Andrew Sabl

This is vital. Writing helps us think. So many students are saying they turn to LLMs because they don’t know what to say, and need to hear that not knowing is normal as one starts to write.

This machine kills fascists

Time for another break from here.. youtu.be/xVOJla2vYx8

Humanitarian as in vegetarian

More on the West Bank detention of Brad Lander (and about 80 others). www.theguardian.com/world/2026/o...

Today is the official release date for my new book, First Among Equals: Visions of Equality before Egalitarianism. It explores how and why “equality” became, rather suddenly, a basis on which ordinary men and women could make political demands in early modern England. Please, check it out!

I feel seen

Actually, it would be considered a deranged question in much of the U.S. as well: just not in the South and rural Midwest, I’d say.

I think we’ve found the headline of the year.

Now published: plato.stanford.edu/entries/acad...

Bella’s cousin Bowie is visiting. Try to tell me these aren’t the world’s cutest pooches. I double dog dare you.

Musk really is the super-powerful and therefore super-spoilt child from the Twilight Zone episode.

Genuine question: is anyone seriously working on nonprofit versions of the photo and vertical video-based social platforms? Or platforms sponsored by multiple middle powers with a charter that would give no single stakeholder control?

True story: At my first wedding, the band asked if they should play the “Titanic” theme at the reception (it was the late 90s and it was very popular). Laughing, I said no: no songs about sinking ships, please. So instead, after a few, they played “Suicide is Painless”—wearing sh*t-eating grins.

I’m sorry to have to be the bad guy here but we need to recognize that we live in a compressed air thrusters world now. If you’re not finding ways to teach the critical use of compressed air thrusters in your classroom, you’re setting your students up to fail when you could be setting them up to fly

“First Sun” by artist Monira Al Qadiri. New installation on the Lassonde Art Trail in the new Biidaasige Park (Toronto).

Still a crucial question…

Great post on where small-dollar donors seeking to maximize the impact of late contributions should give. substack.com/@dlitt/note/...

If you adopt “liberalism is our great and permanent enemy” as a premise, this isn’t the only awful conclusion that follows.

🧵!

The reporting of the NYT on this has been grotesquely skewed by their administration informants and the Times' editorial bigotry, but the students at the Harvard Crimson cover the ground professionally.

Let me make a sort of orthogonal point: I don’t get the attacks on immigrants - that even I’ve experienced - that sound like “you came here from a bad place.” Yeah man I know. That was the whole idea of coming here. To come to a good place where you can make something of your life in freedom.

Where’s a Voegelinian reading of Silicon Valley when we need one? (No doubt there actually is one and I’m not sure I really want to read it—but sure, go crazy in replies. 🙃)

There will be a lot of equivocating about all the times search warrants have been executed on members of Congress for corruption investigations and the like, and it can't be stressed enough in how many ways HSI raiding Ilhan Omar is extremely not like that.

Arendt once told an interviewer that everything she’d written had its origin in thinking, with some irritation, “A is not B.”

I highly appreciate this directed graph showing which language is used to indicate incomprehensibility in different languages (eg, “it’s Greek to me”)

I absolutely love threads like these. Methodology change *means you are measuring something in a different way* kills me that we just gloss over it constantly

It would really be great if folks not affiliated with the Trump Administration could stop using "Department of War." The Department of Defense is a statutory creation, and the name is statutorily given--the administration cannot unilaterally change it.

This is petty and least important aspect of this but: I reported on this years ago and the trump campaign falsely denied the reporting, and now via Hegseth they’re just doing it. Monstrous

The irony is that calling their stochastic parrots “AI” was industry propaganda in the first place—but clearly not propagandalicious enough for Trump.

Very bad optics, but less bad on substance than the headline (along w/some posts here) suggests. The EU has—along with Canada and Lithuania—removed its sponsorship logos from the conference’s materials. But EU officials will still attend, and EU funding remains. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

ChatGPT is adding the signatures of real New Yorker cartoonists to its AI-generated images. So far, I've found the signatures of more than 15 contributors. "It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me." www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/chat...

Amidst the admirable activism around the Cornell case, I don’t hear enough people drawing what seems an obvious lesson: University police departments shouldn’t exist. Their whole purpose is to ensure students never face serious consequences for awful actions—and alums retain that lesson.

This would explain…far more than I want to think about.

Time for another social media break. #mentalhealth

Tbh I will never understand why my stepson’s camo hoodie with “A Bathing Ape” in big letters and a logo to match is totally fashionable and my T-shirt from a modern art museum is not. 🙃

New phrase I learned this week: Slop Grenade. A big ol' piece of AI generated shite that someone drops into a project that takes more time to interpret/fix than would have been needed to just do the thing the old-fashioned way.

I’m trying to stop eating deli meat. But it’s really hard to quit eating cold turkey!