@stephjayb
Author | Watching Women: Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State (2024) Assoc Prof of English in Tucson | Surveillance | C20/21 Caribbean and British Lit | GWS rock scrambler | hawk enthusiast | she/her
OpenAI’s push to become crucial infrastructure in education should not and cannot be separated from its broader entanglements with the US military and mass surveillance that includes students and teachers.
Seconding, and adding that @meganc.bsky.social's essay on Skid Row is not only perfect in itself, it is also the perfect counterpoint to Ben Folds' whining.
Lightly side-eying people who have 4-6 answers but none of them are the weird ones.
(My answer is Richard II; I wrote my undergrad thesis on Love's Labour's Lost)
Friends: I have been recently appointed to the Global South MLA Forum executive committee and the CFP below is backed by the forum.
**** World Literature and the Global South: Frictions and New Horizons ****
Please consider submitting your abstract and/or kindly repost! Thank you!
The Dems could have enacted policies that helped people & let the right whine itself into a corner at any point over the past three decades but they CHOSE to maintain the status quo instead.
Working on my @marchxness.bsky.social bracket and the Belle&Sebastian v. Lauryn Hill matchup is making two very different versions of myself that both existed in my early 20s fight one another.
Male colleagues weighing in suggest you may be right!
Hmm, okay, reconsidering my assumptions about these with two in-house data points suggesting the email blasting is indiscriminate
I would be happy to be proven wrong, but one of the main qualifications being "friendly" suggests...
A few times a year, definitely more since I became our department's director of undergrad studies.
This is me, but with Wyndham Lewis.
"Why did I choose love in a place that chose to see proclivity? Why did I want to remember it?"
Now up in the Tiny Cabinet (the smallest museum at @uarizona.bsky.social) is a great essay/installation by @uamfa.bsky.social's Bea Troxel: the.tinycabi.net/2026/02/bea-...
If you give Einstein your credentials to log in, then it can access ALL of your campus portals: your financial accounts, transcripts, email, health records, &c. because all of that is under one umbrella. Literally the only way to your LLM is through your campus login. The security risk is massive.
"Women adopt AI at rates 25% lower than men.
This isn’t a guess. It’s the finding of a Harvard Business School meta-analysis examining eighteen studies, over 140,000 participants, across multiple countries."
"Every AI Company Is Building a Different Wife"
abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built...
So assuming a “secure digital environment” means “stopping AI bots from scraping data,” I think OCLC is missing an opportunity to speak to its patrons like real people, not consumers. That’s something libraries can do that other org’s can’t. Emulating marketing-speak misunderstands libraries’ value.
AI does not enhance “efficiency.” AI is a permission structure for a totalizing regime of austerity and labor immiseration.
appalling theft of public funds as corporate welfare for the kleptoplagiarism cognitive decapacitating machine
The University of Arizona @douglassday.bsky.social celebration has an AMAZING cake from Allyn Haynes Catering. We may not be able to cut into it... #DouglassDay
Thanks!
I'm SO pleased that my book has won the 2025 Surveillance&Society (@survstudiesnet.bsky.social) Book Prize!
They call it "masterful and provocative," and a colleague is threatening to have that printed on a shirt, bc I also won the "best colleagues" lottery.
ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/su...
A while ago bought a box of sugar cubes and the box referenced their three-centuries-long company history and of all the things you can put in your promo copy wow would that not be the one I would choose.
Also: the female co-workers who try to discipline you out of this, as if maybe no one has ever tried to socialize you to be properly feminine.
Like, if my Mom and the nuns couldn't strong arm me into doing conventional femininity in my teens, what makes you think you're going to succeed now?
Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock teaches well (for grad students at least), Dionne Brand's At the Full & Change of the Moon is maybe less explicitly about time, but time works interestingly there.
Fun, but not world lit & probably a bit long to teach: Terry Pratchett's The Night Watch.
Defund the CIA and use the money to make more Muppet retellings of classic literature
DID YOU KNOW?
If you have Delta Sky Miles, you can donate them to help a kidnapped-and-released person fly home!
They are set free on the streets of El Paso or another Texas town with no phone, no money, nothing at all. Your miles can get them back to their loved ones!
It is going to be huge! And @ubisurv.net's piece, which manages to be both encyclopedic *and* pointed about these post-9/11 thought currents and how they show up in 2000s sci-fi, is a great one.
Anyone can sign this; I think everyone should.
The people who push the EdTech, Apps, and Test Prep do not want us to solve the problem they’ve created. These outcomes are not an accident or a side effect. They are the intention.
