God.
The agency said that if a house of worship endorsed a candidate to its congregants, the I.R.S. would view that not as campaigning but as a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.”
(The title is a fine trope from Atrios.)
Kwantlen Polytechnic University has been at or near the centre of my life for more than two decades. We’ll keep the newsfeed here up into my retirement years, though.
You really must subscribe. Today’s was delightfully humbling:
racket; racquet. For the implement used in net games, racket is standard in American English and British English alike. The variant racquet appears in some proper names (e.g., the Palm Springs Racquet Club) seemingly because the “fancy” spelling looks more high-toned. But racquetball and racketball are two different sports. Racquetball is a U.S. sport that is played on an indoor or outdoor court with short paddles and a hollow rubber ball. Racketball is a form of squash played mostly in England. The racket, ball, court, and scoring all differ from American racquetball. In 2016, the World Squash Federation rebranded racketball as “Squash 57.”
In a piece for The Conversation Canada, my Kwantlen Polytechnic University colleague Jeffrey Meyers writes about Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder, two eminent American scholars who fled Yale University and the United States, taking positions at the University of Toronto, to escape the authoritarian impulses Trump’s administration has brought to American universities.
Stanley’s father, a German Jew who fled Germany for America in 1939, carries the remembrance of fascism. Both Stanley and Snyder explore the similarities between what is occurring in Trump’s America, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and, equally chillingly, between Trump’s America and Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Even prior to the first Trump presidency, Stanley already asked in his 2015 book, How Propoganda Works, whether the U.S., “the world’s oldest liberal democracy,” might already have become a liberal democracy “in name only?” …
As a Canadian, I would like to say America’s loss is our gain, and I wish these scholars well. I am also aware that narratives of flight to Canada as refuge have historically bolstered national myths while obscuring Canadian inequities. My hope is that Canadians will not observe the arrival of U.S. scholars with smugness, but instead with shared concern.
Too much cynicism might prevent us from acknowledging the importance of these … scholars’ decisions to leave their country and come to ours at this particular time in history. However, my hope is also that we are also inspired by their considerable truth-telling skills to demand Canada also do better.
I agree with each of these points. I would add that while several nations seem to be courting scholars and professors who seek and/or need to leave the United States, Canada has yet to do so in any public way that I have seen.
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May 27: We can get some wonderful students up here, too, now that the Trump administration “has ordered US embassies worldwide to immediately stop scheduling visa interviews for foreign students as it prepares to implement comprehensive social media screening for all international applicants.”
“When people ask for a blessing, an exhaustive moral analysis should not be placed as a precondition for conferring it. For those seeking a blessing should not be required to have prior moral perfection.”
“A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.”
“Right now we don’t have a very good relation with Creation.”
I am sad today, though heartened by this man’s words and example. RIP.
My favourite way to travel is by train, so I follow all of Amtrak’s accounts. They are very witty:
When Southwest Airlines announced they were charging for bags, Amtrak posted on X, “Guess we’re the only ones doing free baggage now.” …
The post, followed by more info on Amtrak’s baggage policy, is an example of what Amtrak senior manager of social media Nicolle Lopez calls its infotainment strategy, designed to educate and entertain at the same time.
“The minute [you] feel something is a little bit too polished, a little bit too scripted, or the minute you feel like it’s an ad, your thumb just [swipes] immediately,” said Lopez. [NPR, “How Amtrak keeps its social media strategy on track for Gen Z”]
Mastering that type of tone is harder than you’d think.
In his article “Enshittification, artificial intelligence, and the privatization of public education,” Dr. Chris Samuel warns that artificial intelligent’s infiltration into education (AIED) will likely mimic the same depressing “enshittification” users saw in platforms like Facebook, Google, and X/Twitter.
First, a platform provides a novel experience and value with big promises of making that experience better and better as more people join and the platform grows. Think of Facebook for example, with its initial promise to show you content generated by your friends (and only content generated by your friends) without spying on you or harvesting your data. As more people joined, Facebook enjoyed a “network effect,” meaning both that the user experience improved (you have more friends to follow, more groups to like!) and that the cost of remaining outside or leaving got higher (you’ll miss out on all those friends and groups!). In effect, friend groups got locked into Facebook. It was time for stage two.
In the second stage of enshittification, platforms sell their user base to advertisers and publishers. Facebook broke its promise to only show you the content you asked for (by following friends and subscribing to groups) and instead began to show you ad content. They also broke their promise not to spy on their users and began harvesting data to sell to advertisers. In doing so, Facebook re-allocated the value of their product away from the user base and toward advertisers and publishers. Soon enough, advertisers and publishers also become hostage to the platforms. Practically the only way to get eyeballs on their ads, videos, and stories is to have the platforms force their content into users’ feeds. At this point, the time is right to re-allocate value again; this time it goes to the platforms’ shareholders.
In third-stage enshittification, advertisers, who had been getting cut-rate deals to show their products to users, start having to compete against each other to be at the top of feeds. Publishers, who used to be able to get users over to their own websites by showing some teaser text with a link, start getting punished (by being sent further down the feed) unless they include full-text articles with no way of redirecting readers off platform.
At this point, enshittification is complete. Platforms no longer function to provide either an optimal user experience or an optimal business experience. They only provide an optimal profit experience for their shareholders.
I can certainly see this happening with AIED. That said, platforms like ChatGPT never thrilled me the way early iterations of Facebook and Twitter did. These made my life better, by bringing me closer to other people.
From The Public Domain Review:
Another year dawns… and another bevy of works dust off their copyright and emerge fresh-faced, full of hope, into the elysian plains of the public domain! On this year’s Public Domain Day (which falls each January 1st) we welcome, in lots of countries around the world, the works of two titans of 20th-century art, Frida Kahlo and Henri Matisse, and in the US a handful of seminal books including William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain, but there are three main types of copyright term for historical works which cover most cases. For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are:
- works by people who died in 1954, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (relevant in UK, most of the EU, and South America);
- works by people who died in 1974, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (relevant to most of Africa and Asia);
I added The Public Domain Review’s blog to my Feedly feed earlier this year. As someone who has spent so much of his life in publishing, and still thinks of himself as a publisher, I find this publication utterly edifying and wholly charming.
Scholarly journals hide everything from people who can’t afford to read them. Large language models steal everything from people who can’t afford to lose anything.
Reposted from basil.CA:
2025
Next year, at summer’s end, I will be retiring from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I will remain open to other contract opportunities elsewhere after that, but this will be it for me as a full-time prof. The decision conveys my acceptance that I am just not the marvellous teacher I used to be: The oil in my olive is no longer extra-virgin, and my students and I share fewer and fewer references in culture and in history.
A friend wrote me earlier: “Give a special mindfulness to every day in the classroom. These years that defined you will no longer be your lifescape. You are a teacher and took that as a trade and an obligation quite seriously and you got a lot of joy from it. Just savour all the days between now and when you’re over the wall.” I will.
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Addendum: I expect that NoContest.CA will go on well after my retirement. Indeed, I hope to expand its reach once I have more time to spend here.
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