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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they)

@writerethink.bsky.social
2.1K followers 1.4K following 1.9K posts

linguist / cognitive scientist / writing professor obsessed with all things relating to language, learning, and the mind. And knitting and sewing and music (especially violin and ukulele). And cats. Also a UU. neurodivergent. she/they. 🌈💖💜💙 /🖤🤍💜

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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 2h
My fall last week shook me up more than I expected…just tried to take laundry down to the drying rack in that room, opened the door, and was like “nope, not going in here without a buddy.”
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 10h
Tech industry is laser focused on solving the problem of humans enjoying each other’s company bsky.app/profile/down...
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Tauriq Moosa @tauriq.bsky.social · 13h
The thing I've always wanted for music is for it to be... solved. Have these weirdos ever engaged with art from a human level?
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Many thoughts about the argument in this piece but one is that citing a few studies to say that there is little evidence that "we discover what we think in the act of writing" contradicts everything I saw in 26 years of teaching college writing. Of course not the only we figure out what we think/1
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 21h
I’m also a college professor: a cognitive scientist who teaches writing. So you’ll say I only think this because I have a vested interest, but writing actually IS important, and this piece offers such a shallow and limited perspective on its value to us as thinkers. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think. (Gift Article)
If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
One of many frustrating things about the stupid injuries I incurred in my startled-by-mouse fall last week is that my always slightly-draggy, nerve-damaged left leg is now paired with a right leg that has a badly bruised/gouged shin. So now neither leg is great at doing its job!!
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Hannah Vardit @hannahvardit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
i worry that men think being A Good Guy is dramatically and heroically intervening on behalf of an endangered woman and then being publicly rewarded on a grand scale when actually being A Good Guy is just usually saying, “hey man that’s not funny” or “wow that’s fucked up” and there is no reward
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vortex_egg @vortexegg.com · 28/09/2026
The push to make it so that "websites as a destination for humans is over" is an intentional move to violate the freedom to read of individuals and move access to information into a "pay to get an opaquely intermediated version from a nontransparent source" model.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
new post on my #knitting blog: not much knitting! lots of thoughts on grappling with a "stupid" injury.
whitknits.wordpress.com
an open wound
Don't worry, I won't be sharing a photo of it...but I have indeed been walking around (as little as I can manage, but that's likely still more than I ought to be) with an open wound this week, in a very literal sense. Here's the story: on Tuesday morning, I was pedaling away on the exercise bike in our basement, finishing up Michael Pollan's "A World Appears" (which was fantastic!) on my Kobo while I exercised; I start every day with 30 minutes of exercise either on the bike or on the (old, 1990's era) Nordic Track that sits behind it.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
From Serena Jampel, one of the writing tutors I worked with at Harvard on the difference between the human tutor and AI and how a writing tutor can help a student find their voice. Lots of wisdom and also this truth: "the more you use it, the more you use it" www.harvardmagazine.com/commentary/h...
And that was another remarkable feature of the Writing Center. Sometimes students would resist my feedback, insisting that their structure would make sense once they added a bit more reasoning. In doing so, they were often pushed to articulate their thinking more clearly, and to affirm their confidence in their position.

An LLM cannot do that, because it does not have its own opinions or thoughts. It is only trained to engage the user: the more you use it, the more you use it. That’s actually the antithesis of writing instruction, which aims to cultivate independent thought.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
new post on my #knitting blog: not much knitting! lots of thoughts on grappling with a "stupid" injury.
whitknits.wordpress.com
an open wound
Don't worry, I won't be sharing a photo of it...but I have indeed been walking around (as little as I can manage, but that's likely still more than I ought to be) with an open wound this week, in a very literal sense. Here's the story: on Tuesday morning, I was pedaling away on the exercise bike in our basement, finishing up Michael Pollan's "A World Appears" (which was fantastic!) on my Kobo while I exercised; I start every day with 30 minutes of exercise either on the bike or on the (old, 1990's era) Nordic Track that sits behind it.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Oh, FB, I promise you that if I felt a pressing need to have a “crayon masterpiece” of this 14 year old photo of my and my daughter, I would dig out her old crayons and draw the thing my damned self. I made those sweaters with my own hands, I have no aversion to making things myself!
A screenshot of an ad for Muse, suggesting that it can take tasks off my plate. The task being proposed? Turning a photo of my holding my infant daughter while wearing matching handknit sweaters into a “crayon masterpiece”.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Oooof, so glad I got out of the CS/AI space when I did (‘06-ish)…what drove me out was the way I was treated (by fellow students and by faculty) as if my only value was as a reward for the boys, not as an excellent programmer in my own right.
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
‘We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.’ This is a CEO openly confessing to a level of acquired mental indolence that, were he not coddled 24/7 by an army of paid underlings, would make him incapable of living independently and feeding himself. He’s fine with it. Your kids won’t be.
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Robert McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
“We asked an amoral billionaire who can’t remember his own address how the industry that prints his money — ravenous for energy and powered by environmentally antagonistic power sources on an unprecedented scale — could help with climate change.”
nytimes.com
Opinion | Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far
Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, does not want you to be afraid of A.I.
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John Warner @biblioracle.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I don’t mean this as a criticism of this piece, but this was obvious from the start. If you don’t know anything, AI is a substitute, not a tool. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | A.I. Has Made Me a Better Doctor. It’s Made Med Students Worse.
I’m confident in my mastery over what doctors do — and less confident about my continued mastery of an ever-evolving universe of facts.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I like this notetaking example. it is a good case of how gender works. Notetaking has never been about producing a transcript. It is a bureaucratic skill in the 20th c. organixarion because it is SENSEMAKING. Those women socialized to take notes? They have been doing men’s metacognition for them
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I keep hearing little sounds and it's probably nothing at all but if another fucking mouse runs across my desk today, OMFG...please let there be no more rodents in spaces where I do not expect to see rodents! (Last year, one DID run across my desk + lunchbox, which inspired me to knit a mouse!)
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
My current suite of injuries has made it exceptionally clear to me how much I like to sit with my legs crossed or tucked under me somehow. Possibly this is partly because I'm short and my feet don't reach the floor easily in normal desk chairs? Anyway, it's VERY annoying not to be able to do so.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 23/09/2026
i think you can fairly say that the second trump administration is the most racist federal administration since woodrow wilson and honestly i'm not sure that it isn't more racist than wilson's
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digby @digby56.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I will never get over how incredibly stupid this is. Do they not know what risk pools are? Do they not know what insurance is???
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
bit weird given the play is written in early modern English but I'd pay to hear Ēalā Rōmēo, Rōmēo, for hwȳ eart þū Rōmēo? Wiðsace þīnum fæder and forsac þīnne naman; oþþe, gif þū nelt, swere mē þæt þū mīn lēofa sīe, and ne bēo iċ nā lenġ Capulēting.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
My “steps goal streak” (on my watch) is going to die tomorrow. I ended up with over 9k steps teaching on campus today even trying to minimize walking where I could, and am in mind-bending pain. So tomorrow: my steps goal is as close to zero as possible.
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Catherynne M. Valente @catvalente.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
From my new essay about the new social contract AI/AGI is actually meant to force us to sign: catvalente.substack.com/p/grand-thef...
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Rough morning: while pedaling on the exercise bike in our basement, I noticed a large mouse (or...rat?) scrambling down the door in front me, and in my panicked freakout, managed to get my foot caught on the bike pedal and sent myself flying...
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
New post on my #knitting blog: very little knitting, but some cross stitch, weaving, and baking to welcome fall.
whitknits.wordpress.com
a bedraggled welcome to fall
Tomorrow is the Fall Equinox, though we celebrated it as a family yesterday because tomorrow is also a cross-country meet day for the kiddo. So was this past Saturday, when she woke up at the crack of dawn, got herself ready and walked to the high school to get on the bus at 6am to head to Syracuse for a big meet.
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Iron Spike @ironspike.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Barack Obama drove a lot of white people insane. This was the election version of being ordered to integrate the town swimming pool, and choosing to fill it with cement instead.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Really weird to read the "A Letter to Future CCC Readers" in the June '26 issue of CCC that recently arrived in the mail, which starts "Things are not going well." And then realize that it was written *before* the whole NCTE de-chartering thing. Indeed, they are not going well. In so many ways.
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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 18/09/2026
i'm not over Alito saying we shouldn't count ballots that are mailed on or before Election Day but arrive shortly afterwards bc they can “radically flip” the “apparent outcome” cannot stress enough that, until all ballots are counted, there's no outcome to flip! ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/alito...
ballsandstrikes.org
A Brief History of Sam Alito’s Delusional Obsession With Voter Fraud
His conduct in several recent cases suggests that Alito is deep in the right-wing conspiracy theory weeds.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
And if I'm remembering the approximate amount of my 2020 salary correctly (we switched to new HR software whose records only go back to 2024), I'd be making basically exactly what I currently do...except I've been promoted TWICE since then. Whee!
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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Same people who seem to think it’s bad for China to beat us at AI are perfectly fine with China beating us at high speed rail, solar energy, wind energy, shall we go on
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
After my small experiment last week with "Ai Detectors," I have concluded that they are BULLSHIT. A paragraph that I wrote 100% on my own got between 0% to 25% AI detection using 4 different services. It's bullshit. If someone was using the 25% detection tool, then what?
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Whatever crud I picked up from students (despite being one of those weirdos who still masks everywhere) seems to have moved solidly into my chest and my scarred up* left lung is NOT HAPPY and I feel like garbage. *pneumonia of late 2019 really wrecked my left lung
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The president is just such a stupid asshole. I know we try to ascribe motives to this guy but he’s at the end of the day, when the story is written, just a dumdum idiot with a tiny brain that don’t work so good.
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
We get the "Meta is giving free Meta glasses to all vision-impaired veterans" ad on YouTube basically every single time we watch a YouTube video. And like...if we were building these as legit accessibility tools, then that's great. But it's so clearly NOT what Meta's doing.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 17/09/2026
the worst part about this is that a lot of the damage will be permanent by the time we can turn the research funding back on a lot of folks will have unsurprisingly and not unreasonably decided that they should leave this area of research because it will never be reliable what a huge waste
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
When I read the newsletter about this earlier today I squealed with glee!!
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Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I need younger generations to understand how weird it is that trump is such a unique terrible fuck up that it’s actually correct to blame the president for a demonstrably shittier economy and costs
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
new post on my #knitting blog: rivulets is finished!! whitknits.wordpress.com/2026/09/14/r...
whitknits.wordpress.com
rivulets is finished!
Shortly after our “Homecoming/Water Communion” service at church yesterday, a service centered around water and joining our raindrops and tiny streams into a mighty river, I stitched th…
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Feeling pleased with myself because my piano teacher commented on how much improvement she was seeing in my left hand/wrist since my last lesson back in June, and that really is the thing that I tried hardest to focus on this summer! Someone who knows what they're doing can see my progress!!
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Ryan Enos @ryanenos.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
After 9/11, I so feared what it would mean for our politics. And here we are, 25 years later, with the President of the United States asking people to raise their hand and pledge allegiance to him and playing a video saying he was created by God to save us from domestic enemies.
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Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I've spent my entire career reporting on the War on Terror. Many this week have asked me for my extended thoughts on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Here they are.
forever-wars.com
Today We Must Finally Remember What The 9/11 Commemorations Ignore
Righteous victimhood fueled the War on Terror. 25 years later, we also have to remember all of those slain under its banner
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
9/11 marked my entry into adulthood...I was on my way to buy books for my first year of college. There’s not a single moment of my adult life that wasn’t colored by it, even though it didn’t touch a day of my childhood. (For my students, it's just history, the way stuff from the 1970s was for me.)
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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
As both an academic and a writer, I am repelled by the "this looks like a long document. Would you like me to summarize it for you?" that seems to appear at the top of every pdf viewer now. NO. The *entire point* of good writing (either books or journal papers) is that every sentence has a purpose.
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Democrats should be at the microphone right now noting that this is a Hatch Act violation that they'll be pursuing in January. I don't care that the nation's become numb to this shit. It's still illegal and if Democrats should run against it and then act to crush it.
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Quinta Jurecic @qjurecic.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
AI chatbots have democratized billionaire brain worms by allowing everyone—not just the very rich—to experience total insanity-inducing sycophancy
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
THIS. It is the most demoralizing thing in the world for me as a person who has been writing online for 26 years now. I sound like ME, dammit. If the machine sounds like me, too, then that's on the machine for stealing my voice.
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Ergative Absolutive @ergative-abs.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
This is where psycholinguists get their novel shapes to learn how people learn new labels. #psycholinguistics #linguistics
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Ooof, I get that hosting a thread (on AHP's Patreon post) where people answer the question of what advice they would give to someone wondering about having a child in our present polycrisis is dicey territory, so I understand why comments would be disabled...
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Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they) @writerethink.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Kiddo brought home her GIGANTIC honors biology textbook and could barely tear herself away from reading it this evening…I know she says she doesn’t want to go into science and that’s totally fine, but it sure does seem to light her up!
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