Thanks, I watched it, kinda fun I thought.
I think they’re calling it a comedy because as I interpret it, it’s a satire (which is of course a kind of “black comedy”). I think the object of satire is overly ambitious Asian parents, a la “Tiger Moms,” who drive their children down narrow tracks toward ultimate forms of success, like admission to Harvard. The strongest signal to me that this film was in the mode of comedic exaggeration was the last line, something like, “We can’t wait until you get into med school!” (Which of course would be another nearly impossible achievement for a kid who’s spent most of her life practicing violin.)
Something, something, primum non nocere…
Me reading this article…
Now I can hold a sustained, tailored conversation on any of the topics I care about, from agnotology to zoosemiotics, with a system that has effectively achieved Ph.D.-level competence across all of them
In many ways, all is not well on American college campuses. Humanities enrollments are plummeting, and the academic job market for Ph.D.s has effectively collapsed. These are grim times for the disciplines entrusted with carrying forward the humanistic project.
And yet, odd as it may seem, I think things have never looked better. Let the machines show us what can be done with analytic manipulation of the manifold. After all, what have we given them to work with? The archive. The total archive. And it turns out that one can do quite a lot with the archive.
[ETA]
It’s a white dude! Shocking!!! /s
I hope you have crossposted this in the dumbest things I have read thread?
I have not… could do though?
After decades of universities hiring armies of part-time professors instead of full-time, tenure-stream instructors and researchers, and college presidents running their campuses like for-profit businesses, the implosion of US higher education has been almost inevitable. Despite Harvard recently providing the Trump administration opposition to their repression of colleges and universities, top-down hierarchies and disempowered workforces have rendered higher education’s responses to conservative and far-right movements in the US utterly impotent. Add to this the conservative assumptions of liberal arts fields as “immoral,” “indoctrination,” and “libtards” instead of what they really mean: an expansion of one’s knowledge of people and the world. There has also been a decades-long overemphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The possibility of Trump’s Project 2025 gurus privatising the federal student loan programme would pretty much be the straw that broke US higher education’s back at this point.
I’m glad someone else is saying this, because I feel like I’ve been screaming in to the void on this…
Harvard just scrapped it’s office of Diversity Inclusion and Belonging and has renamed it the office of campus and community life. They will move focus from underrepresented minorities to first generation and low income students instead.
Resegregation comes to Harvard.
So, resist Trump for approximately 30 seconds, then immediately start doing his fascist bidding. Why are they doing this? Why did they resist if they were GOING to do this? Is there any point at all to trying to understand the decisions people make any more, or is everyone out there just a busted meat robot operating off a random number generator in their head?
A commenter on the blog where I saw this expresses my feelings:
I just find it too real, like these are supposed to be humorous exaggerations but… it’s not really an exaggeration. It’s more documentary than satire. And I do know very talented professional level musicians who did med school, as well as chemistry, math, etc. (in ivy league schools)