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johnrgallagher.bsky.social
I use qualitative and computational methods to study writers on the internet. I study how machine learning experts communicate. More generally, I study writing and writers. Associate professor.
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Posts 29 Comments 21

I'm not watching the Trusk feud in any way.

submitted 5 hours ago • 0 comments

One of the most interesting website functions I've seen in the past five years is substack's requote feature. Users highlight a passage and then reshare. I'm genuinely struck by the affordances of this feature.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

19 years of course evals in the books. I've managed to keep all but the very first semester (lost to time somewhere, in a pre-digital age)

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Too many journalistic AI pieces are actually just press releases in which the journalist parrots what managers tell them.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

The lousy, uncritical AI journalism needs to stop. This reporter (Kevin Roose) wrote this: "Another told me that his start-up now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company." I call baloney. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/t...

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

The lousy, uncritical AI journalism needs to stop. This reporter (Kevin Roose) wrote this: "Another told me that his start-up now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company." I call baloney. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/t...

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

There is more plot development in Miss Congeniality than any Mission Impossible movie

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Okay, I would take this class

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

What are your favorite novels about social media? I might teach a class about it for spring 2026

submitted 7 days ago • 9 comments

Total failure

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Great video. "...MIT economist Daron Acemoglu offers a more modest forecast. Drawing from his research, in this brief video he explains why AI might automate only 5% of tasks and add just 1% to global GDP over the next decade." www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zF1...

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

Doing rotors and brake pads tomorrow 🫠

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

People are having a difficult time with the corruption being out in the open and transparent. We are so used to our stories about corruption being secretive.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

How do other people with kids manage to keep their jobs? No afterschool care to be had at any price, minimum days appearing on the calendar arbitrarily, constant conferences and appointments in the middle of the workday. It’s impossible.

submitted 8 days ago • 10 comments

The inefficient code of ChatGPT should really give people a sense of the inefficiency of ChatGPT’s prose.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

I highly recommend this book if you're interested in audiences as well as niche long-tail types of media consumption. nyupress.org/978147983390...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

At Kairos, we have a 7-stage copyediting process, and not one of those stages would benefit from using AI instead of trained copyeditors. As I've been teaching editing courses & brining in AI-as-editor examples and exercises, it's clear that even the best gen AI apps are detrimental to the process.

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

submitted 9 days ago • 81 comments

Inbox: 0 *closes laptop* *set laptop on fire*

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

"We find that speed is correlated with perceived humanness and trustworthiness of the AI tool, as well as the perceived quality of the generated text. We discuss its implications on creative and writing processes, along with future steps in the intentional design of AI writing tool interfaces."

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

"We find that speed is correlated with perceived humanness and trustworthiness of the AI tool, as well as the perceived quality of the generated text. We discuss its implications on creative and writing processes, along with future steps in the intentional design of AI writing tool interfaces."

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

Most of us in higher ed in the US are going to lose something over the next four years (opportunities, or funding, or time). But if we believe universities exist, in part, to preserve historical memory and create a space for dissent, our primary job right now is to fight and take the hit.

submitted 14 days ago • 19 comments

✊🏼

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

One of the best things I read about writing in the times of LLMs.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Grades submitted!

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

I thought narwhals were a fantasy creature until I was 37

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

Reach out after 3 months. If you don’t hear back after two weeks, contact again. Repeat if you don’t hear back. If you don’t hear back after 3 tries, pull your paper and move on.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

A classic song remixed

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

I wrote about audiences, generous mentors & professors, my friend Bill, and my dad. ChatGPT is in there...sort of. My spouse told me this was more of a journal entry than a blog post. Let's prove that wrong. "The audiences that only humans carry" meresophistry.substack.com/p/the-audien...

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment