I do miss advising the student newspaper. Students who are suspicious of journalism are sometimes very surprised (and relieved) to learn that the SPJ has a code of ethics: Seek Truth and Report It Minimize Harm Act Independently Be Accountable and Transparent

Good storytelling in this article about the science supporting the prevailing theory about the children Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by the man who wrote the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." After retiring to Monticello, Jefferson compiled the volume by painstakingly cutting and pasting sections of the New Testament that were focused on morality and stripped of what he called the “artificial vestments” of miracles and superstitions.

So far this term I'm simply evaluating the work according to the rubric. For some very routine assignments (worth very few points in the overall scheme of the course), the bots are doing fine. But those students are not learning, and they are not practicing the skills they'll be tested on. From afar, the modern university can look like a liars’ haven.

From a new slide in my "Introduction to American Literature lecture: 1738 -- A merchant and former sailor named Benjamin Lay stands up in a church, says “This is what God will do to you if you own slaves,” and stabs a Bible with a sword. Did I mention that he’s a vegetarian, pacifist Quaker dwarf who wrote an anti-slavery book while living in a cave?

I had fun voicing a king who has been turned into a crow in this short audio play. A once peaceful kingdom becomes chaotic when a malicious spell transforms various humans – including the king and prince! – into a variety of animals – like crows, spiders, and deer. Can a perplexed princess avoid the ire of her mother the queen and help her brother and father find the cause, break the spell, and restore the order before it’s too late? Learn the answer in this fantastical fantasy story “Animal Kingdom,” written by Tim Papciak.

This is one of those findings that seems so obvious, but I'm glad to see researchers have actually measured it. School children in China who used AI reported spending about 20 fewer minutes on their homework, and earned about 20% more points, compared to their classmates who did the homework themselves. But when it came to exams, AI users scored about 20% lower.

Many thanks to Benjamin Lay, my favorite 18th century vegetarian pacifist abolitionist Quaker dwarf, for this eſspecially unhinged example of the "long s" character, that might perk my undergraduates up a bit during the opening lecture. (I'm assigning a few passages from his All Slave-Keepers That keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates as part of a unit on revolutionary rhetoric, and I'm hoping to find ways to engage students with a writing style most will find very unfamiliar.)

There’s a whole gamut of storytelling out there that is as colourful as an Indian textile bazaar, as rich as the spices of an Ethiopian stew and as passionate as a tango in Buenos Aires. Tales that encompasses love, loss, joy, revolution and even stretch to exploding mangoes, a ferociously funny Frankenstein and ghosts with strong political views. There are other ways to get facts.

When a student asks me before class, “Did you get my email?” I usually have to shrug. I sometimes get more than 100 work-related emails a day. GMail is pretty good about sorting out the important stuff from the background noise. (I should do something about those ~35k unread messages in my inbox, though.) I might have replied promptly and at length to your email two days ago, then moved on without storing a particular memory.

An impressive balance of boundary-setting and empathy. Imagine admiring someone’s work well enough to steal it, and then imagine that writer you admire getting a call from an editor who’d discovered obvious evidence of plagiarism you committed. Editors and writers talk – none of this happens in isolation. And when it does happen, it often happens all at once. A poem you lifted months or years ago can trigger an avalanche of discovery that can all but bury your career as a writer.

There Will Come Soft Rains By: Ray Bradbury In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o 'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine! In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two…

We used to be able to opt out of Meta gathering information that other companies use gather about us (when we use our Facebook profile to log in to a third-party website, or through browser that routinely gather information about what we do even when we are not logged into a Meta account). Now Meta is merely giving users a cosmetic choice about…

In May, for the first time, solar supplied more of the nation’s electricity than coal, or 12.8%, Ember said. Coal supplied 12.2%, its fourth-lowest monthly share ever. “For years solar power has risen in the US electricity mix,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior energy and data analyst at Ember. “At the same time, coal power has lost its status, first as the largest source in the US mix, and then gradually over the years has fallen even further.”

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816 that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be,” he was advocating for what he termed the “illimitable freedom of the human mind” that one associates with the liberal arts. Research universities can be found in many countries around the world, as can institutes of technology, trade schools, and various kinds of undergraduate institutions.

I used to love encountering so much quirky writing in routine homework assignments. Clever, meandering prose, often self-referential, sometimes snarky and heartbreakingly honest, bursting with raw reactions to plot twists or shocking discoveries, with occasional tangled syntax and amusing spellcheck-driven typos (among my favorites are "defiantly" for "definitely" and "heroin" for "heroine). I particularly loved it when a student asked a question in an aside that was a perfect opening for the topic I planned to introduce in class.

Rewatching ST:DS9 Rom and Leeta can't agree on her wedding dress. Garak is guardedly amused by Ziyal's faith in his tailoring skills. Quark just wants Leeta back at work. In his role as Emissary, Sisko agrees to perform the marriage ceremony. A crowd assembled on the promenade reacts as the wormhole opens, admitting the latest in a punctual convoy of Dominion forces headed to Cardassia.

I remember in the mid 1990s, typing a lot of URLs, and following links that people added to lists, and people put their favorite links on their "personal home page" so they could find them easily. Seeing what people thought was worth linking to was fascinating. On someone's page I found a link that said Yahoo! Not knowing what it was, I clicked, and found the entry page to a massive human-authored directory.

As a teenager, I remember being shocked to learn that the average American spends more time watching TV than reading. In the age of broadcast TV, you had to make time to sit in front of the TV at a certain time, timing your bathroom visits and snack runs to the commercial breaks. When I was little, we had just one TV set in the living room and a small black-and-white set in a spare room (where my dad often watched sports).

The New York Times reviewed over a dozen hours of cabinet meeting footage to analyze how his administration spoke to him. On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents. Allison Schuster, a White House spokeswoman, said in an email that Mr. Trump’s cabinet used these meetings to “highlight the exhaustive list of accomplishments they have delivered on behalf of the American people.”