hometown 4.5.18+hometown-1.2.1Hello! Where to begin? I'm a former #historian who got a PhD in 2019, studying the history of the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. In 2020, I completely switched gears and became a software engineer, but still moonlight as a freelance #writer. I write too much about #food. My taste in #music is all over the map, I'm always looking for new projects and work, and I spend too much time playing #videogames.
Some memes you need to save in your phone because it will just keep coming up again and again.
Sometimes I sit back and kind of marvel over the fact that I have this whole career as a software developer. I worry I don't value it enough.
It didn't happen by accident, but it was a sudden pivot: in less than a year I had a new career after devoting my 20s to trying to become an academic.
The other day I was talking with my manager about long-term promotion tracks for me (Engineering manager? Product architect? TPM?) and it sorta hit me that at some level I didn't think I'd last or make it this far. Why would I? And yet, I have.
It feels kind of absurd sometimes because one of the things I put so much mental effort and investment into is writing, but I'm not particularly successful with that. And then I have this career that leaves me much more secure than many of the more professional writers I know.
Anyway, I will be working to remain grateful that this worked out. It was not inevitable; the other options open to me in 2020 were for a variety of reasons not great.
I quit a project last week. What I was initially told was that I would be editing lesson plans; what I learned was that ChatGPT would write the content and I would structure the lesson plan (“do this activity here,” “share with a peer”, etc) and fact check it.
To me, it’s like a microcosm of what’s wrong with the way we use AI. For me, the hardest part of curriculum development is the pedagogical part: thinking about the best way to structure it takes me the greatest amount of time. LLMs save me no time at all there. As for the content, they might vomit it out pretty quickly, but that part is so much easier for me. I don’t trust their accuracy, but I do trust mine. And especially right now, I don’t want to present neutered or overly safe social studies material — but AI is perfect for that.
I have the luxury of quitting freelance work that I don’t want because I have a full-time job. But it’s depressing to see where education is heading with this.
Excellent writing from Matt Seybold on Disclosure Day, the alt-right's relationship with science fiction, "sovereignty as a service," and the inability of Democrats to let go of the past.
"Disclosure Day thus dramatizes the fantasy of retro-neoliberalism which has stultified contemporary American liberalism, most egregiously establishment figures in the Democratic Party, many of them one-time architects of the Washington Consensus. If we all abandoned the platforms politics of microtargeting and rage, couldn’t we go back to how it was in the ‘90s? Can’t we just take a mulligan? Can’t we all just get along?"
Reading through a manuscript for a university press as a reviewer (not a thing I normally do, but it's on a subject I care a lot about) and I'm struck by both how much I enjoyed this kind of research, the difficulty of doing it, that part of me misses it, and part of me is relieved to not have to.
The idea of slowly writing a monograph and conducting all of this in-depth research sounds amazing. It's really fun. But the reality of doing it inside academia is that it's a stressful nightmare, not least on a logistical level -- and doing it outside academia is even worse. Even the pressure that you're under to produce if you're doing it for an academic career is suffocating.
I'll never write anything like my dissertation again. Part of that is bittersweet, but there's also a real sense of relief.
Anyway, happy to be recommending this book.
I’ve had this t-shirt quite literally for half my life, but its time has come. The neckline is falling off; it is so thin in places that it’s almost like tissue paper. You let everybody know of my amazing taste in alt comics. Good night, sweet prince.
Democrats love to talk about affordability but they really don't seem to have a playbook beyond hoping that Trump tanks the economy and they get elected behind it. Their rhetoric is just...bloodless. You need to find ways to inspire people.
I wrote about what they could learn from FDR here for Dame Magazine.
https://www.damemagazine.com/2026/04/07/fdr-economic-strategy-democrats/
It’s beginning.
(Pumpkins, sun gold tomatoes, Juliet tomatoes, basil, piri-piri peppers)
Summer Zeb is slowly emerging from his protective cocoon of sweaters.
This got published a couple of days ago and snuck under the radar. I’ve been thinking about the TVA a lot and why we need something like it today for climate change: regional planning to make our communities more resilient. But that in turn led me to where the TVA went wrong.
https://scalawagmagazine.org/2026/04/dirty-energy-and-the-lost-promise-of-the-tva/
Had the pleasure of getting to talk with David Perry last week about his new book The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook. I wish I'd had this book six years ago when I was just starting out as a freelance writer!
Larry David should do Hot Ones
Reading this and having a grim chuckle. Some of it is at my alma mater's expense; my OSU experience was decidedly mixed, so of course I'll read this uncharitably.
But at a deeper level past my own peculiar schadenfreude, it's bleak to look at this because it says some very bad things about university administration. This is small-g graft. The university president tried to allocate university resources to a woman for a PODCAST (and it must be added, an especially shitty looking one); when that failed, he wheedled a state agency into giving her tens of thousands of dollars.
If there's a silver lining, it's that the university managed to inoculate itself against their bullshit, but this was so transparently corrupt: it really makes me worry about the stuff people are getting away with, and the fact that universities aren't just budgets for legislators to rob; they're also prizes for the rent-seekers.
Ok, I concede, I do actually wish to go where everybody knows my name.
Has anybody seen anything like astroturfing in support of data centers? Supportive Facebook groups, influencers suddenly jumping on the bandwagon, anything like that? Asking for a friend.
@jnl@hcommons.social Cookies are meant to be soft and chewy and it's a sign of the dangerous times we live in that they come in any other form.
Had the pleasure of getting to interview Caroline Tracey her new book Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History.
@jnl@hcommons.social I can see it now and it’s the message we need in 2026
@jnl@hcommons.social I get so exhausted with this thinking (what you describe) because it’s so self-defeating. You can’t build anything permanent except for a set of standards that push people out; you can’t have movement elders unless they’re in perfect lockstep with the vanguard; nobody gets to join unless they sprang forth fully formed from the head of Zeus.
Now if anywhere had a *hostile* reaction to this, it was LinkedIn
@zeblarson@hcommons.social
Reupping this piece because it’s so good.
