Sara Parks
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saraparks.bsky.social
Sara Parks
@saraparks.bsky.social
All sorts of tech writing and rhetoric. Environmental communication. Other fun academic stuff. Somewhere in the East Texas forests. Just care about people! she/her
Reposted by Sara Parks
Three steps to dictatorship: declare emergency, claim the will of God, claim absurd powers. 🙄 #TeamRhetoric
January 22, 2025 at 4:52 PM
Reposted by Sara Parks
I see authors sheepishly announcing books, or apologizing for good news.

Friends: we’re enduring an onslaught of censorship and bigotry. I am PROUD that you wrote anything. Please yell about what you're doing. Art is a fuel to keeps many of us going.
i feel like you should be allowed to talk about & promote your book for at least as long as it took you to write it
January 22, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Two 3-day weeks to start the semester. What day is it? What time is it? What class is this? Where am I?
January 23, 2025 at 12:34 AM
Reposted by Sara Parks
Love this image from Saguaro National Park in Arizona of the root system of a saguaro. Desert plants are sometimes mistakenly thought to rely on deep taproots, but for many, it's these shallow lateral root systems that sop up water very quickly after a rainstorm. 🌎🌵 Image credit NPS.
January 22, 2025 at 11:57 PM
Reposted by Sara Parks
NIH appears to have canceled/postponed all of its study sections—the independent review panels that approve federal grants for health research.

Such grants fund the work/salaries of 300k people at more than 2,500 institutions
All NIH study sections canceled indefinitely. This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities.
January 22, 2025 at 9:27 PM
Reposted by Sara Parks
I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief. I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching), but for now I’d like to share a very small sample of the work I’ve been so proud to support (thread)
November 14, 2024 at 7:23 PM
Reposted by Sara Parks
Satire will save us all. The end.
November 15, 2024 at 3:57 AM
Yes I'm back to posting like it's 2007 on Twitter. Whataboutit?
November 15, 2024 at 4:04 AM
Straight up gagged a colleague today. Not in a performative way. I said something and could see their throat close in response before the coughing and spluttering started... oops.
November 15, 2024 at 4:04 AM
Reposted by Sara Parks
Join the Team Rhetoric feed! Like and pin it to your main feeds. And fill out this form to be added to the feed: bit.ly/bsky-rhetoric

Find the Rhetoric & Writing Studies starter pack by @katjathieme.bsky.social at go.bsky.app/SCyxbJN
Team Rhetoric & Composition Bluesky Feed
Find all the rhetoric, composition, and writing studies scholars in the vast blue sky. Fill out the form to be added to the feed. And make sure to follow the Team Rhetoric feed to see what everyone is...
bit.ly
November 11, 2024 at 12:17 AM
Why do academics and applied folks in sustainability and environment-related fields respond to years of terribleness by either quick rage or equanimity? It feels weird to be in the latter camp. But a lot of us are rather unflappable. I wonder about the possible rhetorical impacts.
April 18, 2024 at 3:35 AM
Diving into Cours3ra. Wish me luck.
February 6, 2024 at 1:31 AM
Love when students pop into my office to happily update me about their change of major which now incorporates exactly what they learned in my class last year. :) Where's my superstar teacher trucker hat.
February 2, 2024 at 4:22 AM
Do all the things and then eat works really well for the doing all the things part. Not so well for the crash after eating though.
February 2, 2024 at 4:20 AM
Procrasticleaning is sooo last week. On to procrastiadministratoring.
January 6, 2024 at 2:11 AM
Reposted by Sara Parks
On the eve of COP28, I'm re-upping this piece I wrote for Daedalus.

As climate scholars, it's our professional responsibility to engage in climate politics.

THe climate crisis is here. It's time for all hands on deck. 1/2

ClimateSky 🔌💡 GreenSky PoliSky

direct.mit.edu/daed/article...
Less Talk, More Walk: Why Climate Change Demands Activism in the Academy
Abstract. As climate scholars, it is our professional responsibility to engage in climate politics. First, we need to engage in radical scientific analysis: we must ask questions that get at the root ...
direct.mit.edu
November 27, 2023 at 1:09 PM
Reading some pop psych on Flow from 1990 as my plane book. The teacherly sophism of it all makes me happy.
November 25, 2023 at 8:21 AM
I just want the course hybrid (I want the class to make), crosslisted (I want the class to make) at a time when there are no conflicts with other courses (I want the class to make).
November 7, 2023 at 8:25 PM
Reposted by Sara Parks
A British Academy analysis from 2020 shows "those taking arts, humanities and social science degrees end up in jobs in eight of the 10 fastest-growing sectors of the economy more often than their Stem graduate counterparts."
www.theguardian.com/education/20...
'Humanities graduates are just as employable': do the sciences really lead to more jobs?
The UK government wants more students to study science subjects – but employers want humanities graduates too
www.theguardian.com
November 4, 2023 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Sara Parks
So, there's a conversation happening on the birbsite right now about a teacher whose students used AI to rewrite part of one of her articles and decided that the AI version was more "straightforward."

And my immediate reaction is "what nuances is it removing to make it that way"...
October 15, 2023 at 5:33 PM
Reposted by Sara Parks
We are far from on track to meet our climate goals, and much more work remains. But the positive steps we’ve made over the past decade should reinforce to us that progress is possible and despair is counterproductive.
October 13, 2023 at 4:28 PM
Reposted by Sara Parks
It’s also clear that we can control how warm the planet gets over the coming decades. Climate models have consistently found once we get emissions down to net zero, the world will largely stop warming; there is no warming that is inevitable or in the pipeline after that point.
October 13, 2023 at 4:27 PM
Reposted by Sara Parks
There is increasing evidence that the world has warmed faster over the past 15 years than it has since the 1970s. Surface records, ocean heat content, and the Earth's energy imbalance all support an acceleration of warming, as I argue in today's @nytimes.com: www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/o...
October 13, 2023 at 4:25 PM
The day after being doubly boostered I went down hard. The day after that I did all the things! Boomeranged by booster.
October 15, 2023 at 2:18 AM
Forgot about the partial eclipse visible in the Piney Woods today. Totally blew it off. But I noticed the wierd quality of sunlight while coming home from the grocery store. Didn't put it together until later. Genuine, unmediated experience of an eclipse!
October 15, 2023 at 2:11 AM