Nick Seaver @npseaver Twitter profile

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

1 year

we did it folks, I’m @nickseaver .website on the other place (ty @hypervisible )

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

forget STEM, now I’m all about STEAMED HAMS: science, technology, engineering, art, math, humanities, anthropology, music, and such

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

7 years

Good news, academic tweeters: with all these characters you can go back to saying “ways in which” instead of “how”

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

hey, you think we ought to pick a different name? you sure? okay, if you say so man

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

omg omg

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

can you imagine offering an online course and discovering after it completed that literal shakira was one of your students??

Shakira

@shakira

4 years

I just graduated from my 4 week Ancient Philosophy course with the University of Pennsylvania ( @Penn ). I know... my hobbies are very impractical, but it took a lot of hours after the kids were asleep. Thank you Plato and predecessors for all the "fun" over the past month!

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

6 years

When I started my DISSERTATION on helping ROBOTS to DIGEST and ENJOY the INTESTINES of HUMAN CHILDREN, I never thought my research would be co-opted by VILLAINS!

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

1 year

it’s here!!

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

I forgot the ED, those can be whatever you want, ethics and design, education and dance, idk

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

container store just bandying about some pretty serious ontological claims here

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

I’m not going to share my SoundCloud, just remember that STEM is a garbage concept designed to defund the humanities

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

I think this is a Talking Heads song?

Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

We've got a cover, and a set of really lovely blurbs from some of my favorite people! Pre-order here:

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

peer reviewing is very useful for remembering that your personal standards are unnecessarily high, and you should just send your shit out for review

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

This TikTok is extraordinary

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

too much teaching advice is for people with infinite time and energy, someone should make "how to teach good when you're tired all the time"

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

some people say that you shouldn't read academic talks, but when I went off-script today I ended up describing early modern information overload as "being horny for the library"

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

Are there people out there who actually understand the organizational scheme of Google Docs? It can't be the case that everyone randomly clicks around until they spot the shared thing they're looking for, right?

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

I am going to get so many emails

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

A student gave me a thank you card that included a little gallery of drawings that I'd made on the board this term! 😭

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

6 years

Hey folks, here's a post-print of my article "Captivating Algorithms: Recommender Systems as Traps," due out next year in the Journal of Material Culture:

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

Proper house style for spelling theorist names as adjectives (my house): Bourdieusian Deleuzean Foucauldian Harawavian Baradly Fanonful Adornable Butlerite Appadurous

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

You can do science without "STEM"! People have done it that way for a long time! The only reason to fund "STEM" instead of "education" is because you don't want to fund the humanities, thank you for coming to my TED talk

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

I'm thrilled to announce

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

7 years

Hey everyone, I've got a new article out: "Algorithms as Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems" (It's a theory/tricks of the trade piece, which I hope will be especially useful for grad students starting research projects.)

Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems - Nick Seaver, 2017

This article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term “algorithm.” Where some have suggested that critical sc...

journals.sagepub.com

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

writing up grant proposals like the future exists lol

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

data science can have little a ethics, as a treat

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

my favorite thing about mathematicians is how they have explanations of their research that launch you from grade-school math into space, like "you know how lines sometimes cross? and three lines might cross at the same point? I study how that happens in infinity dimensions"

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

tfw an anthropologist sees a sociologist

Adia Benton

@Ethnography911

4 years

@HJHaldanePhD @npseaver and it's a little like...

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

Boston, no!

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

I've decided that my new weird academic writing affectation will be to replace all instances of "zeitgeist" with "time ghost"

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

all my zoom transcripts start like this

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

@tealtan Okay, on thinking about this for like two seconds I guess it makes sense, but still, witchery

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

had to pull together a list of "please don't put these on my book cover" tropes, hope I didn't miss something important

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

It finally exists! This chapter began its life as a term paper for Geof Bowker's Social Analysis of Computing course in... 2012. You may know it as "that paper that gets cited as a conference presentation and has mostly been a PDF on Nick's website."

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

1 year

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

you know that if we had twitter and a pandemic in 1984, Bruno Latour would have been on here with an 80-tweet thread about how viruses didn't really exist until we "discovered" them

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

6 years

Finally sharing the syllabus for this year's iteration of my anthro seminar, "How to Pay Attention": This is one of my favorite things I've gotten to do since becoming a professor, and I'm lucky to have the students and institution to be able to do it!

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

6 years

This is horrifying. Companies trying to divest themselves of responsibility for training their employees and then pretending it's universities that aren't doing their job???

WIRED

@WIRED

6 years

Academia's inability to keep up with the demands and norms of a 21st century workplace has employers in and out of tech saying 'screw it, we'll teach 'em ourselves.'

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

*constantly refreshing the bad news machine* fuck, bad news

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

oooh, 🔥🔥🔥: "Infrastructures of abstraction: how computer science education produces anti-political subjects" (Argues that while CS practices of abstraction look like potential bridges across disciplines, in practice, they block critical projects.)

Infrastructures of abstraction: how computer science education produces anti-political subjects

Abstraction, defined in Computer Science (CS) as bracketing unnecessary information from diverse components within a system, serves as a central epistemological axis in CS disciplinary and pedagogi...

www.tandfonline.com

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

I don’t understand how all of you are still listening to podcasts when we don’t have commutes anymore

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

1 year

hey, it's my official pub date! and the other bad website is doing its thing, letting me know that I'm #1 in "music appreciation," which is definitely what the book is about

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

reminiscing about in-person teaching, found this in my camera roll

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

7 years

Made a couple end-of-term playlists.

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

making a difference

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

feeling for Jill Biden, I would not want anyone to read my dissertation either

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

💀

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

lol the guy emailing the whole membership of the American Anthropological Association to warn us that BLM is “an avowed Marxist organization” may have a bad understanding of the political leanings of the average anthropologist

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

capital will not rest until everything has been milked

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

do people really think we were going to still be playing wordle in a year? seems like man successfully fleeced the NYT with some very lucky timing

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

I still can't get over the fact that my professional association's job board header image looks like their logo running people down

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

@dee_bee_h As a person of scholar,

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

omg

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

okay the wayback machine for fancy university websites is incredible

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

these folks are lucky that bean dad is the main character on twitter today instead of them

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

Hey, my article on recommender systems and traps is actually out now!

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

kudos to whoever designed the zoom direct message UX for digitally replicating that risky feeling of whispering in an in-person meeting

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

Extremely noticeable drop-off in student morale this week, as the weather gets colder, midterms get started, and the election looms. Check on your students, folks.

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

@ibogost

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 months

it's here! the syllabus for my new class, "Technologies of Enchantment," featuring fishing weirs, slot machines, fake houses for mosquitos, multi-level marketing, and phishing scams:

2024-TOE-syllabus.pdf

Shared with Dropbox

www.dropbox.com

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

hmm if only there were a word that meant the opposite of "stop"

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

6 years

REVISIONS, IN COFFEE SHOP ME: alright, that's enough Twitter, let's open this file BODY: Are we a little hungry? ME: No BODY: Thirsty? ME: *gets water* alright time to wri– BODY: I have to pee ONE HOUR LATER ME: alright, that's enough Twitter let's– BODY: I have to pee again

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

thanks for coming to my daughter's MFA thesis show

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

I've discovered my generic anthro article structure:

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

6 years

One of the best things I've implemented in my classes (yanked from somewhere I don't remember) is to have students submit a ~250 word cover letter with their final papers, written informally, about their experience writing, what they learned, and what they most want comments on.

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

If you thought professors had basically no training in how to teach and just emulate their own educations, wait until you see them try to design online courses from scratch

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

Terrible timing, but if you're having a very exciting Friday night and have institutional access, my new article is online!: Everything Lies in a Space: Cultural Data and Spatial Reality

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

My daughter’s idiosyncratic halloween decorations do manage to capture the autumnal vibe

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

7 years

for ppl who found our family The Shining costume too obscure, last year we were a Nobel-winning corn geneticist and two generations of corn:

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

6 years

Ryerson University can no longer use student evaluations in tenure and promotion cases: Hope this sets a precedent.

Arbitration decision on student evaluations of teaching applauded by faculty — University Affairs

Such evaluations can’t be used for tenure and promotion decisions, arbitrator rules in case involving Ryerson University.

universityaffairs.ca

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

WHAT IS A POD

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

Asking for a student: anyone have favorite references on the history of efficiency as a value? (In the “west”, in tech, whatever you got!) I feel like there’s some obvious canonical thing I’m forgetting.

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

oh man, getting vax shot #1 in a hotel ballroom is the most contact with other people I've had in over a year, and I have evidently become a feral animal

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

6 years

Aw, he can write his name

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

I don't want to think about how many likes ago that steamed hams tweet passed the total number of people who will ever read anything I write in an academic venue

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

Anyone got good tips for how to manage a huge pile of academic “to read?” links that you can’t stand to go through because it fills you with dread?

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

🚨 new publication alert 🚨 I co-authored this annual review essay on the anthropology of attention with Morten Axel Pedersen and @Krisalbris , in which we try to draw out the disciplines’s longstanding, mostly tacit interest in attention:

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

taking a break to read some tweets

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

This term I finally got to assign this paper I've fantasized about for years to a whole class of anthro theory students, where they pick a figure and trace it through the semester's readings. Very fun to read (and "blood" was the most popular by a long shot).

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

"successfully" tested my zoom setup for lecture, and I need some kind of plugin that lets me play the curb your enthusiasm music on demand

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

oh my god they redid their mission statement and, well, folks

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

I really have no use for a grammar checker, EXCEPT that I would love it if my word processor called out repeated words, like "you know you used that adverb in the last sentence too" or "that five-dollar noun also appears a couple paragraphs up, shakespeare"

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

1 year

oh wow, having students make research proposals instead of term papers as final assignments is great

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

Sometimes, course design feels like having to design a board game from scratch without any trial runs before you make people play it for real.

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

got the coveted Pinker block (I think by liking the tweet where ⁦ @lastpositivist ⁩ just said "Pinker" and "Epstein" in the same message)

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

@Ethnography911 "Why don't we just call it education" wow, good point

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

guys, I found it!

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

Oh right, there's the definition of "culture" I actually like, from Marilyn Strathern:

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

6 years

always taken aback by how insistent technologists are in framing any ethical debate in terms of a near future where all of their designs are powerful and successful

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

2 years

@jathansadowski I agree with Seaver 2022 on this:

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

revising my shitposts

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

Gmail lets you snooze messages until December 31, 2999 (it’s a Tuesday)

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

because we're more or less giving up on Halloween costumes this year, here's one of our best from the archives: corn geneticist Barbara McClintock and two generations of corn

Nick Seaver

@npseaver

7 years

for ppl who found our family The Shining costume too obscure, last year we were a Nobel-winning corn geneticist and two generations of corn:

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

today is @thisischristina ’s and my 10th anniversary! how!

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

5 years

This will be of interest to some of you (particularly those who tend to the "tech should hire social scientists" critique, as this describes how Spotify uses grounded theory to create personas that they describe as boundary objects):

Spotify Design

@spotifydesign

5 years

*New Blog Post* We've just released a new post detailing how we developed our personas tool, how we use it today and why it’s so useful for an autonomous, cross-functional organisation like Spotify. Enjoy 🥳🙌

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

4 years

whenever I dip into cultural sociology, I am repeatedly astonished by the omnipresence of Bourdieu—he's unfathomably central, like it's hard to imagine that any other contemporary discipline has a figure that looms as large as he does

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Nick Seaver

@npseaver

3 years

god bless my poor students tangling with 1990s anthropological theory

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