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Jonathan

@jsench.bsky.social
4.3K followers 3.1K following 1.4K posts

Prof of Book History @UWMadison. Dir., Center for History of Print & Digital Culture. Author: Intimacy of Paper. WheatleyCensus.org. Summers @CalRBS. Assoc Editor @PBSA. 4:56 marathoner. Mediocre triathlete. Episcopal. Little League ⚾️ coach #BillsMafia 🦬 ♾️

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Reposted by Jonathan
Tim Carmody @tcarmody.bsky.social · 49m
With capitalism (and later with bureaucracy), this process has been called “alienation”
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 13h
This is horrifying and exactly what a lot of us have been warning against for years. So fucking frustrating. We could have had better—politically, technologically, socially, and economically. We need far better leadership in all fields, at all levels.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 49m
it's almost as if poststructuralists were on to something
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 1h
The amount of time I spend each day going to removepaywall dot com in order to read something is dispiriting. I understand writing & websites cost $! I dont know how to solve this problem! But I know having all the good info & well thought perspectives locked up while the worst shit is free is bad!
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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 2h
One reason I’m resistant to the suggestion that “we” (humanists? academics? The Left?) bracket out the political and economic contexts of this or that tech to think about its boundless potential is that that selective forgetting and abstraction from power is just what underwrites this kind of pablum
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 4h
Counterpoint: It would be great if people read some of the things that have been written about AI surveillance of workers! press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hilke... www.cambridge.org/core/books/q... www.ucpress.edu/books/uberla... jacobin.com/2026/09/amaz...
press.princeton.edu
Data Driven
A behind-the-scenes look at how digital surveillance is affecting the trucking way of life
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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 5h
CFP: Generative Digital Humanities, a volume on AI and DH in the long-running Minnesota Debates in DH book series. To be co-edited by @zentralwerkstatt.org, @laurenfklein.bsky.social, @lnakamura.bsky.social, and myself. Deadline Nov. 1. Please share widely! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-gen...
dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu
CFP: Generative Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities
Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 4h
"Eventually, all our graves go unattended." A great Conan O'Brien and Martin Hagglund mashup.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 4h
The US military has many types of institutions within it. In addition to the armed services, it also has a media and educational wing. Hegseth's assault on all these institutions shows how authoritarians operate. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/which-stor...
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 17h
Friends, while they're trying to talk about fictional machine gods, don't lose sight into what they're all actually powering in real life. You can browse the the entities on the website and use the API, and learn more about it on the DAIR project site: dair-institute.org/projects/sur....
dair-institute.org
Surveillance Watch
This interactive map reveals the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations.
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Anne Helen Petersen @annehelen.bsky.social · 19h
This is *the* piece. Kate Manne, professor of philosophy at Cornell, speaks truth to the totality of failures at the university — and why students protesting the war in Gaza have faced far harsher consequences than any of the Cornell 7: www.thecut.com/article/what...
thecut.com
What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now
As a professor at the Ivy League school, Kate Manne has known many, many victims. There’s a palpable feeling on campus, she writes, that this is big.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 23h
No bibliographical sinning on my watch!
A table tent that says pages drying but pages has been struck out with the correction “sheets!”.Sheets of letterpress printing drying on a wall of shelves.
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Dr. Scandal Piñata @dr-g.myatproto.social · 28/09/2026
I’m in this webinar and, academics, take some time and learn who Marc Rowan is and how he steers our pensions into his company’s maw with one hand, while helping Trump come up with punitive policies aimed at hostile control of universities and curricula.
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Dr Surekha Davies, Historical Monster Consultant (she/her) @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Star Trek: The Next Generation is 39 years old today! I was one of those suckers whose life it changed. A thread of my writing about it, starting with how the show offers a defence of the humanities: #StarTrek #TNG #SFF buttondown.com/surekhadavie...
buttondown.com
Star Trek's defence of the humanities; more international editions of HUMANS
Thanks for reading Strange and Wondrous: Notes from a Science Historian! If you’d like to support my work, buying or gifting HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY...
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This thread is so important because it gets at the AI industry’s central failure of imagination. While I’ve met exceptions to the rule in Silicon Valley, most human beings do not reduce their sense of being alive to a stream of successive task completions, and find it a truly alienating vision.
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Alexander Manshel @manshel.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
FULL BOOKS! Or, as we once called them, BOOKS.
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JayIsPainting 🍁 @jayispainting.earthskyart.ca · 28/09/2026
Company invents tool you can buy to save you from other tool it makes that you can also buy.
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Dr. Peter Paul Rubens @peterpaulrubens.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Animated skeleton just hanging out with his similarly dead friends and their favorite stuff in this bizarre memento mori by Carstiaen Luycks. It's his day.
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Gwen C. Katz @gwenckatz.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fuck ChatGPT flyers. The future is broadsheets.
A crowded broadsheet with way too many fonts. It says:
Forget ChatGPT Flyers
Say it with 
Broadsheets
Unlimited fonts
Stretch them
Or cram a really long sentence into one line for no good reason
No whitespace
Mix capital and lowercase
Pointing hands
(They're called manicules!)
Don't be left behind
Broadsheets are the future
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Tonight I'm wearing a sport coat to my promotion to full professor recognition reception that I first bought at JC Penney in the nearest city to my tiny collegetown so I could wear it to a scholarship awardee reception in the fall of my senior year in 2003.
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AP Stylebook @apstylebook.com · 23/09/2026
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.
apnews.com
https://apnews.com/article/openai-safety-ai-framework-089e75b95bc935af092da7b79d92706d
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
It looked real bleak, man! Whiskey, a stick to bite, and a rusty saw blade bleak! And that’s if you survived a childhood full of fatal viruses, bacteria, and parasites!
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Diogenes of Sinope lived in a barrel.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Splatr.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
AI Toilets grant money.
Call for proposals for grants to “reimagine the bathroom” using AI and computer chips.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Did we get so much generative AI in the 2020s because tech worker power had grown and organized throughout the 20teens? Seems like maybe its the thing that got heavy investment in order to crush organized tech labor.
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Matthew Noe @noethematt.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
"Rather than using art as an occasional creative supplement, this study found that drawing comics can serve as both a medium and method through which students cultivate professional identity, visual thinking, and critical reflection." #GraphicMedicine #meded pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42319991/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Visual Attunement: A Longitudinal Study of Comics-Based Education in a US Medical School - PubMed
This article explores the role of comics as a sustained pedagogical practice within medical education, presenting findings from a longitudinal qualitative study conducted at Penn State College of Medicine, United States. Over two pre-clinical years, a self-selected group of medical students-known as …
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Carin Ruff @carinr.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
🚨📚📜🚨 "With a chirograph, Pope Leo has granted the Vatican Apostolic Archive and Vatican Apostolic Library an additional area within the Vatican City State, and asked that a new building be constructed."❗️ www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news...
vaticannews.va
Pope orders expansion of Vatican Apostolic Archive and Library - Vatican News
Given the increase in the Holy See’s bibliographic holdings and documentary production, the Pope expands the Vatican’s archive and library, and asks ...
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Kruttika Susarla @kruttika.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
ICYMI: @librariesftp.bsky.social shared a new resource! A snapshot of how 15 library systems across the US are funded + governed. This was led by Azani, @dylanflesch.bsky.social , and a few FTP volunteers + designed by me. You can download the zine here: www.librariesforthepeople.org/snapshots
Cover for FTP's new zine: Budgets are Values: How Public Libraries are funded in the US
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
We were about to cure a bunch of cancers with mRNA vaccines developed from federally funded university research. Instead the Dumbest Man Alive is gutting the NIH for his loser ego & funneling cash to grifters who'll launder it through AI companies and deliver nothing but the first quadrillionaire.
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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 20/09/2026
Giving an external committee power to veto research funding because it doesn’t align to a political agenda will not only harm science, it is a threat to democracy.
nytimes.com
White House Moves to Take Control of N.I.H. Grants (Gift Article)
Federal officials are drafting an executive order that would place grants under review by an outside panel, the latest effort to redirect billions of dollars in research spending.
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 20/09/2026
The US higher education system is not equipped to correct for the effects of systemic injustice and underfunding at the high school, middle school, and elementary school levels.
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Remember: Telling lies that everyone knows are lies is a classic tactic of dictators to force their followers to side with them over the truth itself. But the public will not be gaslit. We will continue to spread the truth to our communities. Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Breaking news: something Black people have known is true for 260 years is… still true.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
It’s unbearable that Bourdain is dead and all these other motherfuckers are still here, enjoying this earth.
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Deborah McDowell @dem8z.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
These fascists detest the fact that @jamellebouie.net is actually a thinker who runs circles around them. He reads broadly, thinks deeply, when all they can do is point the finger & foam at the mouth. If they could, they wld go the way of their ancestors: disappear him on a backroad in Mississippi.
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Imagine an arts center even having billions of dollars to mismanage and to lose.
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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 18/09/2026
If you're wondering why I'm so het up about the "AI Doomerism" shit lately, it's because i have students who are actually scared about this shit from the credulous coverage the "AI" Bros' claims have been getting, & I've spent multiple hours trying to give them the tools to tear the fear-hype apart.
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Matthew L Reznicek @drreznicek.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
It's worth noting that this article's two propositions for college--career credentialing and coming-of-age--neglect the idea of self-realization, self-awareness, let alone the development of a democratic consciousness.
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Sarah T Roberts, PhD @ubiquity75.xyz · 18/09/2026
From Science: Free inquiry depends on freedom of movement Starting in May 2025, the US government implemented an immigration policy that targeted noncitizen researchers for visa denials, visa revocations, detention, and deportation based on the topics and findings of their work (1).
science.org
Free inquiry depends on freedom of movement
Starting in May 2025, the US government implemented an immigration policy that targeted noncitizen researchers for visa denials, visa revocations, detention, and deportation on the basis of the topics...
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
It so odd how "Mr. Brightside" has become Millennial "Sweet Caroline." I would like well-written longform cultural criticism on this from @deciderdotcom.bsky.social or similar.
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Citizen.Coping @propcazhpm.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
Omg, I love it. The Civil War ended 1865. African American newspaper the Freedom's Torchlight, was teaching folks to read. 🥹 "To Make Negro Literature" by Elizabeth McHenry Read free #OpenAccess #Blackademics #BlackSky library.oapen.org/handle/20.50... (Also The Emancipation Circuit, T. Davis)
1.2 Front page of Freedman's Torchlight (December 1866), a newspaper designed to
provide basic literacy instruction, reading material, and lessons in political responsibility
to African American adults for whom formal schooling was inaccessible. Watkinson
Library, Trinity College Library, Trinity College, Hartford, CT.
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Daniel Bellingradt @dbellingradt.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Russia targeted a second-hand book market in Kyiv, and publishing warehouses and printing presses nationwide . #bookhistory
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 16/09/2026
Here's the Guardian.
theguardian.com
New lawsuit accuses Trump administration of blocking NIH grants as form of censorship
The administration has used a list of 235 keywords – such as ‘gender’ and ‘racist’ – to prevent topics from being funded
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 16/09/2026
Today, with backing from the ACLU, Kelton and twelve other named researchers filed a class action suit against the NIH under director Jay Bhattacharya for censoring their research and violating their First Amendment rights.
aclu.org
Researchers Challenge NIH Screening of Grants for Disfavored Viewpoints | American Civil Liberties Union
Class action lawsuit seeks to stop censorship and termination of federally funded scientific research
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
In a meeting about “ai resilience in assessment” and can’t stop thinking about how the old “come to my office and recite the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales” assignment all us English majors have had to do since forever remains solidly AI resilient: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…”
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Jonathan @jsench.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by private equity and data science.
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Adam Keiper @adamkeiper.com · 16/09/2026
The latest on the signs that Trump is planning on having installed around the Smithsonian's Museum of American History. A dozen signs for $84,000—cheap as far as propaganda goes, but ruinously expensive in terms of the national disgrace and embarrassment. www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...
theatlantic.com
The Next Change Trump Has Planned for the Smithsonian
A letter from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum revealed new details about warning signs the White House will install near the American-history museum.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
These people believe that individual choice, powered by the invisible hand of the free market, will naturally reveal what is good and what is bad, except when it comes to their own beliefs. Then they're gonna force you to sit there and listen.
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