Both excellent, but I have to put The Body at the top. I think that’s where I realized how excellent some of the actors in this show were, SMG in particular. Anya’s monologue has stayed with me in a way nothing else from tv or movies ever has. Would I rather enjoy a OMWF singalong? Yes, any day. But The Body felt like a one of a kind thing.

Yeah in most North American dialects it’s produced with a tap/flap, not a glottal stop. Unfortunate, because it would be very fun if it were true for us.

SleepPhones are great! They are super comfortable and secure (I toss and turn a lot, anything in-ear never had a prayer). I wear mine working out too.

Under-appreciated advantage over cheaper, similar competition: super easy to clean. The mechanism slides in and out of the band, which is machine washable. You’re not just building up sweat and oil might after night.

Oh 100% absolutely. I mean the gentrification of Hyde Park and Woodlawn with active, deliberate harm to the black community started at the University’s inception in 1898 (1895? 92? They keep changing the “established in” date on all their merch and propaganda, it’s hard to keep up) and continues to this day with no signs of slowing.

I also should have specified that if we’re talking about student/faculty attitudes the “real” UChicago community does not or at least should include Booth and the psychopathic econ department. That’s where all the money comes from (because it’s evil) but everyone except admin hates them. Also I’m pretty sure they would argue “community” means communism and community of any kind should be abolished in favor of a social free market or some shit, whatever garbage they are peddling these days.

Important additional context that didn’t make it into this tweet, this donation was explicitly directed toward promoting “free inquiry and expression” at UChicago. Decades ago that was a legit strength of UChicago that really was pretty ideologically neutral, and that history gives them a phenomenal tool for spinning dog whistles and ultra conservative policies as part of “the life of the mind.”

Here’s the announcement email from the University’s president yesterday.

Worth noting that Eman Abdelhadi is faculty at UChicago, speaking out against her own employer alongside hundreds of other faculty. Eman is particularly adept at making sure every time they use “free inquiry and expression” as a conservative dog whistle it gets thrown back in their faces. (She’s also just kind of a badass.)

UChicago admin work very hard to promote this image of the school as a bastion for “sane conservatives” by taking stances diametrically opposed to the what the students and faculty actually stand behind. The real UChicago is anti-genocide, pro-union, and knows that promoting free speech doesn’t mean tolerating hate speech.

Yeah it’s got a reputation for exactly this. It’s a terrible movie, but the ending is a completely stupid and unearned tearjerker.

Click.

I absolutely consider Phantom Tollbooth a masterpiece. There’s nothing else like it, and it has extraordinary persistence.

If you have a good understanding of what grad school actually is, you know it’s not going to be college+, and you’re still excited? Go for it! Just go in with the attitude that this is the start of a career path (not school) with many branches along the way. Most people you’ll work with will act like your options are 1) aim for TT at an R1 or 2) cut your losses and go into industry. Those are both legit paths, but pay attention to what you’re loving and hating about the experience.

Maybe you absolutely love teaching or mentorship or grant-writing or data analysis or giving conference talks or science communication or managing a lab or any of the other billion things you have to be responsible for at some point. There are career paths between the extremes that can let do so the stuff you actually like doing, and they exist both in and outside of academia. If you go in letting yourself get excited about whatever the hell you actually get excited about, you can figure out what the path you actually want could look like and prioritize those things that don’t make you miserable.

• a PhD who voluntarily pursued an instructional faculty track at an R1 where I never again have to backseat the needs of my students and my love of pedagogy behind desperately looking for research funding because publish-or-perish even though o have at bare minimum 3 months a year to devote entirely to whatever research I am excited about in the moment…or play video games if I prefer

Don’t fight, guys. This is academia. You’re both wrong.

The ascend power from Tears of the Kingdom. Not so much in my literal real life, but any time someone in a show/movie is being chased or is trapped somewhere or even just stuck in an awkward situation I expect them to just fly through the ceiling and leave all their pursuers with question marks over their heads.

I feel this way too. I know nearly who calls me ma’am is intending to be courteous and I don’t hold it against them. That said, knowing they are well intended doesn’t make me less uncomfortable.

Also the idea of sir being the term of respect for all men and even boys but ma’am being for “older” women adds some baked in unavoidable sexism, no matters how genuinely-not-actually-sexiest the speaker is. There are just necessary built in assumptions about the addressee when you have to choose between ma’am and miss (or similar). The implication is that societal value of women, and not men, is age-determined. The former often makes a woman feel undesirably old and the latter often makes her feel infantalized. It’s the same as the Mr./Mrs./Miss situation, where moving just to Mr. and Ms. alleviates that tension a bit. No clear answer for sir and ma’am honorifics though.

For LGBTQ+ specifically, Todd from Bojack Horseman. He’s asexual, and he just kind of…is asexual. It’s a major plot line of character development as he figures himself out, but the asexuality isn’t a gimmick or hook. We care about Todd and this matters a lot to him, so we care about it too. It happens to be him exploring his (a)sexuality, but it could have been anything.

Abed Nadir in Community is one of the best examples IMO of doing diversity in tv right. He is autistic, and that fact is central not just to his character but to making the whole show work. Being autistic creates jokes, it’s never the joke itself. (He’s also not precious or off-limits. Abed IS the butt of some jokes, but not his autism.) He is arguably the audience surrogate despite (because of?) so much of his “deal” being how he doesn’t relate to people like everyone else. In general no one feels sorry for him (and when someone does they look like the asshole by the end of the episode). He has a lot of classic, stereotypical ASD traits, but they are treated like personality traits. He’s a shining example of why identity-first language feels important for a lot of people: he is a complex and fleshed-out whole person as he is. If you took away his autism he’d be flat and boring and unrelatable, a completely different character.

Abed and Todd both kind of just exist very authentically in their worlds. No one (character or writer) is asking you to feel a particular way about them, just to appreciate them for who they are like any other character. If we care about the world and the character, we’ll care about what matters to them.

Finally playing Dave the Diver after getting recommendations from everyone I know since it came out. “Dive for fish and make sushi.” Seemed pleasant enough but I didn’t get why people talked about it in the same tone as like, Stardew Valley.

I get it now.

It may not be the original idiom, but it’s definitely something people say. If the core expressions are “(I) take the lead” and “(you) follow my lead,” that lends itself easily to a merge: you take my lead. It’s not as common as the originals but it’s definitely out there. It will stick around because it’s really easy to unambiguously infer what it means in context.

It’s more of a persistent thing than a series of examples, but a moment that comes to mind is earlier this year teaching a kind of broad social sciences class. I was trying to make a point about something or other and the psychology of capitalism and asked who had ever consciously chosen to stop studying or working to go to sleep or watch tv or otherwise be unproductive. Everybody raised their hands. Ok now who has felt guilty about doing that? No one. Not a single hand. I was astounded.

And in my millennial mind my first thought is of course “wtf are these kids doing at this elite college if they don’t hate themselves properly?” Second thought is “oh cool, these kids don’t hate themselves.”

But following up on what they thought that meant as far as the material we were talking about, it became a conversation about evolving pressures. For me, the concept of “self-care” in college was really the same as “laziness,” which is obviously not great. For them, “self-care” is as much a responsibility as homework, but not necessarily in a good way. There’s a social responsibility to be a certain kind of anti-capitalist while still succeeding in a capitalist system. I had a student say she felt more guilty about breaking her streak on her mindfulness app than getting a bad grade because she didn’t work hard enough.

But at the same time, they truly HAVE to get excellent grades. I might think grade inflation is a huge problem and that they should consider an A- to be a good grade, but the reality is that A- might be the reason they don’t get into law or med school. It’s not like that A- means they don’t deserve or can’t succeed on med school, but it might mean they’ll never get the chance. Do I stand on principle and grade like grades are supposed to mean something, or do I give them what they need to have the future they want?

What about using AI ethically and constructively? I was told I wasn’t going to have a calculator in my pocket by idiots. I’m not going to do that to a new generation. What does it feel like to have to pack extracurriculars to get a post-bac internship even more than they did to get into college? What does it mean to come of age in the era of BLM, COVID, and Trump instead of 9/11, don’t ask don’t tell, and the Great Recession?

It’s just not the same experience. I can’t be. That’s not a problem, but it’s a challenge.

Ironically, understanding the lived experiences of college students.

I’m a professor now, graduated from college in 2010. I actually work at the same school I went to, and I often still feel completely out of touch with what my students actually need and how they approach their education. I have to put real work into connecting with students to meet them where they’re at and create classes they will get something out of. Fortunately I really love that aspect of my job. Most professors don’t give a shit and just assume college is the same now as it was 10-20 years ago.

Local news anchor once ended a segment saying something was “a phallus” instead of a “fallacy. Understandably but hilarious.

Shane’s 6-heart cutscene on the cliff in Stardew Valley.

Also the very last story moments of Tears of the Kingdom. The dive reach grab bit.

As others have said, there’s never going to be a clear cut line between the two. I think it’s more useful to take a functional perspective. Something isn’t problematic because it’s a cult; it’s a cult because it’s problematic. I like Hassan’s BITE model of authoritarian control here. We look for social systems that are purposefully organized to enforce different kinds of control over individuals within the system - Behavioral, Information, Thought, and Information control in the BITE model. We see where systems rely on mechanisms of control to the clear detriment of those within the system.

You mention in another comment the idea that many “cults” are going to be relatively more accepting of you than many “cultures.” That’s undoubtedly true. But the distinction is in what happens next. The border around a cult system is only permeable in one direction. You may be accepted with open arms, but that acceptance is a tool to get you into a place where you can’t leave because you won’t (or feel like you won’t) ever be accepted again outside the cult.

The control mechanisms also create an all-in system. I’m not generally a fan of religion TBH, but you can decide how much you want the culture of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or whatever to affect your life day to day and in what ways. If you’re in a Christian cult though, like the IFB or IBLP (the one the Duggars are in), the system decides your level of involvement. Scientology is a great example of this because it looks like there is a wide range of involvement level. You see a lot of celebrities who don’t seems crazy, who talk about how wholesome it is, who say they’ve never seen any of the abuses people talk about. It’s not that these celebrities are opting for a chiller version of Scientology, it’s that Scientology opted them into a less obviously, outwardly repressive day-to-day for the benefit of the system.

All this to come back to my first point - this is a functional distinction, not a formal/semantic one. Is some social system manipulating its members in an organized and harmful way? Then let’s call it a cult so we can talk about that concept more easily. THEN the question of is this or that group a cult based on whether it functionally presents as one.