Zeb Larson
Freelance writer with a PhD in history. Ex-academic; studied the anti-apartheid movement. Emeritus adjunct. Became a software engineer in 2020. Words in Teen Vogue, Smithsonian, Jacobin, BBC.
He/Him
zeb-larson.com
- I don't know who needs to hear this, but Apollo 13 holds up pretty well.
- A friend’s piece on Beloved and Toni Morrison went live today, and it is fire.
- Reposted by Zeb LarsonI think in part the higher education funding crisis and the LLM-teaching crisis actually strike at the same problem, which is that education doesn't work without a broad, society-wide sense that the *actual content* of education - not the credential - is valuable.
- I have a good chuckle whenever I remember that Current Affairs is still somehow limping on. Props for tenacity, I guess.
- This is an amazing read that also gets at the root of why I don’t discuss the details of my old career with my new coworkers. It’s too much work to make it legible to them; when describing the career travails, they almost don’t seem to believe you because it doesn’t seem logical.
- 7 years ago today I testified in front of a NYC judge + jury how widespread ignorance of how academia works helped a murderer kill a promising scholar vulnerable only because he wanted a stable job. Things have only gotten scarier. Please share: www.zocalopublicsquare.org/historian-mu...
- The thing about the Afrikaner “refugees” is that the number of people is a rounding error: first report is less than 60. That’s how many people they could find out of a four and a half million whites in South Africa. It tells you a lot about who’s leaving and who’s staying.
- Reposted by Zeb LarsonStar Trek TNG, S4E20: The crew get kidnapped and forced to cosplay at a ren fair. Q learns that Picard has a girlfriend and flies into a jealous rage. Picard stabs a guy to death for being mean to his girlfriend 7/10 dumb as hell (complimentary)
- There’s a certain kind of professor that clearly has the Law & Order theme playing in their head whenever they post about catching a cheater or plagiarist.
- Mother of God
- Reposted by Zeb Larson[Not loaded yet]
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- Are you seriously fucking falling back on explanations that were too corrupt for Congress during the *Gilded Age*? This was Oakes Ames' defense during the Credit Mobilier scandal: it's not a bribe if you just happen to sell heavily discounted stock of a railroad company to legislators.
- Men don’t think of themselves as emotional because we’re conditioned into thinking that being angry just means that you’re right.
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- There was a solid year of my life where any reckless act likely to end in failure became "Leeroying it" and I'm gonna bring that back.
- I had this half-baked idea in high school for a comedy about Abraham Lincoln and how aggrieved he was all the time. One of the recurring bits would have been Lincoln destroying his stovepipe hat in anger, only to pull a new one out of a steamer trunk/closet/desk drawer and carry on.
- This is so bleak because it highlights how devalued peer review has become. For some people, they’re so overworked that something has to give; for others, they don’t really give a shit at all.
- An essay I’ll never write is that the internet was already transforming us into a content consumer/slop generator society. Algorithms, “content”, misinformation trolls, and the damage they inflicted on our information ecosystem was already devastating; generative AI is just finishing the job.
