The booing that's famously happening this year is in response to graduation speakers who attempt to say something encouraging about what A.I. is going to do to the career they may still hope to pull off.
June 5, 2026
"That eyebrow pierce.... You’ll have trouble getting the barbell out and eventually someone will have to use tiny pliers to cut it out of your face."
Said Molly Jong-Fast, speaking at the Bennington graduation and, later, quoting herself in a NYT essay titled "It’s No Wonder Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers."
Posts
30 comments:
If a nose ring isn't enough of a signal that you are absolutely crazy add in an eye brow bar or two and watch the men scramble to get away from you.
Conspicuous tats are also a pretty good sign to stay far away.
Job skills are like animal species. The more specialized they are, the more likely they are to go extinct. The successful grads, like successful species, are the ones that can adapt to new habitats.
I was saying Booo-urns
Apparently college students have been trained well - to shut down when presented with something they don't agree with. And journalists have been trained well - to "report" on what they want you to think is the problem although it isn't actually the problem. (And although it's not part of this story, it's all of a piece to point out that Democrats have been trained well - to pretend introspection, tolerance, solution-orientation when they are not actually doing any of those things.)
Is it the same for the titty barbells?
Asking for a friend...lol.
So, did they turn on her, too?
"Eyebrow pierces? What about AI and affordable homes and climate change???"
The main point of the commencement speech that I will never be asked to asked to give is “in a world of large language models be a small language model.” It’s essentially a more or less type speech.
I’m still highly confident the fright that humans will be ‘Jetsoned’ out of work is fostered by failure to learn from historic periods of innovation. As always technology will be disruptive to certain jobs but will create opportunities that didn’t previously exist. Automobile, refrigerator, personal computer, internet…pick a disruptive technology. All the same…
…they teach economics at Bennington but they refer to it as ‘political economics’ kind- inequality, climate change, racism- you know, Paul Krugman NYT economics, not smart people normal economics…
I bet they wear socks with sandals…
Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” and his X feed are the antidotes to the AI panic. Required reading.
With “barbell” brow piercings, doesn’t one end of the bar have tiny threading that screws into one of the bells so it can be removed?
Pliers don't cut. Does she mean diagonal cutters?
---- a world where I often felt like an impostor
Hmm. Yes. Weren't we blog readers treated to a bunch more of Ms. Not-Erica-Jong's dubious musings just recently? Why? And why more? Speaking as one of those readers, I found her prior entry here pointless, and this one too.
#LookAtMe, hater.
@ Wince
I think so, but I expect, like any threads, they're subject to corrosion and can get locked up if you don't use them for a while. The face is probably a harsh environment for very fine threads.
A mad hater (sic) with a handmade tail (sic). #RebelsWithACase
“The booing that's famously happening this year is in response to graduation speakers who attempt to say something encouraging about what A.I. is going to do to the career they may still hope to pull off.”
A.I. is watching this and thinking, “These humans are going to be pushovers.”
1956: "What do you want to be in life, Johnny?"
"An astronaut!"
2026: "What do you want to be in life, Johnny?"
"I need to creatively engineer my human output so that I am never mistaken for being AI bot. 'Want' has nothing to do with it."
Anthropogenic Intelligence (AI) #NoJudgment #NoLabels #Whatever
Did these kids find a tough job market this spring? That would be consistent with the other data suggesting the accoutrements of supply/demand that favored new and recent grads for so long has swung out of their favor…
“Pliers don't cut. Does she mean diagonal cutters?”
Given the level of intelligence on display at this event, they probably will remove them with pliers.
"Did these kids find a tough job market this spring?"
Saw a headline yesterday that the number of job openings is high. Though maybe not in fields these people studied for.
Pliers would work if you just yank hard.
“Pliers don't cut. Does she mean diagonal cutters?”
Isn't that why they booed her?
Pliers may be designed or amended with a cutting insert to severe the wire, so to speak. A social transition in progress with a liberal license.
She said "pliers" because the slang term for diagonal cutters is "dikes".
…no grads at Bennington know how to use hand tools, except maybe the crafty artists…
I didn't read the book, but apparently she wrote a Mommy Dearest book about her mother, Erica Jong. I don't follow Molly that closely, but she does seem like a block off the old chippie.......Apparently she's one of the neo-Luddites. This isn't the first technological advance in history, but it's the first technological advances that affects people who write about technological advances. Remember when Thatcher closed down coal mines that were economically unsound.. That was a crime. But closing down coal mines because coal is environmentally unsound is a pious act that will win you a place in heaven.......If AI cures cancer but causes disruptions in the job market for Bennington grads, can it really be worth it.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 4 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.