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Reposted by nm whitley

Melissa Reynolds @melkatrey.bsky.social · 22h

I just keep coming back to this, the most obvious lacunae in every conversation about “incorporating AI” into our classrooms: no one—literally NO ONE—can explain how it improves the work of learning & knowledge-making. There is, in fact, overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

This whole thread.

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 1d

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 13h

www.wweek.com/culture/2025...

Can you put into words what that purpose is? You and the frog have really become icons of this protest.

There’s been a nice overall whimsy that has shown up. The frog is amazing. We had a bunch of other inflatable people here last night, too. I saw people playing Twister the other day.

What they rely on is fear. So by coming out in an absurdist manner, it speaks to them, to some extent, that we’re actually not that afraid.

It also dismantles their narrative a little bit. When they try to describe this situation as “war-torn,” it becomes much harder to take them seriously when they have to post a video saying [U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security] Kristi Noem is up on the balcony staring over the Antifa Army and it’s, like, eight journalists and five protesters and one of them is in a chicken suit.

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nm whitley @nmwhitley.bsky.social · 19h

Posting the logo of this old punk band I like for no reason

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Matthew Claxton @matthewclaxton.bsky.social · 20h

Great family story about Robert A. Heinlein getting a (deserved) slap in the Soviet Union!

mburnamfink.bsky.social @mburnamfink.bsky.social · Apr 18

There's a family story that when my great-grandmother Grace was a tourist in the Soviet Union in 1960, she was in a small airport and oddly enough, there was another American couple there.

The plan was delayed, and the man was getting quite irate with the situation.

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Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 1d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 21h

If your invited keynote speaker works for a company started because OpenAI wasn't basing its work enough on science fiction and said speaker uncritically cites TESCREAList, fictional work masquerading as science, you might not have organized a serious academic gathering.

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nm whitley @nmwhitley.bsky.social · 3d

ICYMI i talked about stories by Carolyn Zhao @strangehorizons.bsky.social @suplexicon.bsky.social y.social @bruisermag.com @johnchrostek.com @hexliterary.bsky.social and Samanta Schweblin, plus songs by Stereolab, but not Goodnight Moon which I had nothing to say about buttondown.com/shortstoryre...

SHORT STORY REX Sept 2025

1. “The Heartbreak Hotel on Plutonic Planet”, Carolyn Zhao Got sucked in by this one’s sort-of free-associating whimsy, its deceptively naif je-ne-sais-quoi....

buttondown.com

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nm whitley @nmwhitley.bsky.social · 8d

Hello all, my story "Enselfening" is now live in the new issue of The Dark!
I am finding it impossible to come up with a pithy sales pitch for it, apart from saying it's quite weird and I'm proud of it and hope you'll read it 🙏🙏🙏
www.thedarkmagazine.com/enselfening/

Enselfening - The Dark Magazine

For several years, Winnie had been living on the north side of a town where nobody oriented themselves in terms of north, south, east, or west but rather in relation to the sea, the hills, and two riv...

www.thedarkmagazine.com

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Mr.Eddie8976 @mreddie8976.bsky.social · 1d

Every Democrat, in every interview, asked anything about the WH should start their answer with, "Well, obviously the president has some sort of dementia, so you see..."

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Moby Dick @mobydickatsea.bsky.social · 1d

sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers

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White Rose Resistance @whiteroseresistance.org · 1d

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Wendy N. Wagner 🎃 @wnwagner.bsky.social · 1d

Did you know @nightmare-magazine.com turned 13 this month??!?
www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/e...

Editorial: October 2025 - Nightmare Magazine

We always try to pull out the stops in our birthday issues, and this year is no different. There’s no real theme this month---although regret and reparation loom large---but every single piece is out ...

www.nightmare-magazine.com

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loarider @loarider.bsky.social · 2d

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Cinephilia & Beyond @cinephiliabeyond.org · 2d

"And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it 'the future.' AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be re-consumed. You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume."

Cinephilia & Beyond @cinephiliabeyond.org · 2d

Robin Williams' daughter pleads for people to stop sending AI videos of her dad.

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Sebas @ohlookbirdies.bsky.social · 4d

"anti-AI people should just learn more about it" motherfucker I know so much about it, that's why I'm anti-AI

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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 2d

I agree a lot with this and it gets to an older understanding of liberalism I've mentioned before. It is more primal and "no kings" is actually a great slogan for it. The problem is "a king can do whatever he wants to you."

Ash vs the Evil Dead @ashflanagan.bsky.social · 2d

It doesn't make any sense to conceive of due process as a right that individual people can have or not have at all tbh. Bad framing from the start. Due process is a restriction on the government's actions, and by definition it applies to either everyone or no one.

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The Onion @theonion.com · 2d

U.S. Military Carries Out Strike On Scuffy The Tugboat https://theonion.com/u-s-military-carries-out-strike-on-scuffy-the-tugboat/

U.S. Military Carries Out Strike On Scuffy The Tugboat
Pentagon Claims Little Red Vessel Working With ‘Narco-Terrorists’

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Angela Liu @angelaliu.bsky.social · 2d

This review for Goodnight Moon is a fucking masterpiece.

Margaret Wise Brown's nihilistic classic is a howling renunciation of God, here depicted as a "quiet old lady whispering 'hush'." There is no afterlife here, no reward, no release from the crushing mundanity of life. There is only the bowl of pathetic mush, the forlorn mittens, the abandoned balloon, the telephone that never rings. We live our lives in a "great green room", but at the end we accumulate nothing but the discarded trappings of our childhoods. Even love cannot offer solace: where are our families when the end comes? "Goodnight nobody," we call into the blackness.

There is no hope in the world without us. We know what will happen, when we close our eyes, to the young mouse left alone with two kittens. They will toy with him; they will torture him and leave his decapitated body on our pillow. But we will never awake to see its guts splayed out near our heads. "Goodnight air," the poem ends. "Goodnight noises everywhere." We fall, silently, into the void.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/900911702

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Angela Liu @angelaliu.bsky.social · 2d

@sashabrown.bsky.social is a genius (and found this thanks to @nmwhitley.bsky.social's fantastic short story recs)

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Sasha Brown @sashabrown.bsky.social · 2d

Shout out to NM Whitley's kickass newsletter, which I also subscribe to! Subscribe here!

buttondown.com/shortstoryrex

Short Story Rex

where short stories are king and i recommend them a promotional vehicle of one NM Whitley

buttondown.com

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Howdy Doomsday @howdydoomsday.bsky.social · 2d

Let's do the fucking news.

Classic 1980s news screen "Now It's Everyone's Problem"

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nm whitley @nmwhitley.bsky.social · 3d

been ages since i heard it! honestly SC is up there as well as the ones people usually rate like Fishscale and Apollo Kids but one i think a lot of people incomprehensibly sleep on is The Pretty Tony Album

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nm whitley @nmwhitley.bsky.social · 3d

ICYMI i talked about stories by Carolyn Zhao @strangehorizons.bsky.social @suplexicon.bsky.social y.social @bruisermag.com @johnchrostek.com @hexliterary.bsky.social and Samanta Schweblin, plus songs by Stereolab, but not Goodnight Moon which I had nothing to say about buttondown.com/shortstoryre...

SHORT STORY REX Sept 2025

1. “The Heartbreak Hotel on Plutonic Planet”, Carolyn Zhao Got sucked in by this one’s sort-of free-associating whimsy, its deceptively naif je-ne-sais-quoi....

buttondown.com

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Smooth Dunk @smoothdunk2.bsky.social · 3d

4 panel comic

Panel 1:
A Purple person is standing holding a clipboard. A Blue Person sits at a laptop.
Blue Person: Woohoo. I’m the CEO of a social media platform.

Panel 2:
Purple person: We should hire a PR person to interact with the public
Blue Person begins to type on laptop and says: Nope. Gonna do all that myself

Panel 3:
Purple person looks concerned and says: Really…but…

Panel 4:
Purple person: You’re such a whiny little fucking baby

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Steen Comer @mediapathic.bsky.social · 3d

RSS is, and I say this without hyperbole, an incredibly useful tool for psychological independence in the current environment. Newsblur, as Vajra suggests, is good, I use Feedbin, there are others. Most remarkably easy to set up.

Vajra Chandrasekera @vajra.me · 3d

Speaking of the well-deserved death of social media, I've started using Newsblur as my new RSS reader (had to clean up a depressingly large number of dead links, including to sites that still publish but no longer have RSS feeds) and that does still in fact provide a source of good internet

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