Thomas Arnold | Lightnews

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 14h

Pre-emptive registration 🤝 Clever Hans bsky.app/profile/mich...

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 14h

Had been thinking for a while of getting to Tristram Shandy, but anno gemini 2026 it's a little much to see the medical fraud is named Dr. Slop.

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 1d

Quaint. My agentic AI absorbs all the books and writes all the emails, so it will have to suffer dementia and pain for me.

Call me, New Yorker.

Sheila Liming @seeshespeak.bsky.social · 2d

Reason no. 103857392 to read books and, yes, write your own damn emails, too

www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Reading and writing can lower dementia risk by almost 40%, study finds

Cognitive health in later life is ‘strongly influenced’ by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments, say researchers

www.theguardian.com

Sheila Liming @seeshespeak.bsky.social · 2d

Reason no. 103857392 to read books and, yes, write your own damn emails, too

www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Reading and writing can lower dementia risk by almost 40%, study finds

Cognitive health in later life is ‘strongly influenced’ by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments, say researchers

www.theguardian.com

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 2d

As the New Yorker floats an ontological shrug about Claude's "self" (with in-house philosophical backing), his concept of "pre-emptive registration" deserves a strong revival to take on "alignment," "explainability," and other "well, we humans aren't so _____ ourselves" muddles.

Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 4d

I wrote about the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, and his profound thinking about AI and the nature of intelligence.

aiguide.substack.com/p/on-brian-c...

On Brian Cantwell Smith and the Promise of AI

Today I had the bittersweet pleasure of participating in a symposium honoring the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, a good friend whom I’d known for over 30 years.

aiguide.substack.com

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 2d

Cope Claude Quale Quale

Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 4d

I wrote about the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, and his profound thinking about AI and the nature of intelligence.

aiguide.substack.com/p/on-brian-c...

On Brian Cantwell Smith and the Promise of AI

Today I had the bittersweet pleasure of participating in a symposium honoring the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, a good friend whom I’d known for over 30 years.

aiguide.substack.com

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 4d

Also useful metaphor because Elon, in perfect conformity with the diagnosis, predicted chess will be "solved" like checkers in ten years. Just bored, tragicomically ignorant waving off of mathematical realities.

Johanna Winant @johannawinant.bsky.social · 4d

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!

Close Reading Is For Everyone
Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant

Call for Pitches

Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail?

If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step.

We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it.

Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 6d

Gotta drink something to prep for the measles slouching up I-26 from SC.

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 6d

Stirring insight into Twin Peaks, which invites revisiting Mulholland Drive and even his artistic credo "Catching the Big Fish." It takes an odd persistence of psyche to have "captured not only personal pain but a shared longing: for time to stop and atrocities to end and goodness to prevail."

Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior.bsky.social · 6d

Last year, I wrote about Jeffrey Epstein and Twin Peaks. I wrote about Laura Palmer. A generation of girls, now women, who grew up in Laura Palmer’s world.
sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/laura-palm...

Laura Palmer’s House

Jeffrey Epstein, Twin Peaks, and dreams of justice.

sarahkendzior.substack.com

Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior.bsky.social · 6d

Last year, I wrote about Jeffrey Epstein and Twin Peaks. I wrote about Laura Palmer. A generation of girls, now women, who grew up in Laura Palmer’s world.
sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/laura-palm...

Laura Palmer’s House

Jeffrey Epstein, Twin Peaks, and dreams of justice.

sarahkendzior.substack.com

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 6d

Vladimir: We need AGI

Estragon: Yes, the climate cannot be helped until AGI arrives

*they do nothing*

Matt Pearce @mattdpearce.com · 7d

Read @jomc.bsky.social’s novel “Wrong Way”:

www.mcdbooks.com/books/wrong-...

Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 7d

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

It Turns Out Waymos Are Being Controlled by Workers in the Philippines

During a Congressional hearing, Waymo's chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, was grilled over the company's reliance on overseas workers.

futurism.com

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 8d

If only there were a metaphor for him trying to leave the island behind as forgotten history.

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 11d

Lovely book in some ways but the d'Aulaires really drew the Greek pantheon like this

The faces of Cronos, Zeus, and descendant divinities, all blondish, fair, almost all blue-eyed.

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 14d

Instinct, not so much The Language

Daniel Silliman @danielsilliman.bsky.social · 15d

A legal asylum-seeker who works at Chipotle and plays music at a church in Maine went missing. His pastor searched and searched, eventually finding his abandoned car with the keys on the floor.

ICE grabbed him. No criminal record. No explanation.

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 16d

"Oakeshott Learning" is right there

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 18d

The thread has some great teaching insight, and it makes me think this article would pair well with the Kevin Roose Claudeswarm post as a perspective on how narrowly the terms of "adoption" are imagined.

jennifer uncoolidge @histoftech.bsky.social · 18d

Just saw this fascinating new #history of #computing article from @myrnamoretti.bsky.social — looking forward to reading the rest of it and seeing if I can work it into one of my classes:

“Here Comes the Future: Black Women and Early Digital Culture in Essence”
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

jennifer uncoolidge @histoftech.bsky.social · 18d

Just saw this fascinating new #history of #computing article from @myrnamoretti.bsky.social — looking forward to reading the rest of it and seeing if I can work it into one of my classes:

“Here Comes the Future: Black Women and Early Digital Culture in Essence”
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 21d

As Chief Executive Function Officer it's time to sound the alarm-- if I don't do something useful with this draft I'm going to lose psychic permission to keep drinking coffee.

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 26d

Nice example of "intelligence" not entailing autonomy, participation, and "stakes" (was thinking of ChatGPT holding forth about alcoholism vs. introducing itself at an AA meeting). If folks need a spoonful of Talebian squid ink to take their care ethics medicine, that's at least a start.

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 28d

Fallacy? I'm embarrassed for you, child. It's called vibearguing.

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · 28d

Imminent MSNBC segment on socio-political layers of "You're all set, hon"

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · Jan 13

"I Who Have Never Known Men," like Isaac Babel's stories, manages to drain what you thought was life's meaning at the exact same rate as your will to put the book down.

Adrian Daub @adriandaub.bsky.social · Jan 12

This wasn’t an easy one to record: on the murder of Renee Nicole Good, Gestapo comparisons, and the gendered dimensions of both the murder and the right’s defense of it podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

Episode 116 -- A Murder in Minneapolis

Podcast Episode · In Bed With The Right · 01/11/2026 · 53m

podcasts.apple.com

Thomas Arnold @thomasarnold.bsky.social · Jan 11

The fact I am enjoying Ducks, Newburyport, the fact holy-moly is it long, Faulkner's like enough already, Faulkner if lived on North Shore, Benji's whole chapter just on fried oysters...

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