u/vemmahouxbois

I wrote an absurdist short story many years ago and posted it on a blog.

It was meant to be a parody.

There was an article written by Thomas Chatterton Williams at the New York Times last year that is very similar.

Chatterton mostly writes about issues relating to race.

Many parts of it seem identical, to the point that they seem to be copied.

That is by coincidence, obviously.

Chatterton writes in the style that the short story was parodying.

I would like you to read the 2 pieces of writing and compare them.

His essay in the New York Times likely has a paywall. You could get around it by adding the title of the article and the name of the author, Chatterton, in Google, and then selecting the article in the Google News section.

I would like you to tell me whether you see the similarity.

The short story I wrote is called:

"Is it racist to notice that Michael Jordan is Black (because I've never noticed that)?"

https://theabsurdification.blogspot.com/2015/05/is-it-racist-to-notice-that-michael.html?m=1

The article by Thomas Chatterton Williams is called:

"The Grip That Race and Identity Have on My Students"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/08/opinion/race-students-teach.html

That is an excerpt from his article, for example:

"When my friend Coleman Hughes guest-lectured on his case for colorblindness, several of them were visibly unnerved, suggesting that the idea itself was a form of anti-Blackness."

Excerpt:

My story about Hanania went viral, setting off a chain of disapproving op-eds in places like The Atlantic and The New York Times: But in the years since, I’ve watched many of these same elite media institutions rehabilitate Hanania over and over again, credulously accepting his claim to have left the alt-right behind. And they’ve allowed him to brand himself as perhaps America’s foremost “former” white nationalist— despite what I’d argue is plenty of easy-to-find evidence to the contrary. 
As the American right in 2026 continues to be so wholly enveloped by the absurdities of Trumpism, some centrists are increasingly desperate for conservatives who appear “reasonable.”

Only by pointing to such phantom right-wing figures can they rationalize their own conservative mode of politics and their distaste for the left (or morally justify their fecklessness in the face of rising fascism.) But such “respectable” conservatives, who can pretend to be above the MAGA fray, are in short supply; so in recent months we have been inundated with interviews and articles treating a murderer’s row of far-right clowns as interesting thinkers. This includes the likes of Laura Loomer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ben Shapiro, and Chris Rufo. 

For his latest act, Hanania is presenting himself as someone who has turned against Trump, leading to a recent Atlantic profile titled “The Anti-Populist.” He says he regrets his vote for the president in 2024 and that, by elevating unqualified figures like Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump and his movement have abandoned the experts and “elite” consensus needed to govern. Hanania’s writing now revolves around the “need for a ruling class,” or what he calls “Elite Human Capital.” It's the argument that forms the foundation of his new book, “Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends In Disaster.” 
The Atlantic piece actually does a good job documenting how loathsome Hanania is—including his recent provocation that Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile because his victims were “post-pubescent”—but nevertheless allows Hanania to portray himself the way he is so desperate to be received: as a serious, “heterodox” thinker bravely “staking out lonely territory” between what he argues are the equivalent evils of MAGA populism and the populism of the left. 

So The Verge did a podcast interview with The Atlantic’s “education reporter” famous for pieces that have gotten savagely dunked on here for claims like “the end of literacy,” “college kids can’t read good,” and “college kids can’t finish a movie” and apparently she can’t complete a sentence in spoken conversation.

I couldn’t make it more than half way through the interview because she was gasping for air like a drowning person through comical levels of upspeak. Where does The Atlantic find these people? 😭😆

In April, Olivia Nuzzi and Vice founder Shane Smith found themselves crossing paths at an intimateWest Hollywood gathering hosted by MAHAblogger Jessica Reed Kraus, also known as HouseInHabit. The event, co-hosted by Substack, celebrated journalist Jay Beecher, whose controversial book challenges the prevailing narrative surrounding Ghislaine Maxwell’s role in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. The guest list, curated by Kraus, featured an eccentric mix of media figures. As Kraus later wrote, “A reporter on the phone the next day noted that most in attendance had endured some form of cancellation themselves.”
Later that evening, Nuzzi, Smith, Kraus, and other guests decamped to Chateau Marmont, the storied Hollywood hotel where the Los Angeles elite often gather. It was there that Nuzzi was spotted with Smith. While Nuzzi has largely remained out of the spotlight over the past year, she hasn't exactly shied away from LA's most visible social scenes.

Meanwhile friend of the pod Eric Adams recently obtained Albanian citizenship. 🧐

A new data investigation argues that The New York Times sharply changed the way it covers transgenderpeople beginning in 2022, moving from rights-based framing toward more skeptical, conflict-driven coverage that elevated opponents of transgenderrights and gave less prominence to transgender people themselves.

The analysis, published Friday by civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo in The Dissident, reviewed 3,242 Times articles published between 2014 and early 2026. Caraballo also published an accompanying data site, where readers can review the findings and methodology.

“This isn’t about any individual story,” Caraballo, who said the project took her two months to complete, told The Advocate in an interview Monday. “This is about the whole corpus of how they’ve covered trans issues over time.”

The New York Times did not initially respond to The Advocate’s request for comment. After this story was published, the paper rejected the analysis and denied that its coverage is biased or anti-trans. In a statement to The Advocate, Danielle Rhoades Ha, the Times’ senior vice president of communications, said the paper’s role is “to report accurate, fact-based information on all aspects of a story to help the public understand vital issues better.”

Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, said she undertook the project because years of criticism from transgender writers, journalists, and advocacy groups had often been met by the Times with defenses of individual stories. The problem, she said, was not always factual error, but the cumulative effect of framing, story selection, and prominence.
“It is harder on the individual level because there isn’t anything usually factually wrong with their stories,” Caraballo said. “But part of the problem is the framing, what they choose to highlight, and how much priority they give certain stories.”

Thanks to Robert Evans/Coolzone Media, I took a look at the website of the executive director of Peter Thiel’s recently exposed salon Dialog. It turns out he’s prime IBCK episode fodder and wrote a self help book called How To Be A Grown Up. He also has a YouTube prank channel called Do Princeton Grads Know Anything?

Reading Communion requires a strange leap of faith, a leap across a chasm into some alternate universe—several, actually. For in order to make sense of this book, one must be able to pitch one’s mind into a world where the Donald Trump of the past six years somehow doesn’t exist, a world where Christianity is somehow an entirely different religion than is generally manifested in American culture and politics, and a world where JD Vance himself is another person entirely. At times one feels as though one is actually reading Whitney Streiber’s Communion, the 1987 blockbuster about extraterrestrial contact, the content here so entirely alien to the world we now inhabit.

I’ve seen claims that Ezra Klein, Cory Booker, Bret Stephens, and Jared Polis were in the leaked member list, lol. The hacker behind this is maia arson crimew, who got ahold of the no fly list in 2023.

Dialog’s meeting in Dublin will feature sessions on topics weighty and, perhaps, less serious.
One session is titled “Bring Back Nuclear.” Another will focus on “Disinformation and Deepfakes.” Participants will hear about “Contrarian AI Takes,” “Three Predictions for Iran” and “Democracy Under Surveillance.”

One session is headlined “Build-a-Cult (Soapbox),” while another declares, “It’s Fun to Be in Charge.”
Optional activities include private tours of a distillery, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Guinness Storehouse. 
It’s unclear whether the data leak will change plans for the event.

Regardless, crimew, the security researcher, told Straight Arrow it’s surprising that the secretive organization’s information about some of the world’s most powerful people became public.

“It’s just wild to me how this once again shows that the people who run the world are so confident in their safety that they don’t really bother with any proper operational security,” she said, “not even for their ‘off the record’ secret conventions where they all network and discuss our collective future.”

This didn’t turn out to be exactly what I was hoping for, but I’ve seen some back and forth debate about current literacy rates in the States and what they mean and I know there’s a lot of people in education here who can parse this stuff way better than a layperson.

The headline here seems to imply post secondary students are/can read less than before but that doesn’t seem like that’s what the profs interviewed are really saying:

Carlos Noreña, a UC Berkeley history professor specializing in ancient history,said the amount of reading he could comfortably assign while expecting students to read a “substantial” portion of it has dropped over the past 20 years at UC Berkeley. 

“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” Noreña said. 

Noreña said while lectures are an important component of class, he assigns primary sources and critical writing to his students because the goal is to push them to read the material and develop their own views. When he first came to UC Berkeley in 2005, he would assign 100 pages per week for an upper division course, with the expectation that students would read 75 to 80 pages

[…]

Fellow history professor Trevor Jackson said he assigned three full books for his world history survey course. While he didn’t find that students struggled with them on a concerning or new level, he noted a decline across the board in people reading entire texts, especially nonfiction. 
Jackson also cut the amount of reading in his classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. After finding that shorter texts made in-class discussions more fruitful, there have been cases where he continued to cut reading — but not because students were struggling with it.

“Having an in-depth conversation about 10 pages is more pedagogically useful than having a shallow conversation about 100 pages,” Jackson said. 
Generally, faculty did not see a drop in student comprehension of reading material, although some did pinpoint blind spots in skill or technique. 
English lecturer John Shoptaw, who teaches poetry, said he has noticed his students come in not yet knowing how to hear and analyze the musicality of an Emily Dickinson poem. Sometimes, they also have trouble distinguishing between figurative and literal meanings.
Julia Fawcett, who teaches theater, dance and performance studies, said her students do well with identifying arguments in critical articles, but have more trouble with fictional texts that don’t have a line of argument to follow. 

These are all UC Berkley profs so YMMV, but I guess I’m mostly interested in how people are responding to recent headlines about literacy rates and claims that AI is already having a negative impact on student literacy.