The treatise is a whopping 750 KB!
The treatise is a whopping 750 KB!
đ
"Cake-Pop Demon Hunters" has proven to be too scary for the 7yo.
only for books that they got via torrent is my understanding.
www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/contact
Surprised they didn't go the last mile and rename it the Department of War Crimes.
I do like the notion/trend of paper-only classes. I wonder to what degree folks have gotten pushback on accomodations grounds.
"As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of answering that question."
"None of the quotations attributed to Infomocracy appeared in the book." A thrilling, scary essay from Lee Konstantinou in the Chronicle. www.chronicle.com/article/peer...
I will say, it's also (obviously) an individual problem! Whether a journal editor should take the initiative to report a person who does this is a hard call; I would be inclined to. I do suspect that for every blatant case like this there are lots of subtler cases w/o hallucinated quotes.
Every single quote from the novel supposedly under analysis was hallucinated. Every single one.
âLike the wonks who worked for Information, I was holding the line against the ensloppification of academe, one false citation at a time âŠâ ensloppification is the new enshittification, and theyâre both super gross
En voor wie twijfelt aan de omvang van het issue: @lkonstan.bsky.social beschreef eergisteren exact hetzelfde fenomeen en kwam tot gelijkaardige conclusies. www.chronicle.com/article/peer...
still upset about this. tl;dr (or registrationwall; didn't read): @lkonstan.bsky.social was asked to peer-review an article about #Infomocracy, and it had made-up quotes and citations because it was clumped together by a machine.
This is so nuts. Also "The article I was reading gave off that robot stink." is a fantastic line.
âMany secure people â tenured professors, university administrators, lawmakers â have contributed to making academe a pressure cooker, incentivizing cheating.â
Thanks, Malka. I am a big fan of the Centenal Cycle!
this gave me a fizzy, unsettled, questioning of reality feeling similar to the first time I read Borges, but without the excitement of discovering Borges
"The article I was reading gave off that robot stink."
Thanks to @evankindley.bsky.social for shepherding this into print. www.chronicle.com/article/peer...
Thanks to @evankindley.bsky.social for shepherding this into print. www.chronicle.com/article/peer...
Am I the only one who is seeing these injected ads on ASAP/Jâs website? Malicious Wordpress plugin?
Feeling nostalgic for the days when "being the biopower of the enlightenment" was a real career option.
I'm in the "Spending Saturday morning searching for peer-reviewed scholarship on MrBeast"âstage of my career.
Meanwhile, on Substack.
Forget technofeudalism, we finally have a good name for the system that has replaced capitalism.
Culture Industry essay; Tom Comittaâs Peopleâs Choice Literature.
7yo very much wants to see âCake Pop Demon Hunters.â
Wow, AI image editing is getting so good!
CONSPIRACISM paper proposals now welcome for the ACLA seminar I am co-organizing with @lkonstan.bsky.social and @lalouverouge.bsky.social meets in Montreal in late Feb 2026
Forget the sociology of literature, someone needs to do an ethnographic study of MrBeast.
I am confused. What are these âHumanitiesâ you speak of?!
Also, reading about the distinction between poetics and hermeneutics really brings me back to Culler's lit theory lectures in the late 90s at Cornell!
overdetermined*
Social media, smartphones, fatherhood, middle age: my precipitous cognitive decline is highly overdetermine.
Yeah -- I realize now as I'm reading it that it is v. familiar. lol. Should go back and reread what I wrote back then!
I hear Christine can be prickly.
Cool. Would love to read this, as I've been dragooned -- or maybe I volunteered? Can't remember -- into writing about allegory and lit sociology once again & would love to incorporate your replies.
The important point is Spicer's "Graphic Story Magazine" mustn't be confused w/ Kyle's "Graphic Story Review" column which started in "Graphic Story Magazine" when it was called "Fantasy Illustrated" & not to be confused w/ "Graphic Story World" which Kyle founded before renaming it "Wonderworld."
The world is in bad shape, but this had to be done.
What we do is, we teach people interesting stuff about books. đŹ
is revisiting the halcyon days when retweets were signaled by manually typing "RT" at the start of a post.
King Elessar loved Big Macs.
Interesting to connect this idea with @lkonstan.bsky.social 's essay on the tech right, Tolkien, and fantasies of virtuous power. arcmag.org/mythic-capit...
The ideal is a benevolent-but-powerful king, far away, who will let you to keep your little pastoral ethnostate (aka the Shire) in peace and quiet. Though since Arda is just a precursor for our world, we know it doesn't work out in the end! đŹ
What I have done is I've unplugged the router in our house, but my daughters insist on watching YouTube all day every day, so I had to plug it back in. đŹ
Since the semester is finally about to start, I thought I'd try to play _Death Stranding_, since I have so much free time. And it's like... all cut-scenes... all the time? More like a not-walking simulator.
First time getting translated into Korean. www.pado.kr/article/2025...
Serializing. Junot DĂaz is doing one. John Pistelliâs Major Arcana was serialized on his paid newsletter then published by Belt Publishing.
So serializing novels on Substack seems to be, increasingly, a thing.
Don't worry. It's all going to work out.
I think the rise of so-called generative AI has, all told, made me a better and more sensitive grader of undergraduate papersâsince I am now scrutinizing every sentence in every paper I read with unhinged levels of paranoia.
Still have flashbacks to playing Deadly Towers on the NES.
Seem to be caught in a "Steve's Lava Chicken" / "APT." musical time loop. Help!
đŹ
Decided to look at the Wikipedia page of David Eddingsâwho I read a ton of in junior high. *Yikes*.
Kind of wild how many academic journals permit LLM text "with human oversight" or "with disclosure."
Devastated to learn of the death of Brian McHale, my good friend for over 50 years, from metastatic melanoma. Here are some of Brianâs books. His many articles and books leave a great legacy, but not as great as his friendship. RIP.
Big fan of the Palma!
How about an ethnography where I just hang around a couple indie bookstores for a year and then transcribe all the conversations I overhear. đ€Ș
Because of the subject matter I have come to wonder if this might be a Sokol-like test of the peer review system⊠but honestly I think itâs just run of the mill academic dishonesty.
Someone should start a SLAC where students have their phones and laptops confiscated from them at freshman orientationâand get them back at graduation. Parents would pay good money for that.
I guess I got a free lesson in AI-detection forensics! đ
Further investigation confirms: wholly invented sources and hallucinated quotes from real and invented sources. đ
I shouldnât comment on it since itâs still under review technically but itâs a work of literary criticism.
itâs bad but in a weird way.
Got my first peer review request, from a major journal, where I have a very strong suspicion the article under review has been substantially, if not wholly, written by AI. Wild times.
I'll be teaching Intro to Grad Studies this Fall. Among many other things, we do a week on humanities-in-crisis talk. Any favorite recent pieces in this genreâincluding both writing that powerfully spells out the shape of the current crisis, and pieces that push back against crisis narratives?
Clearly, you are destined to write a TNG novel called "I, Data."
So, these generic wooden blocks are apparently "perfect for STEM learning." Uh huh. đ€
If you want to hear a podcast featuring me talking about Tolkien and the far right, have I got something for you.
*me and my book project
Phonics books seem evenly divided between books that systematically map the relation between phonemes and graphemes in Englishâand books with activities that are actually fun and tractable for kids to do. Someone should try to combine the two approaches.đ€Ș
đ
Rice cooker YouTube is a real place...
Trust no one. Also... submit an abstract to our ACLA panel on "Conspiracism" when the portal opens on August 1! (with @lalouverouge.bsky.social and @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social) www.acla.org/seminar/a770...
He wanted to issue a correction: âEverything you say about me is true!â
Not inaccurate.
If you want to read deeply researched accounts of what happened to novels in the last fifty or so years, may I recommend Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965â1999 by Evan Brier uipress.uiowa.edu/books/novel-...
Finally finished JAMES. I am surprised how much it's structured like a thriller -- short sentences, short chapters, many quasi-cliffhangers, and a propulsive narrative energy.
Very happy to learn that _Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman_ won the CSS Edited Book prize this year.
You know what the critical world needs? One moreâfinal, definitive, epicâessay on the category of "homology."
đ±
iPads are a parenting nightmare; also, how did anyone raise kids before the invention of iPads!?
There are _qualitative_ sociological methods, too.
Coal mines, this time.
âI played a medley of Keith Sweat, Bell Biv Devoe, Hammer, and Public Enemy pop songs on the piano.â After reading this sentence in Along Came a Spider, I have a sudden and irresistible urge to write something about James Patterson.
Better to just stay up till 5:30 and keep going.
This is a great book.
Really, one of the best conferences I've ever participated in. Every paper I saw was excellent.
So happy to announce the publication of my new study of AI.
chatGPT reveals that some people are philosophical zombies but for comprehending and appreciating prose
đ€
Good time to point out that @post45data.bsky.social also hosts OPEN-ACCESS, SEARCHABLE, and CITABLE data on US literary prizes, Iowa writers, NYT bestsellers, and (my own contribution) the thousands of American writers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts! data.post45.org/our-data.html
All 6000 pages.
You're not going? Sorry to miss you!
Excited for this one next week.
Today is release day for OotG! Here is the book half in the dirt. Thanks to all the people who made the book possible, especially my co-editor Jorge Santos and @utexaspress.bsky.social utpress.utexas.edu/9781477331804/
Writing this chapter on Alt Lit, I must conclude that people maybe shouldnât write novels on or about âthe internet.â
every month now we get a breathless new article with a headline like, "Meet Curtis Yarvin, the Dark Prince of the Blogosphere Who Invented Being a Racist Libertarian."