Was in an Amtrak cafe car at 8 am recently & it seemed like that project was coming along nicely

[frantically searching my memory for details] what, racism?

"warns"

Reminds me of the one described in the beginning of Moby Dick

I've never seen a Catholic church with that kind of pulpit

Were they knitting in only one direction? I'm fascinated by this

When's that happening again?

Huh, ok. I'm thinking you and I read different portions of his work then

I mean, idk, I don't know the guy, not really any room for sexism in any of his work that I read (& my heroes/mentors in the field were women)

I'm no longer in academia but one of the things I took away from it is: experts aren't always trying to answer the ?s laypeople find interesting, & that makes it really easy to misinterpret their results. I apply this insight reading science press releases outside my area, it's useful I think

Anth ling asks a lot of "why" about lang/culture. The vein of ling that most continues to pay attention to Chomsky isn't trying to answer those "whys." That bugs people. They can't picture what it even means to study lang aside from those "whys." So the whole basis of the endeavor seems weird 2 them

I have always believed a lot of the anti-Chomsky sentiment (in re: ling) is because the questions most people want to ask & answer about language aren't really the same questions he (& syntactic theory in general) are asking & answering.

Like, don't know if it's all going to end up being correct, that's how theory is, but they're serious researchers, it's not just "because the great man said so," it's really not

No the linguistics is solid, there are a lot of good researchers all doing good work in syntactic theory in that school, of course bits evolve or get disproven but it's a solid academic discipline on its own terms. It's like physics like string theory or whatever, needs expertise to seem sensible

That capybara is anything but humble

No but I rearranged the furniture so the old man cat has stair-steps to get onto the kitchen counter

Then I take him off, because he knows he shouldn't be on the counter, doesn't he

Research funding for Trump Syndrome. Telethons

The press should lean into this. Explainers on prevalence of handshake injuries among public figures. Panels of medical experts on Sunday shows walking us through anatomical animations. Top MDs addressing the mechanism for a handshake bruising the back of the hand. Increasingly speculative diagnoses

Get queasy just thinking about them, decades later