Thanks, Seth!

That essay is phenomenal.

www.loc.gov/item/event-4...

Same here. On the flip side, it makes me incredibly grateful when students fully show up eager to actually write. I took that for granted before, to a certain extent.

What I hate about ChatGPT is how suspicious it has made me. Not-so-polished writing tends to make me think it was written by a human (🤪) or pieces that hew close to the readings/sources we used (🎉). Otherwise it seems impossible to know anything for sure.

More here:

For those of you lucky to live near the cicadas, I hope you feel the thrill Margaretta Morris felt when she studied these curious creatures. And should you hear the rattling trill of Cassin’s cicada, you might be rebellious & call it Morris’s cicada, or perhaps, better yet, something entirely new.

Even better, maybe we can follow the model of the American Ornithological Society and disconnect human names from the names of creatures. These names tell stories of power, more often than they tell stories of the plants and animals themselves. And these names sometimes hide more than they show.

And then two of those men—John Cassin and James Coggswell Fisher—went on to name that cicada after themselves: Magicicada cassinii (Fisher), or Cassin’s cicada.

We are overdue to correct the record. Perhaps we could refer to the smaller buzzy creature as Morris’s cicada.

Thank goodness for artisanal everything: garbled sentences, wonky stitches, wobbly lines, all of it.