iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I always learn new things from these labor history threads, but this one especially.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 21/09/2026

you could say this verbatim about silicon valley. and honestly, if you are a democratic politician reading this, you should!

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 18/09/2026

Imagine if, instead of regulating drones (which we did!), we instead decided to let drone companies self-regulate, and ALSO dedicated tons of money and time to "problems" like "what if, in 1000 years, hyper-intelligent dogs learn to fly drones into mailmen." This is what we are doing with AI.

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Boris Dralyuk @bdralyuk.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Come one, come all!

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I bought this book based on this thread, and it's very good—it's great to read something helpful for figuring out how to teach writing in the age of LLMs that was published before ChatGPT existed.

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

You get what you get and you don't throw a fit

US map with northern MN and the West Coast in red and the deep south in blue, with the words "you talk most like someone from Minnesota—about 54% of your answers match a typical resident."

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Sara @saralovesyou.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

If you ever worked with me on academic tech stuff, you know I tried my best to dissuade people from using Turnitin. This was a very predictable outcome of them hoarding other people’s work submitted under coercion for well over a decade.

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Lots of good things happening on the "rediscovery of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya" front"! Nora Seligman Favorov's translation of "The Brother" is finished and will be released in the US in a few months (at an insanely low price for a university press).

global.oup.com

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

It's not just general deference to political power, either, it's specifically that they want to help Trump. Google didn't have its search results start showing the Twenty-Eighth Amendment in January 2025 when Biden (with much better reason!) declared it had been adopted.

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

New awful search will also return other grammatical forms of each word in the phrase (even inside quotes), which is terrible for language teachers and students trying to check on a specific phrase/form/combination

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I gave my retrospective here sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/08/woke..., not to be coy. But I don't think I was ever a True Believer in quite the right way so I'm probs not a good example of the pertinent class of people. Then again from the outside I bet I seem like I am, so maybe I am a good guide?

sootyempiric.blogspot.com

Wokeness: a Retrospective

In recent times my online sphere has had a fair few people make the claim that, in some sense, the culture has moved on from Woke. The d...

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

A poem by Virginia Hamilton Adair, who published her debut collection at the age of 83

REUNION BETWEEN PLANES

I'm the old school friend swooping out of the sky like a Halloween witch in my Hollywood shades and my stretchable wig and a girdle of groans. Since we shrieked our goodbyes in a shower of rice
my babies have grown beards been jailed and divorced. My husband the broker embezzled, absconded, is living abroad with a kennel of bitches. I remember your dad who fondled our bottoms your mom with her bottle she hid in the sofa.
My God, they were younger by decades than we are crossing into the dusk
of this terminal bar.

-VIRGINIA HAMILTON ADAIR

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Jay Troyer @gr8flbluejay.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Pavel Tchelitchew, Russian (1898-1957), Woman at the Window, 1937, oil on canvas, 92 x 67.5 cm, private collection

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

"He then gathered his family and friends about him, filled them with as much Dickensian good fare as he could persuade them to swallow, and, after their Christmas dinner, set them down to play 'Charades' and 'Clumps' and 'Animal, Vegetable and Mineral' in the drawing-room,

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

This is shockingly hard! Margaret Atwood Javier Cercas (but some are mysteries) Roman Senchin (only 4 1/2 books) Martin McDonough (1 book + 2 plays + 2 movies) I feel like the spirit of the restrictions would leave out children's book authors, or I could complete the list.

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I was today years old when I realized the linguistic term calque is just French for tracing paper.

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

The signatory Twain was assigned was Francis Lightfoot Lee of Virginia, who, as Twain was quick to point out, was “so inconspicuous that his name would now be wholly forgotten, but for one thing…” Here we find the quintessential Twainian pause, often deployed as a kind of misdirection.

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Lots of good live blogs of the game, but I recommend radiosarajevo.ba

Live blog (in Bosnian) of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. the US in the World Cup

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sakura christmas @prof-christmas.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Saddened to hear of the passing of the Sinologist Victor Mair, a linguistic genius the likes our field will not see again for a long time. I first got to know him via his incredible blog, Language Log, fresh out of college and was beyond-the-moon happy when he reposted my writing there, but

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

Language Log » Gibberish Uyghur

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Victor Hugo "once, when writing a poem based on the Book of Ruth, invented an entire Biblical city—Jérimadeth—just to land a funny rhyme" (Daniel Hahn, If This Be Magic)

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Why does anyone say Spanish is easy

Graph showing people write "se llamara como se llamase" like that, or with "se llamara" twice or "se llamase" twice, but not "se llamase como se llamara"

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Seva @seva.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

how the hell did they make Russian history this boring? my review of THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN. On Jude Law's Putin, the worst rave scene since The Matrix Reloaded, and a story that mistakes the Kremlin's self-image for a dissection of it

hegemon.substack.com

My Review of The Wizard of the Kremlin

how the hell did they make Russian history so boring

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Finally learned that Canvas lets you grade things in random order or in the order received, and anonymously if you want. Sorry to the people at the end of the alphabet in the years it took me to figure that out!

corner of Canvas Speedgrader window with settings wheel that leads to "Options"

options menu that lets you grade students in random or chronological, not just alphabetical, order

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Nick Anderson - political cartoonist @andertoon.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Raising the Flag Follow my work and writing on Substack: nickanderson.substack.com

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ghost malone ergo propter bones @proptermalone.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

can’t imagine much more demoralizing to a student than being accused by a machine of using a machine to cheat when you did no such thing

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elliot hughes @elliotshughes.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

For a second time, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has vetoed a measure that would temporarily give tenants more time to catch up on rent payments in the wake of Operation Metro Surge:

startribune.com

Frey again vetoes measure giving tenants more time to pay rent after Metro Surge

The mayor of Minneapolis said more time won’t improve outcomes. The council president said residents “deserve solutions, not vetoes.”

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Poetry is so silly. Косяк особняка. Ты — на курсах, ты родом из Курска.

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Dostoevsky and his second wife had four children, with two living to age 5. Reads as exceptionally tragic now, but was routinely tragic then.

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Phil Dorroll @phildorroll.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

I made a starter pack for specialists in Eastern Christian Studies- check it out, share with others, and let me know who else to add! go.bsky.app/8a9jSuF

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

We are farther from Office Romance (1977) than Novoseltsev was from Pasternak's poem "Loving some people is a heavy cross" (1931) when he tried to pass it off as his own.

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the autumn and the scarlet 🍁 @marcy.beneprism.rip · 11/04/2026

Here's my esoteric hot take on the possible cause of this data anomaly

young adult happiness chart with "worthless sex criminal becomes world's most powerful man" drawn around 2017 and "worst pandemic in a century" around 2019

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Spanish media has no trouble quoting "open the fuckin' strait" without sanewashing.

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Endlessly fun to study a language so long you can watch it change—today I'm hung up on "кварта и квинта похожи друг с другом" and "это правда смешно, как бокс и балет похожи друг с другом" (Ruscorpora and Google Books Ngrams still have exclusively похожи друг на друга).

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

"If I could completely describe the way he transmuted such dross into gold, I could theoretically assemble a few thousand pages of nineteenth-century materials, program a computer to make the proper selections, transformations, and arrays, and crank out a new Dostoevsky novel."—Robert Belknap, 1990

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Mikhail Gorbaechev @mikhailgorbaechev.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

TBH I really don't like "no one is illegal on stolen land" as a slogan. It mixes up a bunch of distinct issues and thus overcomplicates an already good position—no one is illegal—while simultaneously reifying blood and soil nationalism on land that isn't "stolen."

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Seriously though, I want to really note my appreciation for Tim Walz’s specific, by-name defense of our Somali neighbors. “Your great-grandchildren will still be here when this administration is dust” hit me harder than every other speaker combined

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

Lots of people already on hand two hours before three marches converge here

Crowd of people in front of the Minnesota Capitol

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

The 3 is full too, glad to see so many people

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

It is mind-boggling to live in a world where I can ask myself how to talk about using a typewriter in Russian and in seconds find a native speaker talking about it in detail. Убрать замок верхнего регистра = turn off shift lock. To type the numbers 3 and 0, use the letters З and О.

youtube.com

Инструкция к печатной машинке Эрика 30 (40/42/100/105/Любава) | пишущая машина typewriter

YouTube video by Владимир Коленников

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North American Dostoevsky Society @dostoevskysociety.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Only one week away! Remember to register for this exciting virtual talk by Michael Marsh-Soloway on the Mathematical Mind of F. M. Dostoevsky, sponsored by the Program in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies @oberlincollege.bsky.social .

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

This is a sad story, which I'm reposting because I had never heard "run from water, hide from wind."

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Erik McDonald @erikmcdonald.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

More nominations than the 19 spots for Senate District 60 DFL Directors (!)

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