"Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideousthat even you turned from me in disgust?”―Mary Shelley, Frankenstein "You may ask yourself, 'Am I right, or am I wrong?'And you may say to yourself, 'My God! What have I done?'"--Talking Heads The road to writing hell, it seems, is paved with good intentions. I like … Continue reading Confronting AI, Part the Second
Confronting AI, Part the First
In comes this email on my Higher-Ed.-In-Prison Google Groups listerv: "Wondering about the ways HEP can be both empowering and oppressive? Here's an AI-generated essay on the topic." "What Was I Scared Of?," Dr. Seuss Now, I've been laboring over an article on this same topic since January of 2020. Currently titled, "Liberators in Theory, Collaborators in … Continue reading Confronting AI, Part the First
We Need to Talk About Brackets
Punctuation is politics. I've said it before. In a post on this blog titled, "We Need to Talk About Ellipses," I wrote, "[T]he basic job of the ellipsis is to fill in for a missing chunk of text in a direct quote. This gives it, along with the quotation mark, a certain moral weight–it’s punctuation … Continue reading We Need to Talk About Brackets
Cold Comfort: The Classroom as Refuge
"Church Stone Shelter," Julia Kivelä, archdaily.com It is a truth universally acknowledged--among my colleagues, anyway--that the best classroom experiences tend to come from the ancient pedagogical practice known as "winging it." Sometimes, that means veering into a side quest when it seems profitable enough. At other times, it means walking in totally unprepared, relying only … Continue reading Cold Comfort: The Classroom as Refuge
Was Ulysses S. Grant a Socialist?
In an earlier post on this blog, I pointed out some similarities in the writings of U.S. Grant and H.G. Wells, specifically in the way Grant attributed the outbreak of war to the spread of populations and the rise of new forms of communication. "In the early days of the country," Grant wrote in the … Continue reading Was Ulysses S. Grant a Socialist?