that happens to everyone but is heightened in neurodivergent people?
Why does everything take seven times longer than I expect? I'd get it if it was something new, but it happens with things I've done many times.
He showed us a lot of movies, actually. We saw the film Alive, about the soccer team who crashed in the Andes, on the claim that it taught us about "mental health."
This isn't cute because he was a bad teacher who was kept in his role because he was grievously injured at school, but my health teacher in eighth grade was obsessed with Reba McEntire and once showed us a Reba concert under some health pretense.
Please help Osama and his family!
Please help Rania and her family!
If you haven't seen Bad Day at Black Rock, I recommend remedying that
Every manosphere health fad is John R. Brinkley adjacent and RFK, Jr. would have been his bff.
RIP John R. Brinkley, you would have loved 2025
I've already said what I need to say about Newsom's stance on trans ppl & why it will fail in this short 🧵. but can I just add, as a long time Californian & Bay Area resident, I'm convinced that this online push for him 3 years out from Dem primaries is 100% astroterfed... bsky.app/profile/juli...
"down to brass tacks" must be awful when you're an English learner
I don't really understand why my pedantic thread is still being reposted, but I do stand by the idea that the Democratic leadership is being far too broad in their language and expressed goals.
The Labour stuff is making me so mad for you all. My brother lives in England, and I can't tell whether that's better or worse than still being here.
In addition to thinking about pedagogy, this is probably influenced by the marketing book I was reading recently.
I don't always mind cliché, but it does sort of self-eliminate in the sense that it stops meaning anything in particular.
I HATE THE BAILEYS SO MUCH!!!
Um, but thank you for making it so I shall know henceforth.
I did not know about this, and I'm so mad. I could have been knowing about this for my whole life! I would have loved to have known this on many prior occasions!
Oh my god
And to bring it back to writing advice, some of the best writing advice I've ever been given is "make your reader feel smart." The Fight wing of the Democratic Party knows how to do that. Schumer and Jeffries talk to us like we're stupid—and like they don't care that we know that they think we are.
And this connects up to something I've been thinking about Jeffries' comments last weekend. If there's anywhere on the planet where you're NOT going to find a persuadable swing voter, it's watching the Sunday morning politics talk shows. That's a place where you talk to your people and the media.
I got cranky on main and my cranky mode is pedantic. Alas.
And he's entertaining and offers unfiltered versions of the things he offers. If you like those things, then you get all you want.
You're not picking them up, but you are sending people home. Stop it!
Democrats see their opponents picking up votes by being cruel and think they can be halfway cruel to peel off some of those people, but the people who get off on cruelty don't want the diet flavor. They want full-bodied cruelty.
Last? thought: sometimes Democrats think they can pick up new people by alienating people they assume have nowhere else to go. Sister Souljah moment ass behavior. But people do have somewhere else to go: home.
It's not a mini thread. I'm so sorry. I SUCK at being brief without a lot of editing and I wrote this on the fly because I was mad at seeing something about averages.
All you've shown is that, whatever good you may have done, you don't really *care*, and people do not like a demonstrable lack of interest. It's not even entertaining, let alone useful.
But also! Transphobes hate your message because you're including trans people at all. People who already believe in equality hate your message because you're excluding people from shared rights. And the people who can be educated will be swayed by someone who cares more.
I mean, the biggest thing should be that it's morally wrong to exclude people, and I know a bunch of people think that doesn't matter to strategy, but it actually does. Having values and sticking to them is appealing.
Stop trying to appeal to both by saying something like "Trans people should be included in most of life, but not all." That might be where the average is, but it's not where people are. There are transphobes, people who already believe in equality, and people who need educating.
So get weird and passionate and find the other people who are weird and passionate and educate the people who can be educated.
Writing seeks to find an audience, and strategy seeks to find an audience as well, but appealing broadly to averages is not the same thing at all. Averages are not people. People are strange and spiky and a person who fit all the averages would paradoxically be deeply weird.
Oh my god, this is a very silly response.
(I don't know if this thread is so elementary as to be useless, so boring as to be useless, or so abstract as to be useless; venting the spleen is cleansing, but not always interesting.)
People in the middle are probably fine with it, but they're not excited, because the middle is not an exciting place. You've just told excited vaccine supporters you don't really care about them and excited anti-vaxers (fuck the double x, it makes no sense) that you don't support their goals either.
You are losing the passionate audience your candidate could have gotten through specific support of the cool thing they did. People who care a lot about vaccines like that you did that, but they hate the way you just framed vaccines as personal. People who hate vaccines also hate this message.
What doesn't work is something like "I support vaccine access so that everyone can make their own choice." You are undermining your candidate's beliefs and benefits when you undercut the benefits of vaccines by framing them solely as a personal choice.
First, there's already a passionate audience you can grab with that. Second, there's an opportunity to educate. By being passionate and specific, you grab the audience who is already on board and you may interest people who don't yet know they agree with you.
No one is excited about meeting in the middle, about getting a very little piece of what they want. People care about issues and care deeply. So, let's say recent polls say that talking about COVID vaccines tends to irritate people, but your candidate has fought for vaccine access.
However, almost every Democratic strategy I see is the equivalent of "In recent years, technological changes have affected everyone." Boring, broad, and appealing only in averages, never specifics. No passion inspired or demonstrated.
It's more engaging to a broader audience to start with anecdote, and personally, that's what I'd do, but if people are interested in ed-tech and student behavior, they're probably interested in the paper even without a flashy opening.
Plenty of published and much-cited academic essays start with something like "This is a paper about students and how the last thirty-five years of ed-tech has changed their behavior." No hook, just a clear description of what you're going to talk about.
So, back to the tech essay and then to Democratic strategy. Specificity finds your real audience. You could go for an actual hook using anecdote, but for your actual audience, because they already care about the topic, just telling them specific should be enough.
Moreover, humans connect to strong emotion and/or specificity. You can say that the killer stabbed fifteen people, and that's not going to move your audience as much as starting with the story of one person and expanding to include the other 14. We don't connect to numbers. "Everyone" is a number.
Your real audience is not everybody, but a large subset: students, instructors, and people interested in education. Someone who has been affected by tech changes in domestic life may not be your audience.
You're talking about changes that have affected students, and you've picked three specific examples, from most recent to least: ChatGPT, the iPhone, and the ThinkPad. Your essay is not about technology generally but about the ways new tech affects student behavior.
In theory, this should grab people. After all, it's true! And it applies to all of your readers, no matter who they are. But the rest of your essay, if done well, is specific. You're not talking about *all* technological changes.
You want to grab the biggest possible audience you can, so you pick a deliberately broad opening that you assume will apply to everyone. Something like "In recent years, technological changes have affected everyone."
I'm going to use the college essay as a metaphor. Let's say you are writing an essay about how recent technological changes have affected students. Your opening sentence should grab your audience, and it doesn't have to be gimmicky.
Honestly, this is just me venting a frustration as I finalize some stuff for my classes. So a (hopefully) mini thread about why this kind of messaging sucks.
Writing teacher advice for Democratic strategists: Your audience is NEVER everyone, and acting as though it is will lead to generalities that appeal on average but not in specific. You find your audience through specificities. Relying heavily on polls and consultants leads to tepid messaging.
WHAT NEWS, BOY? WHAT DAY IS THIS?
ICE forcing firefighters to stop battling a wildfire and make them all show their papers, then arresting some active firefighters and pulling them off the line shows there's no bottom. As @aselrod.bsky.social pointedly argues, it's nothing less than an "active assault on virtue wherever it exists."
I assume the title card and summary of Evelyn Prentice on Amazon Prime were made by gen-AI. A brave new world in which perfectly good stuff we already had is made gooey and bright and wrong.
YEP
But because this autism-obsessed asshole is in charge of medical policy in this country, autistic people are at an especial risk right now and you can add to that that autistic people are more likely to be gender nonconforming. An intersection of threats.
You need a diagnosis to access many services but it also makes you subject to discrimination and surveillance, which is a fun dichotomy that a lot of disabled people face.
Perhaps related to why my insurance doesn't cover autism diagnoses for adults, even though we know that it's wildly underdiagnosed among adults, especially in women and people of color of all genders. And a diagnosis right now is a Catch-22, anyway.
RFK, Jr. and his ilk only think of autistic *children* because 1. They see children as property and autistic children as damaged property. 2. They assume autistic adults are out of society all together so autistic adults who exist in the world are not really autistic to them.
Man's been obsessed with autism for a million billion years and all he's saying is that he saw kids he thinks are autistic in *gasp* public.
You can't tell shit about mitochondria by looking at people; insert joke about A Wind in the Door that I haven't quite figured out.
I appreciate that many headlines about RFK Jr.'s eugenicist "mitochondrial challenges" note that he has no medical training, and I think it's also important to note that if a doctor said it it would still mean that doctor was a lying eugenicist.
Please help Soad and Omar!
Bring back the 18th-century idea of "puppies," but pick a more loathsome word for it.
There really does seem to be a sharp divide between humans who like when someone or something is ingratiating and humans who experience full body disgust at the same.
You know, I said "I know why I'm reading it and it doesn't," and that's true, but it also doesn't read, so there's that. Based on work I've seen turned in to me, you can ask an LLM to search for specific things within a document and it still just generates probable information and quotes.
Regarding the tragic death of Adam Raine, there are already narratives forming that blame vague "dangers of AI" or a broader moral panic. But this is not a story about the faceless perils of superintelligence. It's about a $500 billion tech company's core software product encouraging child suicide.
I am not going to try it because I don't fucking want to, but I do wonder what it would say. "Knit a sweater in your size"? "K2tog sometimes and at other times yo"? "Increase and decrease until there's a sweater"?
I don't want it to summarize them for me because I know why I'm reading them and it doesn't. Even if I wanted to skim I'd need to do it myself, but it's even better when it does that for a knitting pattern. How do you summarize a knitting pattern?
I think more than one? And certainly some of them were walking around in public talking out loud to their phones with no one on the other end.
No, just what the commercials I'm thinking of (for Google, I think?) displayed. There was at least one scene where another human being was in the room but the other person was talking to a chatbot.
When Adobe Acrobat Pro added AI, there was a popup telling how to disable it and I did so immediately, and it's never actually been disabled. It pops up OVER the PDFs I'm reading and offers to summarize them for me.
All of these products for doing work that are like "We added a 'companion' because that's what was missing from your spreadsheet."
The OpenAI-induced deaths are making me even angrier at the commercials I've seen for chatbots that are like "You should be talking to them all the time, even when other people are in the room."
♥️
I think a lot of public conflict is triggering to her in the trauma sense, but she's been taking up more conflict as things have gotten worse and I feel really moved by that.
He was big, dumb, and attractive, just like the moon
A bad man who deserves to be booed. The good news is, the argument was because he *had* been booed.
“I feel like Dad is saying: ‘I have taught you this language. Now speak it.'" www.latimes.com/entertainmen...
She's such a great mom, but I think a result of growing up in an alcoholic home is that she basically never wants conflict and would rather people be polite even when they shouldn't be.
I have rarely ever gotten into a fight with my mom, but we got in a big argument over whether it was okay to boo Dennis Prager at a school event (I was in favor, she against) and we made up and then some years later, she was like, "Never mind, you were right."
And you actually became an artist, whereas I made some babies and basically stopped drawing.