Monday, October 12, 2026
Thursday, October 8, 2026
The woman with the mattress: the radical, rage-fuelled history of anti-rape art [ The Guardian ]
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In September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz began to carry a blue mattress weighing 23kg around her university campus. The mattress was similar to the ones New York’s Columbia University used in its dorm rooms, where Sulkowicz said she had been raped by a fellow student two years earlier. Her performance/endurance artwork constituted her visual art senior thesis, drawing attention to the lack of criminal charges brought against her alleged attacker and his continued presence at the university. As she hauled it across campus, others could choose to assist her with her burden. Many did. She recorded responses to the piece in a diary. . . .
The article:
The wiki:
The Former NFL Lineman Who Solved a Decades-Old Math Problem [ WSJ ]
A former NFL player named John Urschel decided to do some light reading this week, and for him that meant leafing through the latest math papers from OpenAI about topics such as the Riemann hypothesis.
“Oh my lord,” he thought. “I was absolutely floored.”
Urschel was blown away by the findings because he happened to understand the hundreds of proofs better than nearly any human on the planet. Nine years ago, he traded the National Football League for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Monday, instead of studying abstract play designs, he was publishing some impenetrable language of his own to prove a decades-old mathematical conjecture.
Urschel’s paper, titled “On the Growth Factor of Random Matrices,” is one in a deluge of AI-assisted proofs that mathematicians have achieved in this new era when they can combine their genius with supercomputing power. But within this community of brainiacs, there isn’t a single person quite like the 35-year-old Urschel. After three years with the Baltimore Ravens, the offensive lineman who was listed at 6-foot-3 and 313 pounds ditched his helmet to become a professional egghead in 2017. And he hasn’t regretted it for a moment since. . . .
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Tuesday, October 6, 2026
Sunday, October 4, 2026
Thursday, October 1, 2026
How colleges are responding to Trump administration’s ‘call to action’ [ CSMonitor.com ]
The flava:
Two months after the Department of Education called on colleges and universities to publicly state their commitment to principles the Trump administration accuses them of abandoning, a pair of major state university systems have complied, while many more institutions remain wary.
Even that limited response is vastly different from the uniform rejection from nine leading universities last year of the administration’s previous initiative, the Compact for Academic Excellence. That effort tied compliance to federal research and grant funding.
This time, the U.S. government has not issued an overt threat of consequences. Still, college leaders worry their answers could become grounds for punishment or that not answering could draw its own wrath. They question whether complying risks institutional independence. Complicating the decision: The questions themselves deal with subjects that colleges wrestle with constantly and feel to many like they are already addressing.
The National Call to Action issued by Education Secretary Linda McMahon in August asked colleges and universities to respond publicly by the end of the year. The list of questions probes how institutions are handling admissions transparency, the free exchange of ideas, intellectual pluralism, affordability, academic rigor, foreign influence, and the goal of advancing the nation’s interests. . . .
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Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
College Leaders Are Using A.I. Students Call It Hypocrisy. [ NYTimes ]
College professors and administrators have been busting students for cheating with artificial intelligence for several years. Now, the professors and administrators are getting in trouble, too.
Dartmouth College last week announced it was investigating its provost, Santiago Schnell, after the college’s student-run newspaper found that some of his published writing appeared written by A.I.
Dr. Schnell, a mathematical biologist, is perhaps the most prominent in a growing cast of college professors and administrators who have been accused of using A.I. in a way that crosses ethical lines. There have been instances of opinion articles, research papers and even campuswide messages to students showing traces of A.I. influence. He issued a statement apologizing.
Administrators wring their hands, and sometime issue punishments, when students outsource writing assignments to a robot to save time or avoid the hard work of thinking.
Some students are calling out the examples of faculty doing the same thing as hypocritical. . . .
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