spencergreenhalgh.com posts digest for Oct 17 2025
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Here are microblog posts that I published recently:
* “AI is as good as any rubric” (an actual statement I overheard at a campus-wide meeting), if true, is more of an indictment of current assessment practice than praise of AI quality.
* A few days into finally subscribing to Kagi, custom “bang” shortcuts are my favorite feature so far.
* Genuinely good kiddo joke: “What do you call it when people made of jewels steal something? An ametheist!”
* We thought we’d intentionally given kiddo an uncommon name, but the local youth soccer league seems to have recruited all of the other kids with that name, and it’s very confusing for her.
* Wild to teach data visualization so shortly after reading Jacques Ellul rail against it in his “Humiliation of the Word.” As is often the case, Ellul’s complaints feel overstated, but as I talk through specific things with students, I find myself channeling his concerns.
* Trying to figure out if I recognize lines in Star Trek VI because they’re Shakespeare or because they’re lines-quoting-Shakespeare from Star Trek VI.
* Remembering the time that an article in the Daily Caller took a colleague’s research out of context to make it look bad, but because it tripped a Google Alert, it still got included in some “our research in the media!” newsletter.
* Regular verbs in French commonly end in “-er” so I joked to a friend about « charmander » as a verb. After some conjugations, he asked what it would mean; it turns out that « mander » is already an archaic verb (and we knew « char » was a noun), so we came up with a defensible definition.
* Je ne dirais jamais que j’aime la fumée de cigarette (en fait, je la déteste), mais il est vrai que ça me rappelle la France, et ça, c’est quand-même sympa. (Je croyais ce constat méchant, et puis je suis retourné en France, où on fume vraiment plus dans les espaces publics).
* Thinking this morning about all of the small, human-oriented things I’ve done this semester to try to be good at my job, and how insulting it will be to have them eventually reduced to a number that can be reported to demonstrate “productivity.”
Here are news articles and podcasts I commented on recently:
* 🔗 linkblog: He Wrote a Book About Antifa. Death Threats Are Driving Him Out of the US
* 🔗 linkblog: Sora gives deepfakes 'a publicist and a distribution deal.' It could change the internet
* 🔗 linkblog: ICE Boasts Zero Murders Committed By 5-Year-Olds Since Child Detainments Began
* 🔗 linkblog: UK quietly dismantles gender-inclusive housing and ties to identity-based groups
* 🔗 linkblog: Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
* 🔗 linkblog: The Blurred Truths of Sora
* 🔗 linkblog: Yes, everything online sucks now—but it doesn’t have to
Here are my reviews of books and other media I consumed recently:
* 📚 bookblog: Slough House (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
* 📚 bookblog: Rogue Squadron (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
* 📚 bookblog: Alma 1-29: A Brief Theological Introduction (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
If you have thoughts about anything I've posted, feel free to comment directly on my website through Hypothesis or to reply to this email with what you have to say.
Thanks for reading!
Spencer