Kendrick played last year, now we get Bad Bunny. I’m thankful the Super Bowl halftime show has artistic integrity and political relevance.

I once got to sit on the PhD committee of a student who studied Pluto’s moon Charon, several years before New Horizons sent back photos. The dissertation was a great read, a real privilege to see science up close. Kuiper Belt Objects are fascinating! starwalk.space/en/news/kuip...

That is wild! Thanks for sharing the source. I learned something new! www.newspapers.com/paper/muncie...

It’s clever, fun, and entertaining, but likely misleading about history and our political traditions.

Is that real? I don’t think party conventions or radio news culture worked like that in 1928.

Exactly! The dark humor, cynicism, and sense of resignation that’s become too common in 2025 is not new to me. It’s something I’ve heard for decades in some of my conversations with colleagues from Russia and Eastern Europe. Effective democracy requires optimism, vision, and determination.

100% agreed! One of the coolest things from my sabbatical year at Cornell was being able to surprise our oldest son by driving to Cooperstown on his birthday on a beautiful Sunday in August. Seeing our five kids react when they realized where we were was priceless.

I was rooting for the Blue Jays, but I really enjoyed your enthusiasm throughout the series! My wife and I got sucked in watching the Mariners, and ended up cheering for the Blue Jays in The Series. Amazingly talent and great parity, really fun to watch!

Skip the tasks and watch the Mariners!

It’s all right ,I think we’re going to make it!

It’s hard work, and many things don’t work out. My daughter and I have faced many challenges in our careers, but there is a huge difference between taking a realistic assessment of things versus being desperate and cynical. There’s always more to learn and enjoy, unless you give in to cynicism.

Not sure about the claim about compromising on ethics. I never did as a professor and only left because there were things I wanted to try outside of academics. Similarly, my daughter is a happy, successful political journalist who never compromises. Always have fun and live your values!

By rigor, I mean the internal process of questioning yourself, your assumptions, the confidence in your findings, and what insights other people might have that you are missing. I don’t mean bureaucratic processes that some institutions impose as a proxy for real rigor.

Yes! I struggled so much with processes as a student. The last thing I wanted to do as a professor was to place artificial constraints on students’ learning and creative processes. The whole evaluation process can quickly get very intrusive and non-inclusive. It’s good to question why we do things.

I don’t have an answer, but I really like the emphasis on psychological safety and the personal experience of reasoning and creativity. LLMs are an amazing tool, like word processors, search engines, even social networking. I think academics should focus on quality, rigor, joy, and personal growth.

Student evaluation is a difficult, perhaps unsolvable problem. It’s one reason I left my tenured professorship 12 years ago. I didn’t anticipate LLMs, but as an experienced writer and expert software developer, I personally find they increase the joy, quality, scope, and creativity of my work.