I don’t know if dating in one’s mid-thirties is truly as grim as this murder mystery portrays, but if it’s even 10% as dire, I’m very sorry for the people who have to undergo it.

Sydney, a 34-year-old accountant, is desperate to get married. She reminded me of the old Soviet joke where a man strikes up a conversation with two women at a village dance.

“Where do you work?” one woman asks.

“Nowhere yet,” the man replies. “I’ve only just been released from jail where I served a 15-year term for murdering and dismembering my wife.”

The woman’s eyes light up.

“He’s single!” she whispers excitedly to her friend.

Sydney and her friends are at that level of desperation. She’d disregard every warning sign as long as there’s a sliver of hope for a relationship. This leads her straight into a serial killer’s orbit but the murders are not as scary as the vagaries of single life.

A very enjoyable book but only if you are safely and comfortably married. Otherwise, I don’t recommend, even though the mystery plotting is pretty solid.

I’m scouring the schedule of my upcoming conference for chunks of time when I’ll be able to be on my own.

I’m on the executive board, and this means that aloneness will only be possible if I let one group of people assume that I’m with another group and vice versa.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind people. I’m very prepared to do my duty and be around them. I just don’t get why they are so into clustering together all the time and making noises at each other.

The best moments at a conference are when I’m alone in my room. God, I love that.

BREAKING: Almost two-thirds of registered voters believe that all illegal migrants should be deported, according to a Marist poll.

— Leading Report (@LeadingReport) October 6, 2024

Yeah, so what? Even if Trump wins, the best we can hope for is a half-hearted attempt to remove some of those who are here legally on the TPS visas. The courts will strike it down because TPS is legal, and we will be told, yet again, that “oopsie, we tried, but see, it’s the Swamp”, etc. But we’ll have our cat memes, so let’s pretend that’s a huge win.

Nobody cares what we want because we aren’t making them care.

I’m going to pull my suggestions out of the comments, so that people don’t have to hunt for them.

My most successful activity so far has been to have students ask the AI to rewrite a short text in colloquial Chilean, then Mexican, then Argentinean. It’s excellent to build vocabulary.

AI can come up with an unlimited number of short texts highlighting absolutely any grammar concept or vocabulary type in any language. If students struggle with past participles, AI can build sentences for you with that grammar form using absolutely any vocab topic you choose.

Another activity is to have students upload a paragraph from an essay they wrote and ask AI to say the same but using half the number of words. And then twice the number of words. This opens a conversation about precision versus wordiness.

Also, AI helps us talk about registers. AI can rewrite a short text to make it more colloquial. Or to make it more formal. Students place the original and the AI version next to each other and isolate words and expressions that make a text more academic, or more professional, or more jargony, etc.

There are also great activities to help students discover AI’s bias, so they can understand what types of activities AI gets wrong. This works great in content courses.

AI will confer an advantage on people who already have an advantage. But it’s only obvious from playing with it and trying to figure things out.

It’s really bizarre that they are publishing it themselves:

.@alexandracooper: Can we think of any law that gives the government the power to make a decision about a man's body?

Vice President Harris: No pic.twitter.com/MchTFgYjnc

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 6, 2024

I sincerely don’t get it. Harris said something dumb, and her own HQ is promoting it? Why?

The clip of two aggressively stupid women mewling “no, no!” is embarrassing to watch.

Yes, there’s a large number of laws giving the government the power over men’s bodies. It’s extraordinary that this needs to be pointed out.

How many illegal migrants are there currently in the country?

Chuck Schumer said in 2022 there were 11 million. Harris supporters argue today that there are still 11 million. There’s been 11 million – not nine, not ten, not twelve but very specifically 11 – since at least the beginning of this century. I arrived in this country 21 years ago (legally), and the narrative was that there are 11 million illegals. There were officially 11 million at every point since then. Today, there are still 11 million according to a widely accepted narrative.

People have accepted the number “11 million” as an article of faith. The normal human rigidity helps promote a wide acceptance of this clearly fictitious number. Once you memorize something, you’ll feel great resistance to relinquishing the memorized data point. The number of people who are intellectually nimble to do that is not large. Whoever invented the “11 million” talking point was very bright. This kind of brightness is absent on the Trump side where a decade of immigration talk has produced no similar rhetorical device. Even “build the wall” has been quietly retired once it became obvious there won’t be any wall.

In the war between competent, well-organized liars and disorganized incompetents who vaguely intuit the truth but can’t be bothered to articulate it clearly, the former win. When I say “competent and well-organized”, I don’t, of course, mean they are good at doing things that don’t interest them. Like organizing flood relief, for instance. These are people who are deadly competent at carrying out their own plans.

I'm no longer a teacher. I'm just a human plagiarism detector.

I used to spend my grading time giving comments for improving writing skills. Now most of that time is just checking to see if a student wrote their own paper. What a waste of life.

— Dr. Amy Clukey (@AmyClukey) October 4, 2024

I don’t understand such people. I not only encourage but force students to use Google Translate and AI tools. I teach them how to use AI, what works, what doesn’t. AI is phenomenal to help people improve their writing.

Are such teachers also upset that students drive cars instead of using a horse and a buggy?

All that I see behind these complaints is a lazy teacher who wants to spend her entire professional life riding on what she learned in school 30 years ago. She’s upset that learning new skills is required of her.

It takes in the vicinity of 30 minutes to discover how to use AI to improve students’ writing. That’s definitely shorter than it takes to hunt after plagiarism in poorly thought out assignments.

This kind of utterly delusional thinking is disturbing:

I’m only posting this because I’ve had people I know make this argument to me in complete seriousness. How, how is it possible to be an adult person in the world and be this clueless? How can this person not realize that people don’t only vote because they like their candidate? Voters can be motivated by the dislike of the opponents’ candidate much more than by the love for their own.

Being motivated to go to a rally and being motivated to vote are completely different things. People are anaesthesizing themselves with these untruths, and when reality turns out to be different, they are crushed.

People dress so unimaginatively that those who make even a small effort to put some thought into their appearance often feel so out of place that they automatically reach for some label to explain to themselves why they are doing it. That’s where many of the very straight people who call themselves “queer” come from.

I would be exactly as upset if teachers or administration at my kid’s school promoted or talked or hinted in favor of Trump as if they did it for Harris. It’s not their bloody place to promote their politics to our kids.

At Klara’s school, the teachers, of course, don’t do it. Which is why I’m paying for her to go to a conservative, religious school.

Teachers and professors who agitate for the Dems convince themselves that they aren’t being political because “it’s just what being a good person means.” Only bad people vote Republican, in their view, so telling students about the moral superiority of Harris supporters is just like teaching kids not to steal.