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Alex B. Kostiw

@formerlybirds.bsky.social
118 followers 95 following 157 posts

Draws, writes, designs, makes, teaches: books. Chicago, and elsewhere. (Ft tt, bb.) tenderly-honestly.com

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Reposted by Alex B. Kostiw
amy brown 👻 @amybrown.xyz · 12h
pringles urn. discuss
PRINGLES
ONCE YOU DROP
Pringles just dropped an urn that you can be buried in.

Once you drop... we have the perfect resting place for you.
To honor our inventor's dedication to Pringles, we are giving away an after-lifetime supply of Pringles and a custom Pringles urn for one die-hard Pringles fan. Enter for a chance to win at OnceYouDrop.com
No Purch. Nec. Ends 10/22/26 at 11:59:59 PM (ET). Open to 50 US/DC; 18+. See full rules for complete details at OnceYouDrop.com. Void where prohibited.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
I hope the rebooted characters are better at communicating with each other than Fox "I never tell my partner where I'm going" Mulder and Dana "Mulder, it's me" Scully.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
I visited the gardens at Versailles for the first time and composed so many snapshots so carefully. Got back to the hotel, backed everything up to the cloud. Due to a glitch, all the photos were deleted from my phone, and none were actually uploaded. I think about this every few months.
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 09/10/2026
🤷🏿‍♂️
news.berkeley.edu
Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News
A UC Berkeley researcher co-authored a study that raises profound questions about how we interact with artificial intelligence in education — and daily life.
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Jeff Greene @jeffgreene.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
“Austerity creates corporate universities,” @tressiemcphd.bsky.social said. “Corporate universities are not healthy educational organizations, and unhealthy educational organizations cannot inculcate or defend academic freedom.” Whew. That’s it right there. dailytarheel.com/484871/unive...
dailytarheel.com
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(VFP) Strategic Gravitas Reserve @braak.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
We're not suffering a breakdown of the social fabric because we've lost the ability to have reasonable disagreements with each other; we've lost the ability to have reasonable disagreements because some people are trying to deliberately rend the social fabric.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Really thrilled to be in this show again. :)
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Reposted by Alex B. Kostiw
Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
This, from Dennett, I wish I'd taken to heart earlier in my life. www.themarginalian.org/2014/03/28/d...
How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1 You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
2 You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3 You should mention anything you have learned from your target.
4 Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Gone away are the uncles, here to stay are the brothers and nephews...
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I know I'm getting older because more and more plumbers and locksmiths are around my age or 😱 younger.
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The Public Domain Review @publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Various versions of a 19th-century “flap book” titled Metamorphosis enabled children to turn Adam into Eve into a mermaid, a lion into a griffin into an eagle — all while learning about the inevitability of death: publicdomainreview.org/collection/m…
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The Public Domain Review @publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The first charting of synaesthetic visualisations, plate 4 from Francis Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883). More on the site: publicdomainreview.org/collection/s…
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Reposted by Alex B. Kostiw
Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
TM
=Q
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
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There is no more "state of the humanities" as such. There is no condition in which the humanities are under attack in which the whole university is not under attack. There is no condition in which the university is under attack that the whole of educational
infrastructure, public and private, from pre-K up, is not under attack. And there is no condition in which education is under attack
in which civil society can remain unimperiled. There is no sense calling for independent or solitary action by something called "the humanities" when that category has been so thoroughly absorbed by concerted attacks on democratic governance, due process of law, rights to privacy, security, assembly, and expression.
We are all humanists now.
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Matt Pearce @mattdpearce.com · 08/09/2026
You have to make making culture a priority. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/how-should...
What do we lose when software is our greatest cultural export? Doesn't it bother you that Al has made the signs in your neighborhood uglier and removed the quirks of human idiosyncrasy in the handwritten note stuck in the storefront window? Wasn't it better that people could choose whether to see the silly Wile E. Coyote movie instead of leaving a finished project in the vault to die in tax write-off purgatory?
Weren't you amazed to learn that the Circe scene in Christopher Nolan's "Odyssey" was shot completely in-camera, with prosthetics and no CGI? Aren't there different, more difficult stories out there that also deserve to get told, and to also get told well?
Don't people work hard enough and suffer too much not to deserve, in their short lives, to encounter beautiful and well made things?
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The Public Domain Review @publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Centuries ahead of its time, Giovanni Battista Bracelli's "Bizzarie di Varie Figure" (1624) depicts figures made from a range of objects, mostly abstract — cubes, rings, squares — but also such things as rackets, screws, and braided hair. More here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/b...
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Gonna start a restaurant one day and call it This & That.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
This looks like people having different definitions of the word "craft" as it pertains to comics. I actually think I agree with Kochalka, at least his first letter; and I don't think he and Woodring are so far apart in their opinions.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
No.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Why were you whispering in a Barnes & Noble?
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Reposted by Alex B. Kostiw
ABOOnchio👻 BOOlchetti👻 @vor-bokor.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
HE REMEMBERS SNOW row.themerrymushmen.com/product/xnoo...
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Lol yeah, I can make up numbers, too.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
The Garden Variety blog is making me miss blogging.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 25/08/2026
"“While machines optimize tasks and automate decisions, our graduates develop the uniquely human capacities that will define leadership in 2030 and beyond,” the school says."
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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
cognitive sabotage, you can ban it extra credit to U Chicago for bans on professional AND undergrad programs; smart SLACs are going to market AI free campuses soon chicagomaroon.com/53262/news/s...
chicagomaroon.com
Sosc Core to Institute AI Ban, Technology-Free Classrooms This Fall
All social science Core classes will transition to an “analog” approach for the upcoming academic year, restricting in-classroom technology use and banning AI-assisted writing and grading for students...
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Domino Books @dominocomics.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
New to The New York Working Cartoon Library archive, we've added a rare John Hankiewicz comic, Monday Wednesday. A nameless narrators thoughts & feelings about drawing itself and observations on models/fellow artists in a figure drawing class. Read in full, free: nycartoonlibrary.org/johnmonday.h...
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Reposted by Alex B. Kostiw
Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Both the Economist and others suggest this study demonstrates that AI can help students. So I contacted the lead researcher to figure out how many. Answer: Out of ~26,000 kids, a total of 20. And five months after starting to use AI, only four continued to spend 65 minutes on homework. Four.
Graph of student exam scores correlated to homework completion time for to groups, students using AI and those that did not. There is a slight spike for studens using AI who also maintained extensive homework completion time. As described in post, the number of students falling into this bucket was 20 out of 26,000.
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Anybody who’s still advocating putting these tools anywhere near a school is not doing so despite the cognitive collapse they cause, but because of it. dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...
Abstract
Using 30 months of panel data on 26,811 Chinese students in grades 7-12, we study how generative Al affects homework productivity and learning. The data combine monthly closed-book exams, high-school and college entrance exams, and homework scores and completion time across nine subjects. We exploit staggered Al adoption in a difference-in-differences design. Al adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months.
High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years. The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys. The learning losses are concentrated among roughly 80% of Al users whose behavior is consistent with homework outsourcing, as indicated by exceptionally short homework completion time coupled with high homework scores. Al users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-Al users experience small learning losses.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Evidence keeps accumulating that LLMs are a powerfully useful technology for people who already know what they're talking about, and a dangerous outsourcing of cognitive function for people who don't. This can occur within a single individual, who knows a lot about some things and not about others.
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Isaac ⚔ Isaac @isaacxisaac.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Just in case some other writer out there today needs to know exactly what time of day their character might hear a specific animal cry at a specific location xeno-canto.org
Screenshot from xeno-canto.org, "Sharing wildlife sounds from around the world". The user has searched Rana temporaria (European common frog) and 214 recordings have been found with date, time, location, and remarks about the context of the recording.
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Jennifer Mach (she/they) @jennifermach.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Chicago history buffs, my neighbor is downsizing and she is looking for a home for these—I guess they were used to print the @chicagotribune.com
Closeup of printing plates with ribbons and jewelry Tray of some kind of printing plates
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Fieldmouse Press @ PCX @fieldmouse.press · 02/08/2026
The Fieldmouse Press Warehouse Sale is LIVE on Crowdfundr: crowdfundr.com/support_solrad We're clearing out our shelves to keep our three-time Eisner-nominated comics magazine, SOLRAD, alive, and you get the deal of the year because of it. Every Fieldmouse Press book for 2021–2024 is 50% off!
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The Public Domain Review @publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
NEW ESSAY — Centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning. Anne Lawrence-Mathers investigates the Ars notoria: publicdomainreview.org/essay/ars-no...
Illuminated manuscript page from the Ars Notoria showing a large circular diagram filled with two columns of Latin/magical text, flanked by four winged angels in red and blue robes holding cross-topped staffs. Below the circle, a labeled triangular diagram headed 'RECTORICA' branches into seven descending strands terminating in arched compartments labeled with rhetorical terms including 'Exordium', 'Narratio', 'Partitio', 'Confirmatio', 'Repletio', 'Conclusio', and 'Finis', each strand decorated with small symbolic emblems.
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Tom Pepinsky @tompepinsky.com · 26/07/2026
Americans have more confidence in higher education than in big tech companies, and the gap is growing rather than shrinking. The higher ed-doomsday pundits need to get on board with the real vibe shift in public trust that is happening right now.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
I see what you're doing with the graphics, but they are terrible for both legibility and readability. Maybe slow them down, and don't loop them? My eyes kept moving with the football, I can hardly read the text over the building windows, and I think I'm done trying to read this article.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Always and forever.
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Nina Metz @ninametz.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Why Aren’t There More Imax 70mm Screens for ‘The Odyssey’? variety.com/2026/film/ne...
Sources at Imax confirmed to Varietythat many of the parts needed to build these specialized film projectors "simply no longer exist." The original design files were created roughly half a century ago, but as Gelfond alludes to, they were never properly maintained. As a result, Imax no longer has a complete manufacturing blueprint — and much like the lost tribal knowledge of the Apollo-era spacecraft, very few engineers working today fully understand the systems.
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Hagai Palevsky (he/him) @dialhforhagai.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Another really good one-pager from the same book, POCKET FULL OF RAIN AND OTHER STORIES. Love Jason’s pre-anthropomorph style
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
I miss the noisy summers I grew up in, and even when my family finally got air-cons in almost every room, you could hear the music from cars at the stop light and boomboxes and people laughing. And when you stepped outside, the sticky sweltering heat enveloped you, exactly as it felt like it should.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
I've had a great Last Four Watched. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I saw with a friend at the Music Box, with a q+a and performance by John Cameron Mitchell, what a gift.
Screenshot from Letterboxd, showing posters for four films: The Vourdalak. Excalibur. Kedi. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Each rated 5 stars.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Peeling oranges, a woman said, "Today, I have wasted energy on anger. Hasten on, all the days we've been waiting for!"
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Jesse Rothstein @jrothst.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Scott emphasizes the importance of craft or “metis” – “local knowledge” about how to farm in a particular location, what customers will need, or how the parts of an ecosystem interact – and argues that large-scale, centrally-governed systems can’t accommodate the complexity of local knowledge. 2/6
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Literacy is not an individual skill. Literacy is a public infrastructure.
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Dexerto @dexerto.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
A Norway fan has gone viral for not taking part in their Row celebration after matches and won't do it if they win the World Cup "It’s factually wrong; they didn’t row, they sailed over the Atlantic”
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Woke up at 6 am again, facing the big windows. Through the tree outside, the sky looks like pieces of pale gold at sunrise.
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Alex B. Kostiw @formerlybirds.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Honored and grateful to be one of the grant recipients.
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Krystal Kavita Jagoo, MSW (She/Her/Hers) 🇹🇹👊🏽✍️🏾♊️♊️♏️ @equitableforall.com · 17/03/2026
"A comprehensive examination of Toni Morrison’s writings, intelligence, her use of the Black literary form, her reading & writing process, & how she fragments language to make it her own. This...turned me into a lover/supporter of literary criticism because it expands our...vision about literature."
therumpus.net
In Praise of Difficulty & Reading Toni Morrison: A Conversation with Namwali Serpell - The Rumpus
“She saw the readers as a chorus, like the chorus in a Greek play, where the audience is part of the ensemble. She gives the example of when you’re in an audience in a musical performance—you’re shout...
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ApocalypticaNow @apocalypticanow.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Technology by its very nature is in a constant state of flux. It's foolish to train young people in skills that are *currently* useful and which may become outmoded by the time they join the workforce
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Clive Thompson @clivethompson.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
behold an ancient "curse tablet" greeks and romans wrote them to try and bring bad fortune upon their enemies one of them cursed a prominent lawyer: "I bind the tongue and soul and speech that he is practicing" item #8 in my latest Linkfest newsletter, free here: buttondown.com/clivethompso...
A withered old grey rectangular object that looks possibly like a piece of old buckled wood, or some sort of ancient cloth. It has characters written in scratch marks on it
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Yuriko Furuhata @underground259.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Very excited to share a link to my new book! The introduction is now available at dukeupress.edu/archives-of-...
dukeupress.edu
Archives of the Anthropocene: Visual Grammars of Deep Time
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