Dan Isbell

Found some wild revisionist history in my hotel room in Japan...

It will be interesting to see if the SKA expands meaningfully. While not quite as bad as the situation of the JLPT for international students seeking to study in Japan, the TOPIK exam is limited in testing opportunities - especially abroad and for the options speaking section.

Gift link for this fine piece. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/o...

After years of championing "free speech," Texas lawmakers have enabled a dramatic rise of censorship in Texas universities, banning concepts, canceling courses and closing departments seen as "woke," and even using AI bots as censors. All in the name of freedom. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...

Over the last decade, there were two hypotheses: H1: the political right genuinely cared about threats to speech from the left. H2: they were using campus speech wars to impose their values and silence dissent. Today, the answer is clear, but I can't find any of the H1 people admitting their error.

The Iraq War is estimated to have costed the US around $2 trillion to date. I think closing schools to save close to 80,000 lives is a better use of my $6,000. Might not be as cost efficient as stuff like vaccines and seatbelt laws, but saving lives is hard to put a price on.

Come work with me in Honolulu! We're looking for an applied linguist whose work addresses languages in workplaces and professional settings. #appliedlinguistics #lingsky go.hawaii.edu/RuF

Interesting plans to modernize the TOPIK, including AI item generation and scoring as well as home administration (for lower proficiency levels) and improved security. I hope the AI scoring will primarily be feature-based ML models, though - wholly GenAI scoring systems are sub-par.

New blog post: "Cluster analysis: A skeptic’s guide". In which I ask a few questions that social scientists wishing to identify hidden classes in their data ought to address. janhove.github.io/posts/2026-0...

Very good news. The proposed rule has had universities, from the top all the way down to individual departments, scrambling to figure out how to continue supporting international students. Good to be relieved of all that... for now.

A recurrent theme in this excellent story about China’s progress is that people there regard Trump as essential to their success, including his ability to drive scientific talent from the US www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered on Sept 15, 2001 in Mesa, AZ (suburb of Phoenix). Those days and months that followed 9/11 were not a good time for this country. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_...

Imagine looking at these PISA reading results and thinking "what if we keep all the screentime in schools, but have an AI assistant on all the screens?"

Nice article on fostering bi/multilingualism among children in the Japan Times: #lingsky www.japantimes.co.jp/community/20...

New Pew survey on attitudes toward additional language study in the US: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Was not expecting this in the middle of a Hanroro (rock/pop musician whose songs are frequently featured in K-Dramas) playlist. Brain was very confused hearing Korean from the start with that melody, but this is very good.

I can’t wait for the 18 part series in the Atlantic about “The Crisis at Business Schools” which will detail of every instance of academic fraud at the nation’s top business schools, the coverups, lack of accountability, and their implications for business ethics and academic standards at B schools.

The best part of starting a new academic year is the pile-on of recurring mandatory training deadlines. All at the same time.

Sad news for #linguistics. Lots of post-grad earnings pressure from (and soon to be on, from federal govt) universities is influencing programs and curricula, with language and linguistics getting pinched at many institutions. (ling/lang refugees welcome here at the University of Hawaiʻi)

One of the first "outrageous" claims I saw as Jason Arday's media hounding unfolded was that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days! Wow! What a thing to claim! And the newspapers all suggested there was no evidence he actually did it. Well, they clearly didn't look very hard 🙄 🧵 1/26

Me, a US-based academic: I don’t care what any scholar believes, we all need to stand up publicly whenever someone’s academic freedom is threatened Me, continuing: also, the first time this has happened, motivating me to sign my first ever open letter, is in late 2026, to a race scientist, in Ghent