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I don't want to have a timely take. I want to spend months thinking deeply about all one thousand words of my opinion on something that happened approximately ten to tens of hundreds of years ago, as God and Fatima al-Fihri intended

Describing a signed review of a blockbuster movie as equivalent to getting a nasty peer review on a journal article that maybe ten people will read from beginning to end is crazy work, by the way

Under no circumstances should you read this plot summary out loud to the screenwriter in your life. They will have too many questions about "the why" and "the core wound" and "does the tattoo blink" when you're just trying to laugh about the Sex Purge synopsis

If you're teaching a course on writing about music this coming fall, here's something for your students to chew on. I'm not sure if my favourite part is the bit towards the end where the reviewer blames new music on COVID, but it certainly is a sentence that is in there.

If you teach music history responsibly, inevitably someone will inform you that you are doing it wrong by failing to focus on "the music itself", meaning "the notes on the page". The notes, being representative of specific pitches, are quantifiable in ways that history and politics simply are not.

The tone of some of this relentless Emily Wilson discourse has to be nightmare fuel for anyone even thinking about doing public scholarship

I am once again recommending that if you, a professor, proudly announce that you are using a commercial LLM to decide which historical facts are important and/or interesting, you should have your tenure revoked.

This isn't just an example of bad faith scholarship conducted with a deep misunderstanding of what the field of history actually is. It's also lazy as shit.

This afternoon I have the privilege of sitting in on a former graduate student’s doctoral dissertation defense. I wrote her many glowing recommendation letters, all highly deserved. Back then, I thought the payoff was seeing her get into her dream doctoral program. I was wrong: this is even better.

My modest wish for myself is to once again sit in a room with other people who want to learn things and talk about the books and essays we read this week. My big expensive brain does not require an LLM to do that; it requires an employment contract.

One effective way to resist late-stage capitalism is to develop strongly-held values and act accordingly.