@JoyceCarolOates congratulations on making the final - sorry to hear you didn’t win

This has the feel of Zeno's paradox to me. We're getting stronger and stronger evidence for something that will never happen. We're always "halfway" there!

recalling years ago when my first husband & I were looking at houses & one of the most attractive was a single floor, virtually all glass, with skylights, & in each room a door to the outside; & when we asked the homeowner why so many doors he said he'd once lived in a two-story house in which there was a fire & he did not want to further explain.

This is an extremely dense neighbourhood known for high number of residents who walk or wheel to get around. The speed limit on Comox is 30 km/hr. Community needs to know what happened here. Hoping person in hospital recovers. vancouver.citynews.ca/2026/0…

UB, English '82

The purpose of the humanities is not to help students “learn critical thinking” or “reflect on the human condition.” While laudable goals, these are secondary and epiphenomenal to what was once the implicit but now abandoned objective of humanistic study: cultural transmission. If we in the West read Homer, Virgil, or Dante, for example, it is not to learn how to think but to know who we are. It is, fundamentally, an act of honoring our ancestral inheritance in view of civilizational continuity. The humanities as practiced today are an inversion of the humanities properly understood: the former seek not to preserve and honor the collective “we” but, rather, to destroy it. Any serious defense of the humanities going forward will need to drop the palaver about “critical thinking” or “humanity” (to say nothing of “empathy”) and start addressing the real issue: the hollowing out of cultural transmission in an era of largely self-inflicted civilizational decline.

👇 👇 👇

A great many things can be learned by reading and writing about them. Importantly, that's not what machines do.

"Essay mills will 'always be with us' but no one said we should teach students to use them responsibly." Hear, hear!

#Vancouver Fairview hit & run! Cyclist on 10th Av Bikeway, crossing Oak west was knocked off bike by old station wagon also travelling west on 10th as it turned south on Oak. Elder male driver of beige/brown panelled station wagon surely felt impact but didn't stop! No injuries.

text from a friend at one of this week’s shows

"passively accepting the end of mass literacy" is the line more people need to hear. the framing around AI in education has somehow made "kids should learn to read and write well" the radical position. if the default path leads to a generation that can prompt but can't compose, we've made a terrible trade. the typewriter idea is interesting because it forces the actual thinking back into the process.

What we think of as modern civilization is essentially coextensive with mass literacy. People greeting the end of mass literacy with a yawn are assuming that we can keep this machine work going in the absence of the foundations it was built on. Huge civilizational-scale gamble.

The best Brutalist/Brutalist-inspired architecture of the 1960s through 1980s still looks more like the future than almost anything built before or since. The atriums of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco (1973), Hyatt Regency Atlanta (1967), Atlanta Marriott Marquis (1985).

surely there are "top schools" beyond Harvard? indeed, I would venture to say that, for many students, there are universities & colleges more suitable for them than Harvard, where students often don't get to take courses with senior professors until their junior or senior years. if you want close personal attention in small seminars or tutorials, think "small liberal arts college."

"Everyone likes to look at the dots. But when I connect them, people scream. Often because when I'm done connecting the dots, they are looking at a portrait of someone they know." sarahkendzior.substack.com/p…

The reason AI poses a threat to college is that no one believes in higher ed any more and the public correctly recognizes the system is nakedly extorionate: you exchange a large sum of money (or take on mountainous debt) in exchange for an “I’m Employable” stamp (AKA diploma).

Interesting that Americans who love "democracy" are pushing this royalist monarchist instead of calling for free and fair elections

Natives are pawns in This game

I have started to think the only way to repair the world is let women run it for a century or so. The difference in grace and sportsmanship for the US team is so stark. The women were kind to their rivals. The men couldn’t even muster basic decency for their teammates.