4/4 While I was lecturing, the US Supreme Court was considering United States v. Skrmetti, a challenge to a Tennessee law that denies transition care to transgender youth. This piece from @slate.bsky.social makes a compelling argument about what is at stake:

3/4 "Eliza," of course, is a callback to the first chatbot developed by by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the 1960s. This piece from @theguardian.com reminds us why Weizenbaum came to worry about AI and the uses that humans would make of it.

2/4 The moving vignette about a bot named Eliza near the end of the novel suggests that while some people will be able to develop an ethical and mutually beneficial relationship to such an intelligence, most will not.

4/4 @waterman.bsky.social directed the students to this insightful piece on the novel's use of the photograph and the novel's relationship to the old blog site "New York Ghost" by @alixbeeston.bsky.social from the online journal Post-45:

3/4 The passage reads:

"Splayed out on her desk was a Nan Goldin photograph, Greer and Robert on the Bed, NYC. I could recognize it on sight.

"'I love Nan Goldin,' I said, lingering in the doorway. 'She was my favorite artist when I was a teenager.'"

To contextualize Goldin, we watched this:

2/4 One focus was the passage that mentions this photograph by Nan Goldin from "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency."

4/4 Then the first five minutes of Jeanette Winterson's 2020 interview with Waterstones, in which she addresses why Shelley's 1818 novel is so "prescient." She offers an insightful interpretation of the resources that the novel provides for thinking about the politics of rights, gender, and AI.

3/4 Hard to believe that "Rocky Horror Picture Show" will be celebrating its 50th anniversary next year!

2/4 ... followed by ... (Say It!) ...

5/5 But that's not the way the anti-trans folks see it apparently. Or maybe they're just afraid of the future and what it holds.

4/5 Victor said, "I have never met anyone who is trans."

[Ry:] "Most people haven’t."

He smiled. "Weren’t we just saying that in the future we will be able to choose our bodies? And to change them? Think of yourself as future-early."

3/5 In the view of the novel's Victor Stein—an avatar of both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Victor Frankenstein—being trans is an expression of the idea of self-making that underwrites US individualism. Consider this exchange from the novel:

2/5 One of the topics this term has been the relationship between cosmopolitanism and the US cultural mythologies surrounding individualism. I highly recommend @hcrichardson.bsky.social's November 30 Substack newsletter on the shifting politics of individualism in the US:

5/5 Here is Building A6 today with its new signage facing the public road. The Institute's space in the building is apparently quite diminished.

Let's call this thread "Signs of the Times."

4/5 The permanent campus opened in 2014. The physical space was marked by disciplinary thinking, as each division had its own building. The Humanities were housed in Building A6, along with the interdisciplinary NYUAD Institute, which had offered academic programming to the public since 2008.

3/5 Meanwhile, NYUAD was building a permanent campus on nearby Saadiyat Island. I took this picture from an Etihad jet while returning to Abu Dhabi from London in 2013.

2/5 The first campus building was near the oldest part of Abu Dhabi. The "Downtown Campus" was a wonderfully interdisciplinary community, where faculty from all disciplines routinely interacted with one another and with the students. It was billed as "the World's Honors College."

2/2 The cathedral reopens on December 7, and this CNN piece gives us a glimpse of the wonderful restoration. I can't wait to see it in person when I'm in Paris this spring.