Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they)

Indeed! I did manage to eat the pizza, though :)

(Ha, giggling at my inadvertent ambiguity: I’m trying to eat the pizza, not the house!)

I AM HOME!!! @awatts.bsky.social brought me a smoothie to drink in the car and had homemade pizza waiting for me at the house, which I am attempting to eat while also grappling with the nausea that set in partway through the day (motion sickness, alas!).

Desperate for food and for just…not being on a bus, a light rail train car, or a bus or light rail station, which is where I’ve been for 7+ hours at this point. (Masked, too…holy moly I’ve spent so many hours in a mask these last few days!)

Hopefully only one more hour to go.

Finally heading out on the final leg of this trip…this bus was 45 minutes late, and it took everything in me to stay calm and not burst into tears as we waited without any info in a dismal bus station. I just wanna be home!!

As we’ve all been saying - it’s a feature, not a bug, of the way these things are built

Challenge for people who believe Claude *is* conscious and use it anyway: Explain how you’re not a slaver.

Talk this morning went great! Several people reached out afterward to follow up, and I might be getting another (compensated!) invited Zoom talk out of it, too. Maybe one of these days I’ll actually believe I’m as good at giving talks as people say I am.

On the bus to Buffalo, where I’ll switch busses to get home. Lucky me, I got pouring rain for the 1/4 mile trek through a series of parking lots between the light rail station and the bus station in BOTH directions this trip (being somewhat sodden is even less enjoyable on a bus, it turns out!).

Oooh, exactly what I need: something to look forward to!!

(I love everything Becky Chambers has written!!)

A photo of my lap; you can see the bottom hem of a magenta sweater, and I have a bright green in-progress version of the same sweater on my lap. My skirt has a print that is made up of magenta, pink, purple, orange, and turquoise. A 4Cs badge is also partially visible.

It’s a nothing-but-Wardie sort of conference! And I realized that ALL of my colorful Wardies (the magenta one I have on today AND the turquoise one I finished not so long ago AND this green one I’m knitting) actually go well with this skirt!!

Ok, I haven’t really looked at the internet much today (because traveling/conferencing). How many new crises await me? Any good news?

A selfie taken from a low angle; I’m wearing a black & neon printed mask and turquoise handknit cardigan, holding up a bright green piece of knitting. I look tired.

On my second Greyhound bus of the day (this one’s nicer than the first), on my way to CCCC ‘26, knitting a Wardie cardigan while wearing a Wardie cardigan.

There’s another horrific video circulating on the timeline and this is my regular gentle and loving reminder to *turn off autoplay* on your videos so you can give consent to see these things.

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

But I've seen plenty of people like me get jumped on for selectively responding to news when they mostly post about the minutiae of their lives and like...how can anyone do anything BUT selectively respond? I think it's good if life has room for the minutiae, not just mainlining news feeds.

I feel this every time I write a new knitting blog post (I post weekly); it feels weird NOT to mention some of the news about the world from the previous 7 days, and sometimes I do, but I'd never get to the actual knitting/crafting if I tried to do that every single week.

This is not just cursed, its monstrous. The digital resurrection of a historian who died in January of this year, all so Grammarly can get some more clicks and engagement from students and/or scholars and/or others.

It feels so wrong on so many levels, these ghosts enslaved to AI forever

Jamelle Bouie clearly and quite publicly works very hard to be informed and even-handed and anyone talking about him as if he’s not doing either of those things should shut the fuck up and definitely be widely ignored

I think it is funny how qualifications and clean records without red flags matter way more for someone interviewing to work as say, a bartender than a white man trying to get hired to be a senator.

hello, march. Later this week, I'll be taking a Greyhound Bus (for the first time!) to Cleveland for the CCCC '26 conference, where I'll be leading a standing group meeting (for the Linguistics, Language, and Writing group) and presenting as part of a panel tied to a different standing group (the Cognition & Writing group) because that's what happens when you're a weirdly interdisciplinary person like me.

New post on my #knitting blog: welcoming March with a color that isn't red, black, or white.

I am angry to a degree that I can't express in words about how Trump is messily dismantling our hard-won global progress on nuclear non-proliferation.

world-altering decisions are being made by a cabal of gambling addicts hell bent on self enrichment no matter the cost to humanity, we should look into that.

There is no path back to "normal" that doesn't go through impeachment & conviction. "To initiate a war of aggression... is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime..." At least that’s what we said when we hanged the Nazis. See avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/09-30-46...

real significant lack of “who and/or what comes next” when it comes to the thought process behind assassinating khamenei

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

It's almost impossible to comprehend how many people have died now because a racist reality star just couldn't deal with having a popular black president.

My own contribution to lace weight knitting, Stargazer Studio’s Wolf Moon pattern.

Whenever I find myself doom-scrolling, I immediately slide over to the knitting feed. It never fails.

This week is lace week on #showmeyourknits and there are some really inspiring designs!

Also, did you know knitting has a long history of civil resistance? knittingforclimate.com/knitting-as-...

US-Israeli strike on girls' school kills at least 85 students, Iran's judiciary says At least 85 students have been killed in US-Israeli strikes that hit an Iranian girls' school in Hormozgan province, Iran's judiciary said on Saturday. Washington has not commented on the reported str...

We killed 85 schoolgirls. We are not the good guys.

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

I can't fucking believe we're doing this again.