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Zero Books Read

Even before I started reading Rose Horowitch’s long essay in The Atlantic, the title, “The End of Reading is Here,” both aggravated me– because no, it’s not!— and also brought back a memory from my days as an MFA student in creative writing from 1988 to 90.

I earned that degree at Virginia Commonwealth University and my advisor was the writer Lee Smith. For reasons I don’t completely understand, Lee was on faculty at VCU for only a year, and I was lucky enough to work with her. She was fantastic, always generous with her time, encouraging but also pointed in her advice, so smart, etc. Great writer, great teacher, great person.

Anyway, there was some kind of event in either 1989 or 1990 where she was giving a speech about the state of writing and literature and what-not (I don’t remember if it was a panel discussion or a lecture or what, but I do remember it was a big crowd). One of the observations Lee made in that speech was that the average number of books read for pleasure by Americans that year was zero because most people do not read books for pleasure at all.

So whenever I read essays like this one proclaiming that now, now the end of reading has arrived, I always roll my eyes a bit. Horowitch romanticizes a  past where typical Americans were well read and famous writers were, well, famous (she mentions the appearance of famous American writers on the cover of Time or Life magazine back in the ’50s and ’60s). She laments the disappearance of newspapers and of difficult novels, and also the rise of interest in “young-adult fiction” even by those who are “decidedly not-young adults.”

I suppose literary culture was a bigger deal in America in the 1950s and ’60s and before, but as someone who has been teaching at “opportunity-granting” universities ever since I met Lee Smith, I assure you the supposed end of reading arrived many years ago. The idea that most people don’t read fiction or poetry for pleasure might be shocking to a group of English majors or columnists for The Atlantic. But when you teach general education classes like composition or introductory literature at a university where a significant percentage of the students are ill-prepared for college, and you ask these students about reading for pleasure, Lee’s zero books average seems about right. It’s been like this since I started teaching.

On average. I always have at least a few students in freshman comp who do read books, though they’re always most invested in genres like science fiction, romance, and fantasy, the kinds of “easy” and non-literary fiction that Horowitch characterizes as the “wrong kind” of books. But with maybe three to five  book readers in a class of 25 students, I suppose rounding down to a zero number of books read per year on average is about right. I haven’t taught a gen ed lit course in at least 20 years, but I certainly had students back then who had never read a complete novel before. A couple of years ago, I assigned the Johann Hari book Stolen Focus in freshman comp. It’s an accessible, best-selling non-fiction book about the decline in attention, and for several students, it was the first book they had ever read. English majors are, of course, more likely to be readers, but most of them seem less interested in books specifically and more in “media.” I’ll come back to that.

Not that Horowitch is completely wrong, and her essay is quite a bit more subtle than the headline. She spends a lot of time discussing Marshall McLuhan’s and Walter Ong’s theories of a postliterate era in smart and well-researched ways. I teach a class called “Digital Writing” where I assign some short Ong and McLuhan readings, so the next time I teach that class, I’m probably going to assign this. Her views on AI here are a bit more resistant than mine, but not that different, really. And as she points out, the sales of books in this country have been actually rising in recent years, partially as a result of resistance to AI.

But the problem, as Horowitch sees it, is that there is a smaller percentage of the overall population who read books (particularly novels) for pleasure– about the same percentage of students I have in freshman comp who are readers. Unlike in the past (she says), “the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. The fact that you are reading this article almost certainly makes you a member of it.”

Horowitch goes on in this vein for quite a while (her essay is around 5,500 words): it’s bad that we’re not reading books, IQ and test scores are falling, this lack of reading books is what’s behind lots of problems, etc. etc. Again, she’s not wrong, but it does sound a lot like the similar complaints I’ve heard my entire adult life. Horowitch clearly understands this as well when she writes “Perhaps, 126 years from now, this essay will seem like the lastest such exercise in hand-wringing.”

So I think Horowitch is wrong about the existence of a “golden past” in America where reading books was more than a subculture. But beyond that, I don’t think reading books (and by books, she means “literature”)  is inherently better than reading almost anything else–other than social media posts. Horowitch and I probably agree that most X and TikTok -type content does not count as the kinds of longer form texts that everyone needs to master and regularly practice to be “literate.” But I think literary experiences can happen sometimes on social media (like on Substack, like on Reddit, sometimes on Facebook), and I think reading 5K-plus-word articles in The Atlantic or long articles in similar publications about sports or fashion or cooking is just as valuable for developing literacy as reading the “great works.”

The other issue for me is that Horowitch’s measure of a literate society is one that reads books for pleasure. Well, what about the majority of white-collar workers (and not a small share of blue-collar workers as well) who are reading and writing as part of their jobs all day long? Why doesn’t that count? I mean, during the school year and when I’m neck-deep in reading and commenting on my students’ writing and also keeping up with the readings I assigned, I do not read much for fun. Instead, my idea of pleasure after a workday of reading and writing is to watch television (including streaming) or a movie, or to play around on my computer.

And speaking of the postliterate media that are not books: what’s wrong with that!? As I mentioned, the students I have in more advanced classes who are English majors or MA students tend to read for pleasure– or at least they are reading more than zero books per year on their own. But they are also very into media well beyond the book, and with good reason: a lot of it is really good nowadays. In my view, the best movies and streaming media today are every bit as “literary” as texts that happen to be printed on paper. And our postliterate world (which I think we entered long ago) has not resulted in the “end of reading” at all. It is not either/or; it is and/and.

I had mostly made my mind up about Horowitch before I finished the essay: here’s another Boomer or early GenXer who is mad about the kids today. Then, in the last six paragraphs, things took an interesting turn. Horowitch writes “I was raised in the postliterate era. I was born shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and entered first grade around the time the iPhone was released.” After reading that line, I did a simple search, and her LinkedIn account popped up. It appears that Horowitch is a precocious young person with an old soul.

This doesn’t change my reading of Horowitch’s essay– it’s well-written and interesting, but I still think she’s mostly wrong about literacy. But I have to say there’s something refreshing and charming about one of the “kids today” making such a passionate argument in favor of old books.

 

 

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Sad Professors

Jay Caspian Kong’s New Yorker article “The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.” is about, well, some professors in “despair” about teaching in the age of AI. This is a late May 2026 entry in Fault Lines, Kong’s “weekly column on politics and the media,” which has lately been a lot about AI and higher education.

Kong says he’s been talking to “academics and instructors at the college and high-school level” whose teaching has been disrupted by AI. “They talk about a sense of loss and of despair, because the one thing that brought them meaning has been erased, or blotted out, by the arrival of A.I.” After introducing his article by discussing a Substack post by J.S. Peters called “Grieving what we’ve Gained (Or, the time I cried in front of my students about AI),” he shares reflections from a dozen faculty, including Peters, about how AI has changed things for them.

If you are teaching college or high school in this new age of AI, I’d recommend reading it.  I don’t agree with a lot of these faculty, but I can certainly relate to what they’re feeling. But lots of things that have caused the despair these professors are describing have nothing to do with AI. A couple of these reflections mention the enrollment cliff and COVID, but I think we need to go back to the mid 2000s for additional causes that have made the work of academics a lot less pleasant: the emergence of the iPhone and social media, both engineered to addict users, especially younger users; the chaos of the first Trump administration, including COVID, George Floyd’s murder, January 6; the increasingly obvious climate crisis our students will inherit; the chaos of the current Trump administration which we’re all experiencing right now; and the runaway costs of attending college in the first place, which seems to have reached a tipping point where a lot more students (and their families) don’t think the return on investment is there anymore.

And then came AI. Plummeting enrollments have hit EMU very hard, and the impact of that– fewer students = fewer opportunities to teach advanced classes, budget cuts everywhere, the beginnings of reorganizing the College of Arts and Sciences, and the not nearly as hypothetical whispers of what if Michigan decided to close some of the many regional universities in the state (including EMU)– has had a much more significant impact on what it means for me to be a professor now than any of this AI stuff. AI is merely the shitty sauce on top of the already shitty sandwich. (I mean shitty here as an adjective, but you can read that differently if you want).

Anyway, the despair these faculty are feeling about AI boils down to the depressing ways students are using AI to cheat and bypass learning. Kong quotes Peters explaining how she had to change her assignments in an effort at making them “AI-proof.” Then this:

[W]hen she presented these new expectations to her students, something unexpected happened. “A wave of sadness washed over me, and I actually got choked up in front of the class.” Peters writes. “‘Before AI,’ I told them, ‘Students used to work hard to come up with their own ideas. I’d help, and they’d struggle, but they’d come to something that was their own. That doesn’t happen anymore and I grieve that.’ ”

I get the sadness. But– and perhaps I’m too cynical after teaching a ton of freshman composition, which is arguably “ground zero” for the never-ending battle against plagiarism–while I am sure that most of Peters’ students embraced the struggle she now feels is lost because of AI, I am also sure that some of her students used to cheat before AI as well.

As I’ve written about many times before, I have never had a lot of “pants on fire” cheating because teaching writing as a process requires students to show their work– the drafts they share in peer reviews, the research they are conducting, etc.– and I never have “one shot deal” paper assignments. Cheating by making fake drafts and the like is more work than just doing the assignment. And, as I have also written about many times before, students cheat when they are desperate and think they are going to fail, and because these students are not usually the sharpest knives in the drawer, it is fairly easy for me to spot.

That said, Peters and the rest of these sad professors are correct that more students are trying to cheat in small and large ways with AI, I think for two reasons: AI is seductive (“you mean all I have to do is push this button and I can be finished with this stupid assignment?”), and the line for what counts or doesn’t count as cheating is fuzzy. Before AI, I had to deal with a few plagiarism issues in each section of freshman comp I was teaching, and most of those were citation mistakes rather than purposeful cheating. I rarely had any cheating issues in the advanced classes. In the last couple of years, I’ve seen two or three AI cheating issues per section of composition (and I failed on the a couple of those students), and there were a couple of AI cheaters in the upper-level class I taught last year that was about AI– and they failed too. If I had a “zero tolerance” AI policy (which is impossible to enforce), then I’m sure I would have a lot more cheating problems.

As a result, I’ve had to change the way I teach writing in two significant ways. First, I talk with my students about AI a lot because it has become one of the major topics of the courses I’ve been teaching lately, and because the absolute best way to encourage students to cheat in small and big ways with AI is for a teacher to never say anything about it. And I think teachers need to be explicit with their students about how using AI to do too much of the work a) defeats the whole point of trying to learn something in a class, and b) generally doesn’t work that well.

Second, I now use software and other enforcement mechanisms to police/detect AI cheating. This is new for me, but it is not at all new for writing teachers to use software– notably Turnitin— to detect plagiarism. I have never used Turnitin because of a host of ethical issues, because I don’t like presuming my students are guilty until proven innocent, and also because I never thought the software worked that well. The way Turnitin detects plagiarism is by comparing a paper with the other papers in its database. That works fine if the student is plagiarizing another student’s paper already in the database, but it does nothing to effectively detect when a student lifts a chunk of text from an article, or if a student gets someone else to write the paper. So Turnitin seemed unnecessary to me.

With AI, I feel like I’ve had to change my mindset to trust but verify, and that’s kind of sad.

As I described in this post, I have required students to use Google Docs in my writing classes for many years now, and long before AI came along. I started doing this because of compatibility issues with word processing programs, because it’s really great for collaboration/peer review activities, and because it helps me grade revisions by examining the document’s version history.

The version history is also useful for detecting signs of plagiarism and/or AI cheating. For example, when a Doc’s version history begins with a blank page, and then, time-stamped just a few second later, all of the text appears all at once and with no mistakes, I can tell the text came from someplace else. There are also a variety of Google extensions tools that can extract A LOT more details out of a Google Doc’s history. Lately, I’ve been using Process Feedback, which is a free extension that generates a report on the writer’s process: when did they make edits, how many words a minute they typed on average, and when they copy-pasted 25 or more characters all at once.

When I have confronted students about what I think is AI cheating that just appears like this, they will often say something like “Yeah, I messed up. I forgot we were supposed to use Google Docs and I wrote the paper in MS Word and then copied it into a Google Doc. Sorry about that.” I’m sure that is sometimes true– much in the way that sometimes dogs do eat homework– but I also know that some students were lying straight to my face. Last semester, I confronted one student who gave me this excuse and asked this person to share with me their Word file; they confessed it was actually AI all along.

That is what is causing these professors despair, and I don’t like it much when students lie to me either. Plus checking through document histories (not to mention clicking on links to research to make sure it’s real, checking quotations to make sure they are real, etc.) takes me more time and work.  But again, this might be a result of having plenty of students over the years who have lied to me about one thing or another. This is not something that is new for me, nor is it something that causes me a lot of despair at this point. It’s just kind of sad.

Several of these reflecting professors expressed very grim outlooks about their specific futures and of all of academia as well. I share those feelings and concerns, but less about AI and more about <gestures broadly> everything else . If I had just turned 40 (rather than 60), I like to think I would be trying to get out of academia and onto a second career of some sort.  But now that I have (likely) fewer than double-digits before I’m able to retire, I’m pretty sure I can ride out whatever happens next.

And one last tangent/point: these reflections of despair and my own frustrations do remind me a bit about an R.E.M. song that is on the not great album Up called “Sad Professor.” That song ends:

Everyone hates a bore
Everybody hates a drunk
Everyone hates a sad professor
I hate where I wound up
I hate where I wound up

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Three Thoughts on Booing AI at Commencements

Chances are, you have heard of/seen various viral clips of commencement speakers talking about AI getting booed by the graduating students. If you’re anything like me, you have also read various social media posts and many other commentaries about what this all means; here are several different recent examples of the sorts of things I’ve been reading.

I have three brief and not-so-original thoughts about all this.

First, students don’t all of a sudden “hate” AI; rather, their feelings about AI are complex and contradictory, just like they are for me and pretty much everyone else who has thought about AI for more than 15 minutes. Well, everyone other than tech bro AI evangelists and/or the rich already types who give commencement speeches like this. I have never thought “hardcore use AI to do 90% of the work” cheating is as common as MSM wants us to believe, but students all use AI in ways I have no problems with, though sometimes I think they might drift into the grey areas of cheating. The students in first-year writing tend to be more positive about AI than the juniors, seniors, and MA students I have in upper-level courses, which might also reflect why graduating students might be more inclined to boo. After all, the freshmen in an annoying gen ed composition class might see AI as a great short cut for getting through something they don’t really want to do in the first place, while the students who are graduating and who have been looking at a dismal job market and hearing more and more about how AI is threatening to make their degrees irrelevant have a good reason to boo. But I think a lot of those graduating students have the same attitudes about social media as well: they hate it, but they also can’t quit it, either.

Again, I feel the same way. I don’t want students to use AI to cheat their way through college (generally, and in my classes in particular), but look, I use AI too, and in ways I suspect is pretty common among students as well. I don’t like the data centers springing up around me here in SE Michigan, but I also think the harms are exaggerated, and it hasn’t stopped me from using Claude to brainstorm, to proofread, and to even suggest a sentence or a paragraph or more when I’m stuck on something, particularly some sort of bureaucratic busywork task.

Second, students weren’t booing AI; they were booing the billionaire commencement speakers cheerfully telling young people about to start their adult lives and careers that the future is not them but AI, an emerging technology that is going to make that smiling billionaire even richer, and there’s nothing today’s graduates can do about it. That is definitely the general impression I got from most of my students in the Writing, Rhetoric, and AI course I taught last year. Their attitudes about AI in general were all over the map. Some students remained adamant AI refusers to the end, some students started and remained AI enthusiasts, and most students began and ended somewhere in-between.

My goal for the class wasn’t about convincing students to use or not use AI; rather, my goal was for students to leave the class skeptical about AI, regardless of how they did (or didn’t) use it. I want students (and everyone else) to presume that AI’s output will have to be fact-checked, to not be sucked in by AI’s sycophancy, to never forget AI has no more understanding of the world around it than a toaster, to never trust the puffed up claims of AI’s capabilities, and, above all else, to never forget that all of this is unregulated and unequally enriching a few few people in Silicon Valley, and really REALLY enriching the likes of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Donald Trump. I don’t know how successful I was on all these points, but none of my students like any of these technologarchy dudes who are palling around with Trump, and I’ve never had a student disagree with any of the readings or discussions we’ve had about the need for AI regulation.

And third, to quote Barack Obama’s famous line, don’t boo, vote. The only way the government will finally regulate AI (and let’s add social media to that list while we’re at it) is if it becomes a campaign issue. And frankly, I think that these boos and the subsequent viral videos and MSM coverage suggest to me it very well may be a campaign issue in 2026. I’m almost certain it will be in 2028.

I don’t know how likely it is for this to boost turnout or not, since young people still don’t show up at the polls as much as they should, but maybe this is something that will get recent grads and current students out in November. Michelle Goldberg’s Op-Ed “Why College Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers” (she and I are more or less making the same argument) also includes a link to the more complete version of the recent May 2026 Times/Siena National Poll of Registered Voters, and if you dig through that data a bit, there are signs of what might be (hopefully) coming. 62% of 18-29 year olds say that if the election for Congress were held now, they would vote for the generic Democratic candidate. 60% “strongly disapprove” of Donald Trump, and 47% think that AI is “mostly bad,” both of which are larger percentages than any other demographic. 1

Let’s see if anyone remembers these boos in November, but I am hoping that this is helps get more people to pay attention to AI and to recognize how citizens can still do something about it.

  1. Not that the politics of AI split neatly along partisan lines. One of the reasons why Michigan is getting a lot of data centers built in it right now is our Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is all for it. And on the right, you’ve got people like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Glenn Beck all raising various objections about AI. ↩︎
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Ghosts in the (Online Teaching) Machine

This past semester was an odd one for me. One of my sections of first-year writing started with 22 students and finished with 10, the highest withdrawal/fail rate I’ve ever had. (My other section started with 25 and finished with 19, which is more typical). In my Writing, Rhetoric, and AI class, I had an example of the absolute most blatant case of cheating I’ve seen in almost 40 years where a student handed in the work of another student who was also in that class, as if I wouldn’t notice, which proves that old-fashioned/non-AI cheating is still a thing. I also had a few attempts at AI cheating in all three of my classes, and I had an especially “problematic” student in one class which required many emails, face-to-face meetings, and phone conferences to resolve.

That was all a lot, but the oddest thing for me last semester was the ghost students in the AI class.

“What do you mean, ghost students?” As this article from Milwaukee’s ABC affiliate WISN 12 website describes, it’s an identity theft scam. “Thieves [who are are usually a part of organized computer crime groups] apply for federal student aid using someone else’s name. Some of the cash goes to the school. The rest, typically earmarked for books and housing, is placed into an account for the scammer to withdraw.” Those living expenses are typically around $10,000. Ghost student scams have been around for a while and have been a problem for online students at community colleges because those schools typically don’t charge a fee to apply and more or less admit everyone. According to this article from an ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, nearly a third of California community college student applications in 2024 were ghosts and it accounted for more than $13 million in fraud.

Now this scam is coming to places like EMU. Here’s what it looked like from my POV:

During the fall semester last school year, my special topics AI class filled up, and so the course ran again this past winter (what everyone else calls spring) term. The course didn’t have any prerequisites (which is typical of special topics), and in the fall semester, I had a few students who should have never signed up in the first place who had to withdraw. I wanted to avoid that for the winter term, so I reviewed the roll in December before the winter term began just to warn non-English major types.

I had four students who were clearly in the wrong place. All four of these students were first year students enrolling at EMU for their first semester in January 2026 (which is in itself odd since freshmen almost always begin in the fall), and all four were signed up for just two online courses: mine and a 100-level gen ed class. I didn’t think too much about the oddness of that at the time, but I did email these students before the semester began and suggested that maybe they shouldn’t be starting college with a class for seniors and MA students. Of course, I never heard back.

An important note on my approach to teaching online: I have always taught online courses asynchronously and focused on discussion and small group activities, I suppose because I’ve never taught a lecture hall-type/”stand and deliver” course. Also, other than during Covid when we had to teach everything online, all of my online teaching have been classes that are for advanced undergraduates and MA students. I note this because I think a lot of my colleagues tend to teach online in a way that replicates the lecture hall, and they tend to teach 100-level gen ed classes online.

The semester began on January 12, and as I typically do in online classes, we started with a simple post where students introduce themselves. This is a very low-stakes discussion post more along the lines of “test-test-test, 1-2-3, is this thing on” as much as anything else. My mysterious new freshmen posted their introductions on time (albeit in hindsight, clearly AI) along with everyone else, and they also responded to peers. These students also responded to the next discussion prompts due on January 14– at least initially. January 19 was MLK Day, but there were more discussion posts due on January 20 and also January 21. While the other students were getting the hang of it, these four stopped. I emailed each of them to tell them that they would need to participate in these discussions if they hoped to pass, and also they still had time to withdraw to receive a refund on their tuition.

It’s not that weird for students to sign up for an online class and then quickly stop participating because they decided it wasn’t a class for them. But I thought the situation was weird enough with these four students that I looked them up on EMU’s system. On the Wednesday or Thursday after MLK Day, I contacted the instructors of the gen ed classes these students were taking (along with mine) to ask those faculty if these students were participating in their online classes. All four of the instructors emailed me back and essentially said they hadn’t noticed anything unusual, and besides, this was only the second week of class. This surprised me, though I suppose these other instructors saw their online courses as more like a lecture hall, and no one really expects students in those classes to demonstrate a lot of presence.

By the third week of class and after more emails to these students went unanswered, I did a search for “con where students register for online class” or something like that, and I landed on some articles like the ones I shared at the beginning. Then I emailed the Registrar and the other faculty/instructors, saying “hey, I think these are ‘ghost students,'” and the Registrar emailed me back to tell me she thought I was probably right.

At the time, I thought I might try to write something to send to a place like Inside Higher Ed or The Chronicle; that didn’t happen because the semester got away from me/got weird. But I did meet with EMU’s VP for Enrollment, Katie Condon, to talk about my particular ghosts and what EMU is trying to do about them. It’s not an easy problem to solve. At universities like U of Michigan or Michigan State where applying students have to pay a fee and submit more information, this isn’t an issue. It has become an issue for EMU (and other similar opportunity-granting institutions) because we’re waiving application fees and letting in pretty much anyone who applies. Plus we are willing to do this for students who are only enrolled online and who never have to do anything in the admission process to prove they are “real.” I guess EMU’s general counsel contacted someone at the FBI about this, but that was only because someone in the general counsel’s office knew someone in the FBI.

This is all a problem that is likely to get worse with agentic AI too.

One thing that Condon told me (something the now former provost suggested in a conversation with her about these ghosts) is that maybe online instructors need to do something at the beginning of the semester to demonstrate “proof of life.” In hindsight, I should have suggested to Condon that perhaps that’s something EMU needs to do when they admit students in the first place. But one thing we talked about (and I’ve learned this is a common way other instructors have addressed the ghosting problem) is to require students to record and share a selfie introduction instead of a written one at the beginning of the semester. I’ll be going that route in the fall. It’s not foolproof, of course– plenty of AI video fakes out there!– but for these crooks, it probably represents a bar too high to easily cross.

Ultimately, like most things about technology’s impacts on the teaching of writing, I think the fact that ghost student scams exist at all says a lot about how we routinely treat students– particularly in online classes– not as actual humans but rather as disembodied and incorporeal, names that show up in the Canvas grade book with no other presence in the world. I like to think that my approach to teaching online as discussion-oriented rather than as a lecture format helps, and I do feel like I get to know most of my online students as humans behind the words/screens by the end of the semester. But this is far from foolproof. My assumption is my ghost students disappeared once they had cashed in on the financial aid package, but had they stayed longer– maybe even through the entire semester– I’m not sure I would have ever known.

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60

I have a vague (and likely mostly an imaginary) memory of turning 10 in 1976, thinking how it was cool my age was in double-digits and vaguely wondering what it would be like to be 20 or 30, figuring out that when I turned 40, it would be the next century.

I definitely remember turning 20 in particular because of the significance of the other ages around twenty. Turning 18 meant I was “an adult,” and I could vote (Mondale, btw). Up until the feds required all states to set the drinking age at 21 in 1984, it was 19 in Iowa. Thankfully, people like me who turned 19 by 1987 when the change would go into effect were grandfathered in, meaning I could legally get a beer in 1985. So that made 19 a memorable birthday. Turning 20 was big just because you’re getting out of the teenage numbers. Turning 21 mattered because that is the age where you can do pretty much anything– other than collect social security and medicare, I suppose.

Twenty-two? I remember thinking that was such an irrelevant age after the three previous years.

Like most people I suppose, a lot happened in my 20s, and when I turned 30, I was finishing my PhD at BGSU (after having finished my MFA at VCU and after living and working in Richmond for five years), married to Annette, and we were on our way to Ashland, Oregon because I landed a tenure-track job at what was Southern Oregon State College but became Southern Oregon University.. It was an interesting place to start my career, it was a great place to have our son, and it’s been a great place to revisit.

By the time I was 40, I was tenured and on my way to full professor at EMU, I had been blogging for a few years, and boy-howdy, I sure used to write here a lot more here before Facebook and Twitter. There’s a recap of a birthday party I threw for myself that I only vaguely remember (but it sounds like it was a good one);a “part two” of my birthday recapping a dinner I do remember at Frontera Grill in Chicago with Bill HD and Steve Benninghoff (we were there for the 4Cs); and part three of my birthday, still in Chicago and hanging out with my friends from the old days, Bruce and Troy and Lisa. I didn’t realize I had embraced the birthmonth concept that long ago.

By the time I turned 50 (and wrote this post), a lot of what I used to write here had shifted over to Facebook, Twitter, etc. My blogging– everyone’s blogging– slowed down or disappeared entirely. In a lot of ways, 2016 was a better time. I was at what was/will be the height of my academic success with all the MOOC stuff (ah, remember MOOCs?), and life was generally good. Plus 2016 was before shit like Trump 1, Covid, Biden’s effort at a second term, Trump 2, etc., etc.

A lot of my post here a decade ago dwelled on death, all stuff that seems more relevant now ten years later. Here’s the end of that post:

On the up-side: I’m in a pretty good spot in my life right now, certainly better than I was for a lot of my 20s. I’m still very happily married to Annette and I’m incredibly proud of my son. I’m not the healthiest 50 year old within a 10 mile radius, I’m not the unhealthiest 50 year old, so I’ll take it. I’m quite happy with my work, and, without blowing myself up too much about it all, I feel like my career as an academic has been reasonably successful, too. I often return to something my colleague and friend Derek Mueller said off-hand one day (I’m not even sure how much he remembers this), which is that academic fame is an oxymoron, and I’m not (and will not likely become) a “big name” in my field. But I’m happy with where I’m at. We talk about moving all the time, but I’m still pretty happy with our house and neighborhood and how we’re living. We have enough money to pretty much do what we want (not that we want to do anything terribly extravagant), which is of course a huge difference between now and when I was 20-something or 30-something.

So yeah, it doesn’t bother me. Now it’s just a question of worrying about really getting old when I turn 60.

Most of this is still true, though with a few interesting differences. I’m still proud of my son and he is now a grown-ass man with a PhD from Yale and starting a new post-doc gig. Thanks to Zepbound, I’m around 50 pounds lighter and more healthy than I was 10 years ago. I’m too close to retirement to care about my place in the field anymore, and we did move into a new house almost two years ago. So yeah, life is good.

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What Happens After AI Destroys Gen Ed?

In all three of the classes I’m teaching this semester (and, like last semester, I’m teaching two sections of first-year writing and Writing, Rhetoric, and AI), I am once again having students read and discuss Hua Hsu’s New Yorker essay from last summer, “What Happens After AI Destroys College Writing?” I blogged about this essay here last semester. As I wrote then, I think Hsu does a good job of capturing the anxieties that both students and teachers have about AI. Ultimately, Hsu’s answer to the question posed by the title (probably written by an editor rather than him) is that AI doesn’t “destroy” college writing, but AI is challenging a lot of assumptions about what college itself is for. Is getting a college degree simply a series of hoops to jump through to earn a degree that assures membership in the upper-middle class, or is it about learning/teaching things?

This time around, I am reading this essay a bit differently. Hsu interviews several students across the country about AI, and the one that stands out the most to my students and me is “Alex,” a pseudonym for a student at New York University, because he is so unusual. Unlike every other student I have caught cheating with AI or anything else, Alex is the unicorn of AI think pieces like this: a criminal mastermind cheater. Hsu quotes Alex as he explains how he uses ChatGPT to write papers and summarize readings for almost everything, and, if he is to be believed, Alex always gets away with it.

I don’t know, maybe Alex told Hsu the truth, and maybe there are students who have cheated like Alex in my classes that I never knew about. But as I’m re-reading and thinking about my own experiences with students talking about how they use AI or the students who try to cheat with it, I’m wondering if Hsu is taking a little “creative license.” Or perhaps Alex is a kind of composite character included because he represents the worst (and mostly exaggerated) fears about AI in education.

In contrast, most of Hsu’s interviewees describe using AI in ways that ranged from things everyone, including me, thinks is blatant cheating (for example, AI “writes” the entire paper the student does a little light editing before turning it in) to using it for stuff like brainstorming, for feedback, and other activities that some professors forbid and that I encourage. But within this range of use, most of these students were selective about the courses and assignments where they use AI, especially when it came to blatant cheating: not usually courses in their majors or courses they care about, but the courses they think are irrelevant and just another hoop. I am, of course, talking about General Education.

The role of Gen Ed in undergraduate studies has always been fraught. As a student in the 1980s, I enjoyed and learned a lot from some of the gen ed courses I took. But I also thought a lot of them weren’t worth it, and given the way these courses figured into my undergrad experience, the university seemed to have felt the same way. For starters, a lot of the Gen Ed classes were about subjects I didn’t like and/or I was not good at. Being required to take a science class with a lab felt a lot like being required eat a big bowl of (insert the name of the vegetable you will not eat here) because it’s “good for you.” These were the classes you had to take before you were allowed to have the good stuff.

Plus, the university didn’t seem to think the Gen Ed classes were that important, certainly not as important as the “real” classes in the major. I got credit for about a semester’s worth of gen ed classes in part because of some high school classes I took, but mostly because I did well on the CLEP Tests. The gen ed classes I took were mostly large lecture hall courses with a sage on the stage talking away, a couple of tests and a final. If they were smaller discussion sections, they were almost always taught by graduate students or part-timers– that is, the lowest paid and least empowered instructors on campus.

As an educator, I believe in the theory behind Gen Ed. It provides students with introductions to fundamental skills and subjects they will use in many other courses and throughout life (writing and math classes immediately come to mind), and it helps students be “well-rounded” in terms of diverse experiences, critical thinking, “broader knowledge” of the world beyond their specialization, and so forth. Back when I was a student and it was a lot more common to start college as an “undeclared” major, Gen Ed was also a way of trying out different possibilities.

But that, as they say, was then, and this is now. Attending college has never been cheap, but the cost of attendance at supposedly affordable and public universities (like EMU) has gone through the roof. Taking classes that I thought were a waste of time didn’t cost that much when I was in college; it does now. “Students these days view college as consumers, in ways that never would have occurred to me when I was their age,” Hsu writes. “They’ve grown up at a time when society values high-speed takes, not the slow deliberation of critical thinking.” I think students have always viewed college at least partially as consumers, but higher costs and the increased value society puts on speed have made this worse. Stir in the rest of the shit of the world in (social media, global warming, pandemics, depression, working too many hours to make ends meet, etc.), and the idea of a busy and stressed-out student cutting some corners in classes they think are a waste of time with AI makes a lot of sense.

As I’ve observed here and elsewhere many times before, this is the pattern of AI cheating I’ve seen in my own teaching. I see social media posts from colleagues and I read hair-on -fire MSM pieces and Substack posts about how ALL the students are ALL cheating ALL the time, but that has not been my experience. I don’t get a lot of students cheating with AI– well, unless I’ve had a bunch of Alexes that I never caught– because teaching writing as a process deters plagiarism. Plus I teach small classes (which also deters cheating), and I don’t have any “one-shot deal” paper assignments (as in “write a 5-page paper about ‘x’ and turn it in”) or any multiple choice/short answer tests or whatever, all things that AI can do well.

That said, my students do sometimes cheat, and at least 90% of the AI cheating incidents where I either required the student to redo the assignment (generally the first offense) or failed them (a second offense) have been in first year composition. The more advanced students in the courses I teach in the major or the MA program are all adamant about never cheating on their writing and certainly not with AI, and I believe them.

Like I said before, I skipped a lot of Gen Ed partly because I did well on those CLEP tests but also because I was an English major. That meant I never had to take a math class in college, and I only had to take that one science class I mentioned– astronomy, incidentally, which was the science class most students thought was the easiest option. But if I were a student now and I had to pass a Gen Ed math class along the lines of pre-calculus, I would be screwed.

Maybe I’d do the right thing and seek help from a tutor or someone, or if I got over my math phobias and if I really tried, maybe I could eek out a passing grade on my own. But if AI could help me in various ways that might or might not be allowed by the instructor, that might cross the line from “help” to doing the work for me, and I thought I could get away with it, I would use AI. And if I had to take some kind of class that I thought was a waste of my time, and it turned out that all of the assignments for the class– quizzes, tests, essays, etc.– are ones that anyone could complete with AI, then I would use AI, at least to help cut some corners. Why wouldn’t I?

“Because that wouldn’t be ethical!” you might be thinking. Sure, but if my options are to take the risk to cheat or to fail out of college, I’m going to take the risk. And really, isn’t it unethical (or at least “problematic”) for universities to make students go up to their eyeballs in debt and to spend all that time taking courses that are nothing but a series of busywork and hoop-jumping assignments that some clanker could do just as well?

Now, I don’t really think AI “destroys” Gen Ed (see what I did there?), but it clearly changes how we should teach these classes and also what these classes are for. To me, that mostly means teaching in ways that minimize the usefulness or temptation of cheating with AI: small classes focused more on learning processes rather than making products, and writing assignments that value reflection and research, especially over simple regurgitation of whatever the professor said in the lecture will be important on the test.

We also need to make these classes “real” and as meaningful and important as the classes students get to take in their majors. I can’t begin to imagine what the solution is to all this, but I suppose the first place to start with rethinking Gen Ed is to take a hard look at the courses and their formats. A class that can be successfully completed by someone who was never actually a student in the class– that is, there’s no participation component, there’s no specific context for the subject, there’s no assessment of material that is only delivered/discussed in the class–is a class that could probably be completed with AI. And it is also probably a pretty shitty Gen Ed class.

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The Year that was 2025

The two things that ran continuously in the background for me in 2025 (when they weren’t in the foreground) were AI and Trump, Trump and AI, AI AI, Trump Trump, again and again and again. So there’s not a lot of need to say too much about all that, no reason to remind myself about everything Trump and all that his people have screwed up and/or destroyed this year. You know what I mean. Anyway, here’s a more personal and less apocalyptic post about the year that was 2025.

January was a “not much new around here” month, though one thing I noticed when I was paging through my journal was I had some version of a cold or something for most of the month. Let’s hope there’s not a repeat of that.

In February (most of it was typical, the work was work, Trump was very busy setting the world on fire, etc.), we went to Cancún for our winter break to one of the zillions of “all inclusive” resorts around there. We really stayed south of the city in the Mayan Riviera area, and the closest we got to the city of Cancún itself was the airport. I don’t think either Annette or I are too interested in staying at a resort like that again, but I’m interested in more travel in Mexico one of these years. Chichen Itza was particularly cool.

We had a weekend of fun in Detroit at the end of March, and then in April, I took a road trip out east for the last CCCCs of my career. Or so I thought! I’m not planning on presenting at the CCCCs in Cleveland this year, but I will probably go since there are likely to be more folks I know this coming year than there have been for a while, and it’s a short drive. Stay tuned. Oh, but before Baltimore, I swung through Richmond for a quick overnight visit to my great old friend Dennis and is wife Sarah for some hanging out and catching up face to face.

The school year wrapped up in April, and May rolled around. The first two-thirds of the month were about getting ready for the trip and just hanging out, and then we were off on our super-epic European 31st wedding anniversary vacation/travel extravaganza. We were originally going to go for our 30th anniversary, but ended up buying a new house instead. I wrote a recap post about the trip here, though I was also all over Facebook and Instagram the whole time too. I’m pretty sure this is the longest trip/vacation like this I’ve ever been on; we left May 21 and flew back on June 20. Also at the end of June: Annette and I went to a big Krause side of the family get together in Door County for my parent’s 60th wedding anniversary.

For July, we were mostly just here and enjoying one of the nicer times of the year in Southeast Michigan, so some reading/writing things, a bit of golf, the Ann Arbor Art Fair, etc. In the beginning of August, we went out to see Will and Maia, along with Annette’s parents, in New Haven, which included a fantastic stop at Sally’s Apizza. Then there was an impromptu get together with just my parents and sisters in Des Moines (which included an overnight stop in Iowa City), and the month wrapped up with a Joan Jett & the Blackhearts opening for Billy Idol. Kind of a hoot.

September meant mostly work, but somewhere in that month (I think?) and also in October, Annette and I went to a couple of No Kings protests. The first one was in downtown Saline where we stood around the intersection of Michigan Ave. and Saline-Ann Arbor Road and held and waved our signs at people driving by. It reminded me a lot of picketing while on strike. The much bigger event was on October 18 in Ypsilanti, where there was easily a couple thousand people. I don’t know how well these protests persuade anyone, but they give me hope. Stuff with Trump et al are bad, but the resistance is real and powerful enough to bring out lots of other people who are as baffled by our current politics as I am. It’s reassuring.

Anyway, we also had a nice two night get-away to Traverse City during our fall break, some early snow and colder than usual weather in November at the beginning of the month, and then a lot more snow during our annual Krause-side of the family get-together at Thanksgiving. We all had to end that a little early this year though because of a winter storm rolling through the midwest that weekend. Luckily, we beat the storm on the way home.

And now here we are in December, after the semester wrapped and now that we are in that weird timeless space between Christmas and New Year’s– or maybe more accurately the weekend after whenever New Year’s eve/day fall every year. It’s been a little different because for reasons, we stayed here and it was just the three of us, too.

So there you have it. I can’t deny it’s been kind of a shitty year, broadly speaking. I mean, I know several people quite well who were DOGED or NIH-ed out of a job, more or less, higher education in general is a dumpster fire, etc. But even though it is buried on the crap of the year, I’m holding on to a tiny piece of hope that things will be better in 2026. Fingers crossed.

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Advice from IHE for Teaching With and Around AI

It’s been three years since ChatGPT was released and AI exploded all over the place, causing a whole new moral panic in academia that is still going strong. And some of these panicking professors are on the verge of losing their minds! For example, consider Ronald Purser’s Current Affairs essay “AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself,” which is easily summarized by the title. To be fair, Purser is not completely wrong. I agree that Cal State’s “partnership” with OpenAI is problematic at best. As a professor who also works at a regional university, the labor issues and poor allocation of resources at SFSU, along with poor decisions about how to spend those limited funds, sound very familiar to me. I completely agree that a lot of our working-class students see through the con– more on that below. But he also devotes a whole lot of time to trotting out the standard angry complaints about AI from academics, that it is a cheating machine, it’s turning students into zombies, that the only solution is to return to paper and oral exams, blah-blah-blah.

A lot of people I know on Facebook shared and endorsed this story, and I get that it strikes a nerve– really, a lot of nerves itching higher education right now, not all of which are about AI. But it’s also a bit too “my hair is on fire” panicky for my tastes, especially when it comes to his basic thesis, which is, well, “AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself.” That is simply not true.

In contrast, I was pleased to read the Inside Higher Ed article “You Can’t AI-Proof the Classroom, Experts Say. Get Creative Instead,” by Emma Whitford. Whitford interviewed several professors and instructors from a variety of institutions who believe that yes, learning and higher education still exist in a world of AI. It’s just that faculty have to change the way they teach things, particularly changing up assignments and activities that were a bad idea long before AI demonstrated them to be bad teaching. That’s more or less what I’ve been saying about AI ever since I wrote what has been the most popular post on this site for a couple of years, “AI Can Save Writing by Killing ‘The College Essay.'” Of course, it’s always reassuring to read others saying similar things.

I think the first step for any teacher who hates all things AI and who believe AI is the end of the university and learning and anything meaningful in the world (blah-blah-blah) is to take a deep breath and to play around with a few different chatbots for a day or two, trying out different prompts (enter in your assignments and see what happens!), and just generally goof around with it so you can experience first hand what AI actually is. This is a tough sell because a lot (most?) of my colleagues and students who passionately hate AI have also taken what they see as the principled stance of refusing themselves to ever use any AI chatbot for anything.

Well, besides the fact that I never think willful ignorance is a good idea, AI is already baked into everything we do directly and indirectly with computers already. Take the “blue book” strategy designed to prevent students from using ChatGPT, an approach to teaching I know some of my EMU colleagues have tried. As Luke Hobson notes at the beginning of Whitford’s article, we already have AI-infused wearables like smartwatches, rings, and Ray-Ban Meta Glasses. “What is to stop someone from sitting in the back of a classroom and whispering into their glasses to say, ‘Hey, I need help with solving this problem.”

AI is now embedded into browsers, it is built into Canvas and other Learning Management Systems, it’s built into word processors and email applications and search engines, and everything else to the point where refusal is not an option. At least it’s not an option if you want to stay connected to things like the internet, social media, streaming entertainment, online shopping– that is, if you want to stay connected to contemporary life in the western world.

I do not think this means giving up and ignoring AI cheating, and I certainly don’t think it means that the rest of higher ed ought to follow in the footsteps of Cal State and cut deals with OpenAI or whoever. Also, learning about AI by monkeying around with it or reading about it is not the same as “liking” AI. Rather, learning the basics of AI is important to understand what it is and to recognize that AI is not a fad, it is not going away, and it is going to shape the future for years to come, both for better and for worse. We can’t “refuse” AI, but we can learn about AI and make changes to how we teach to minimize cheating and promote learning.

Once reaching the “acceptance” phase, the next step is for the AI hating teacher to ask themselves what can I do about it? I think all of the ideas for dealing with AI in the classroom in Whitford’s article (and a few other ideas I’ve seen elsewhere) all lean into two kinds of learning activities that AI can’t do very well:

  • demonstrate presence in the classroom and the physical world; and
  • emphasize the process of learning rather than the products students produce.

And if you are familiar with the theory and practice of teaching writing as a process (rather than assigning writing as a product or assessment), you already know what I’m talking about.

Hobson’s LinkedIn post titled “5 AI-Proof Assessment Ideas” is a good example of this, though some of these ideas are easier to implement than others. Oh, also worth noting: Hobson mostly teaches online, and his ideas reflect that “presence” does not have to be physical or synchronous. Anyway, one idea I like is self-recorded/almost TikTok-style “journal entries.” As Whitford puts it in her IHE article, recorded journals “require students to regularly record and upload five-minute videos of themselves talking about what they’ve learned in class, how it connects to their past experiences and how they might use it in the future.” I suspect students would enjoy this activity, actually.

Oral exams seem less practical to me, though asking students to conduct interviews for various reasons is another interesting idea. I’ve done this sometimes in the past, and the main problem I’ve had with these kinds of assignments there are always scheduling and other logistic snafus. Still, something I could see working well.

On his LinkedIn post, Hobson also mentions “community-based learning,” which for me would also include the fairly common practice in technical/professional communication classes of students working with “clients” on projects for that client. But community-based learning can also mean almost anything that requires students to interact with the world around them, either as a group or individually.

I think this also includes valuing (and grading) participation, and lots of activities where students have to interact with each other. In f2f classes, I do a lot of group discussions/activities, peer review activities, all that kind of stuff, plus I keep track of attendance. In online classes, most of the participation involves discussion boards about readings and activities and the like. Basically, students are required to post to a discussion their initial thoughts/reactions to something (usually a reading assignment) before seeing anyone else’s post, and then they need to read and respond to other students’ posts. I base the grade for these discussions not so much on their quality, but that they complete them. So, to get an “A” on a discussion, students have to post once initially on time, and then follow that up over the next couple of days by responding to at least two other students’ posts.

Note that this is a conversation and not an assignment like “write 250-500 words about ‘x,'” where “x” is some kind of reading or whatever. That’s the sort of “one-shot deal” writing assignment that AI can do really really well. Rather, it’s an interaction with other students participating in the same discussion in the same space. AI can’t do that very well.

Hobson’s last suggestion is to “critique” AI, which has been a big part of my teaching lately because I’m teaching a lot about AI in my classes. But there are all kinds of ways to do this in small ways too; for example, have students and AI both complete a short writing task and then have the class compare them.

I tend to critique AI while demonstrating writing things I think it can do fairly well, along with things it can’t do well– or it can’t do, period. For example, I think AI is good at proofreading, and, with a detailed prompt, it is okay to pretty good at giving feedback akin to peer review. Interestingly, when I ask my students to compare AI feedback and human feedback, they generally prefer the human feedback. AI provides more feedback than human peers, but that feedback can be misleading, in part because AI has no presence in the class (or on the online discussion) where we talked about the assignment.

But my favorite approach to critiquing AI is finding stuff it cannot do, which often can serve as a not-so-subtle warning to students. For example, in my experience, when I upload a PDF of an academic article and ask AI to summarize it for me, it can do a pretty good job. Even more useful is AI can do well at explaining complex passages from articles for non-experts. But if you ask AI to give you some good sentences from the article to quote in a paper, it will frequently make those quotes up. Seriously, give it a try.

The last strategy for dealing with AI that a few folks talk about in Whitford’s article might be best described as having honest and earnest discussions with students about the whole point of college is learning something. This is kind of what I blogged about back in July 2025, and what I think of as “the AI talk.” I think the only thing worse than limiting any discussion about AI to something like “don’t use it because it’s bad” is not saying anything at all, which (according to my students) still seems to be what happens in most classes.

Whitford talked to Carlo Rotella, a professor at Boston College who doesn’t ban students from using AI because he realizes it can be impossible to detect. “I explain to my students why it’s a waste of their time and mine. I explain that they’re paying $5 a minute for classes at Boston College, and to spend that time practicing to be replaceable by AI is a complete waste of their money and time, and my time.” Later in this article, Rotella said, “The entire point of this class is the labor, so a labor-saving device would be beside the point. It’s like joining the track team and doing your laps on an electric scooter. You went around the track. Congratulations.”

Of course, one of the reasons why this works for Rotella is that he bans technology in his classes– no devices, and bring hard copies of the reading– and a lot of tests and quizzes are based only on class discussions. That’s a bridge too far for me. I also assume that Rotella is able to get away with this because (like me) he’s teaching comparably small classes.

That said, having honest and frank discussions about the whole academic enterprise– that we’re here not just to get through the class and collect the credits but to actually learn something– does help. Like Purser at San Francisco State, I teach a lot of working class, first gen, and older/returning students. When I bring up the Rotella argument, that trying to cheat with AI is really self-sabotaging and it defeats the whole purpose of college, these students (well, at least the better ones) completely get it.

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Zepbound Thoughts, Almost Two Years In

It’s been a while since I’ve written much here, especially about AI things, I think mainly because of teaching. I am once again “all AI/all the time” with two sections of first year writing and an advanced “special topics” course called “Writing, Rhetoric, and AI.” It’s all going well, but because I’ve been reading and writing about AI for all of those courses all semester, I haven’t had a lot of time or energy to write more about it here.

More on that special topics class later because I’m scheduled to teach it again next term– and if you are an EMU student interested in an advanced online writing class, go sign up! Soon I am also going to write more about AI here, about how this last semester has gone and perhaps a response/alternative to the draft of some AI Guidance from the CCCCs. But in the meantime, Zepbound news.

I started Zepbound in January 2024, and by Thanksgiving 2024, I had lost a total of about 38 pounds. As of thi past Thanksgiving, I have lost a total of about 43 pounds, give or take. This is the thing about Zepbound and all of these drugs, I think: I lost as much weight as I did in the first year or so because I simply was not as hungry, and when I ate a meal, I did not eat as much. This is still all true, but I’ve obviously plateaued a bit. It’s certainly better to still be losing at least a little weight rather than gaining it back.

All of which is to say that this stuff has worked great for me, but only up to a point. I’d like to lose about another 20 or so pounds, but to do that, I’m actually going to have to try.

Anyway, in Zepbound and similar drug news:

  • Since the last time I blogged about Zepbound, I’ve been to the doctor for my annual physical. All of my various numbers and measures for things continue to improve, which is good, obviously. The main reason I wanted to do these drugs is to avoid becoming diabetic, and that mission seems accomplished, at least for now. I would like to lose more weight, but I’m not sure it would make me a lot “healthier,” if that makes sense.
  • In the “what’s it like” to be on these drugs genre of essays and articles, I liked this one from Kara Baskin at the Boston Globe, “Zepbound, six months in. The good, the bad, the awkward.” (I accessed it via archive.is) We’re quite different people– Baskin is a 5-foot-1 woman who was about 30 pounds overweight– but with similar not great health issues related to being fat and an interest in addressing that. It’s a good read, and I can relate to a lot of it. “Dining out requires strategy,” she writes, and then tells a story about how she and her husband were celebrating something with an elaborate out to yeat experience, she went all out, and then puked it all up an hour later. I haven’t had that experience, but if I’m going to eat out at a restaurant, I have to plan my day around it, like eating a small lunch if I’m going out for a big fancy steak dinner or something. Like Baskin, “I sure do miss that wild abandon,” because I kinda liked pigging out once in a while. Of course, that’s probably why I needed to go on these drugs in the first place.
  • One thing I have not experienced that Baskin says she has is any sense of guilt or judgement from others because I’m on these drugs. No doubt a lot of that is heavily gendered, but I also think it’s becoming more “acceptable,” for lack of a better word for it. About a year and a half ago, KFF published a poll that said (among many other things) that 12% of adults in the US have tried a GLP-1 type drug, and about 6% are on these drugs right now. Also (and not surprisingly) the percentage of people on these drugs who have been told by a doctor they have health risks because of weight is a lot higher than that.
  • Lots more famous people are on these drugs and have told their stories– Serena Williams made some news about these meds and now she’s a spokesperson for ro. I think that has also had a way of destigmatizing these drugs as well.
  • The Trump administration rolled out a deal with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to reduce prices and the like, though it’s probably still too early if it’s made a difference– or, given this administration, if it’s even a real thing. Oh, BTW, do you remember that press conference in the Oval Office where the guy fainted and where there was a photo of Trump just standing there looking like a zombie? That was about this deal.
  • These companies are getting crazy rich. Novo Nordisk (the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy) has turned Denmark into what Planet Money last year called a “Pharmastate.” Among other fun facts: “Nearly 1 out of every 5 Danish jobs created last year was at Novo,” and if you include the indirect jobs (suppliers, businesses like restaurants where Novo workers eat, etc.), it’s closer to half. And Eli Lilly (the maker of Zepbound) is the first corporation in health care to have a trillion dollar market value. Obviously, the downside of that for users is these drugs are super expensive. I’m cautiously optimistic that my insurance will keep covering it (though a lot of insurers are dropping it) and/or the prices will come down soon.
  • The other thing I’m optimistic about is the new drugs that are coming along. For one thing, the pill form of these drugs is almost here– supposedly. The Oprah Daily was very excited that these pills were “Almost Here” at the beginning of December 2025, but I’ve been reading about the pills arriving on the market any day now for about a year, so…. The other big news is that Eli Lilly said that retatrutide, their “next-generation (of) obesity and diabetes medication” is even more effective than Zepbound and it also reduces knee pain, and that includes patients who are not obese.

Anyway, still on the Zepbound, losing a little at a time….

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Remembering Marcel Cornis-Pop(e)

A couple of weeks ago, I learned that Marcel Cornis-Pop passed away at the age of 79. I had heard a while before this that he had been ill for some time.

Marcel, who often spelled his last name Cornis-Pope, I think because that’s closer to how it was pronounced in Romanian, was a long-time faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University who came to VCU in 1988, the same year I began work on my MFA in fiction writing. Back in the day, he was quite the influence and mentor.

Our paths actually overlapped before VCU, sort of. Marcel, along with his wife (I believe his children were born in the U.S.), came to America from Romania, first to the University of Northern Iowa in my hometown of Cedar Falls. I have a good friend who took a class or two from him while he was at UNI on Fulbright Scholar appointment. At the time, Romania was a Soviet satellite and one of the most repressive and brutal regimes in the Eastern Bloc, led by Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena. I don’t know if Marcel was ever imprisoned or threatened per se, but I do remember him talking about how he was involved in the underground publishing and distribution of books published by famous American authors. So I was always under the impression that, really, he had to leave Romania.

Marcel was my introduction to critical theory, I believe in my first semester at VCU. I don’t remember a lot of the details, but there are two things about that seminar that stand out for me still. First, Marcel was not all that interested in “covering” every theory and topic he had on his syllabus if the natural progression of the course took things in a different direction. Someone told me (it might have been my friend at UNI) that they had a class with him where Marcel and his students abandoned most of the planned readings and spent the entire semester analyzing the Henry James short story/novella “The Figure in the Carpet.” Second, the one school of thought/critical theory that he was not at all interested in teaching or entertaining in any serious way (at least way back when) was Marxism, probably for obvious reasons.

As an undergraduate English major at the University of Iowa in the mid-1980s, I had no direct exposure to literary/critical theory in any of my classes. I think that was fairly common then. I knew a couple of different people from Iowa who went off to PhD programs in English after undergrad and then bailed out early when they figured out that at the graduate level, it was no longer about reading and “appreciating” literature. I found the theory all quite fascinating, in no small part because of how Marcel introduced it to his students.

I took an independent study with Marcel, I think in my second year. I remember meeting with him about what this independent study would be about. I suggested a couple of different authors he rejected, and then I mentioned that I had read Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as an undergraduate, and I think I had also by that point read V. on my own. That piqued his interest. I said, “I am kind of interested to try to read Gravity’s Rainbow,” but…” and before I could even get out the rest of my sentence, that Gravity’s Rainbow might be way too much of a project to take on, Marcel said, “That, do that. I’ll do an independent study with you about Gravity’s Rainbow.”

That was the most intense self-study experience in close reading that I have ever had. For those unfamiliar: Gravity’s Rainbow is a 760-page novel that is perhaps best compared to books like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in that the complexity of it all is intentionally baffling. Sometimes it would take me a couple of days to read five or six pages of it, and without the help of the excellent book by Steven Weisenburger, A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel, I’m not sure I would have made it through. So an intense reading experience, and I did finish the book, though I don’t know if I could tell you now anything about what it was “about.” As I recall, I wrote an essay that focused on the trajectory of the V2 rocket; the book begins with the line “A screaming comes across the sky,” and it ends on the last page in a section called “Descent,” where “it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death.”

Mostly though, I remember Marcel for various pieces of advice about academia at the time. I asked him his thoughts on whether or not I should go into a PhD program and what kind of program, something more like literary studies, or something like this new thing I was exposed to at VCU called “composition and rhetoric.” The main thing he advised, something I tell students now when they ask about graduate school, is to go as quickly as possible because there is no point in being a graduate student any longer than necessary. I perhaps took that to an extreme in my PhD (I finished in 3 years), but I still think he was right about that.

Marcel went on to a long and illustrious career at VCU: he was chair of the department in the early 2000s, was one of the founders of a PhD program in Media, Art, and Text, and I believe at one point he was a dean as well. I never thought about it when I knew him way back when (our paths crossed a couple of times after I left Richmond in 1993, at the MLA convention and only briefly), but he too was more or less at the beginning of his academic career in the US when we met.

Rest in peace, old friend.