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siegeweather.bsky.social
I work on medieval Chinese literature, calligraphy, book history, and material culture. PhD in Chinese, UC Berkeley. Professor. Translator. Teacher of Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Go/围棋/바둑 try-hard.
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It would be cool if someone spent their 45 seconds just listing stuff DOGE has nuked over the last two weeks—starting with NIH funded cancer research—because even people who read and watch the news do not know the extent of the cuts. Coverage in legacy has been pathetic given the magnitude.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Last year in NY, I saw the trees in our backyard buck and twist in a way that screamed tornado despite weather service reporting a normal T-storm. Two hours later we learned a tornado had killed a person just down the road. Understaffed service station. Alert was broadcast at moment of impact.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Got an email from our uni president saying in very upbeat coded language that the budget is off the rails and nearly every funding decision will have to be approved by the VP; it feels so much like those two weeks before covid shut everything down where we pretend it was normal but knew they weren't

submitted 5 days ago • 11 comments

The entire business model of American R1 universities is not viable without restoration of federal funding, & every individual institution pretending it can solve this problem alone is also not viable. University presidents need to be speaking out, collectively & loudly about this, in DC, right now.

submitted 9 days ago • 40 comments

North Carolina State University announces a hiring freeze in response to federal funding issues. There it is, another step in the dismantling of higher education, barely making the news (because it’s not happening at Harvard). www.wral.com/news/educati...

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

Lovely confirmation that characters from the Zhuangzi continue to walk the earth

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

What if we built a whole society around mistaking data for information?

submitted 22 days ago • 2 comments

Hi and welcome new followers! We've migrated over from the Other Place. Follow us for announcements of upcoming sessions of the workshop, and other interesting book history news.

submitted 25 days ago • 4 comments

i will say that we have never experienced anything like an administration trying to essentially freeze the activities of the entire federal government while making a series of illegal power grabs. genuinely unclear to me what kind of response, if any, these guys are generating against them

submitted 34 days ago • 1474 comments

I think no person alive more fully embodied what it means to live the life of the mind for me than David Lynch. Thank you for teaching me how to catch the big fish. RIP

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

OK, but Lee is an extreme outlier in this regard. His is a sad story indeed, because the game lost one of the greatest players ever in his prime. But the vast majority of pros adjusted to the initial shock of Alphago and now quite happily use it as a tool for improving their play.

submitted 235 days ago • 1 comment

Getting carted off by security as I explain that I was just trying to pass André 3000 a small anthology of passages I translated for him about flutes, pitch pipes, and early Chinese cosmology.

submitted 80 days ago • 1 comment

Bad day to launch my new literary magazine dedicated to the exegesis of the Zhuangzi, Decivilization.

submitted 81 days ago • 1 comment

Looking for a holiday gift for an art lover? Here's why you might consider my new Van Gogh book: -Written for a general audience -Gorgeous reproductions of Van Gogh works -Offers completely new insights into this iconic artist -Support an inveterate Bluesky poster! yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

submitted 94 days ago • 2 comments

I just want what every man wants, to transform into a cyclone of ravens on Walpurgisnacht as the Wild Hunt drags the unjust to the sea

submitted 87 days ago • 3 comments

What is almost too on the nose about this (newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/comp...) about UCLA using an AI-developed course is they've got the cover of the textbook as their picture and it is full of strange nonsense words.

submitted 84 days ago • 22 comments

Blue Cross Blue Shield in Connecticut, New York and Missouri has declared it will no longer pay for anesthesia for the full length of some surgeries. It the procedure goes over a certain time, anesthesia will not be covered for the duration. www.asahq.org/about-asa/ne...

submitted 89 days ago • 935 comments

Be a flock of goats 群羊聽經 “flock of goats listen to a sutra” from Illustrated Way of Yongming Yanshou (904-975) 永明道跡 Woodblock print carved in early Edo Japan (1655), a reproduction of a late Ming Chinese print made in Hangzhou, 1606.

submitted 96 days ago • 0 comments