[Iimage: 2020 tweet by Laura LeeLun: "Why has no one written a 'Christmas' rom-com about a lonely Jewish widow and the Chinese restaurant owner who serves her every year but is too shy to reveal his feelings?"]
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A SHORT FILM BY LAURA LEELUN & SHARI ALBERT DONATE After 40 years of patronage, a spicy New York Jewish widow and the tightly wound Chin
That just goes to a donate page, so I assumed it hadn't started yet, but I did some looking around and it turns out the film has been made and is being shown at festivals! I don't see anywhere to watch the full thing (someone please comment if you know) but I did find a trailer:
Hey! Looks like this is still being shown in random film festivals, keep an eye out and you might get lucky. their page says it’s upcoming in NY, Pennsylvania, Denver, and more
Having Windu as your favourite Jedi is NOT for the week, so few focused books, tragic death, mischaractersation central, his ex padawan appears for one minute in a bad batch episode then gets murdered, Mr Star Wars wants me DEAD with the trauma i'm going through.
The Epstein files are not just about pedophilia. Trafficking children for sexual abuse is deeply heinous, so it makes sense that it's captured our attention. But pedophilia is not the point.
The point is that we live with a global network of elites who have enough power to treat politics, laws, public opinion, international treaties, and all other people as personal assets.
The point is that nobody is truly safe or sovereign when a handful of rich assholes have access to this kind of power.
The point is that Epstein being dead and Maxwell being in jail does nothing at all to alter the power structure.
gender essentialism is soooo funny bc it's like "this is what women are like" and you're like "I've met women and many of them, if not the majority, have not been like that" and it's like "well women SHOULD be like that" and you're like "why should women be like that" and its like "because that's what women are like"
All my homies love Mace Windu, nobody could ever convince me to hate Mace Windu, coolest Jedi out there, Mace Windu please come save me from this fandom
Incredibly violent take of mine but I actually don’t think you need to relate to a story in any way to enjoy it. You can enjoy a story even if you can’t point at a character and insert some aspect of your personality or identity into them. In fact I would argue the need for a character like that to be present in every single story you experience is a sign of stunted growth.
Let’s be real guys absolutely fucking no body would hate Fox for killing Fives. If anything Rex would apologize to Fox for one of his men going crazy and taking hostages and almost firing on Fox and his men.
This goes TWICE for anyone hating Fox for "hunting" Ahsoka during the Wrong Jedi arc, by the way. It's not even Fox who actually ends up catching her and bringing her in, it's WOLFFE, but somehow Fox gets all the hate (even though Rex is also involved in trying to "hunt" her down and it's Fox's men who were attacked and killed).
Codywan slowburn fic where their biggest obstacle is NOT the Jedi Code. Their biggest obstacle is NOT the power dynamic and that they work together.
Their biggest obstacle is that Cody gives mixed signals because on one hand, he is really into Obi-Wan. On the other, he does NOT want to be Anakin’s pseudo step-father.
The Ivy League institution needs to address its grade inflation problem.
It’s time for Harvard students to say goodbye to their straight-A’s.
On Friday, a committee of faculty advised the school to adopt a 20% cap on A’s to beat back grade inflation — a stark reduction from the 66% of A’s that were awarded last school year.
Students are predictably having a meltdown, with one claiming the move would mean “life wouldn’t be worth that much to live.” But the proposal would restore meaning and meritocracy to the grading system of the nation’s premier university.
The 19-page report from the Subcommittee on Grading of the Undergraduate Educational Policy Committee expressed concern that the current inflated grading system doesn’t differentiate students and suggested that an A should represent “extraordinary distinction.”
The committee wrote that their recommendations for next school year “are intended to restore grades to their role as meaningful indicators of student performance and feedback, and to support the central academic mission of Harvard College: teaching and learning.” The proposal will come to a full faculty vote ahead of the next school year.
The report shows that the proportion of A’s has exploded quickly. In the 2012-2013 academic year, just 35% of grades awarded were A’s, compared with 66% in 2024-2025.
Aside from a sharp spike during Covid lockdowns, the proportion of A’s has increased at a steady rate. Seventy-three percent of classes now have an A median grade and 95 percent an A- median, according to the Harvard Crimson.
In addition to a 20% cap on A’s, the committee also suggested the university adopt an average percentile rank metric to determine university honors.
Grades are so inflated and so many students near a 4.0 GPA, the report said, that the cut-off for summa cum laude distinction sometimes requires parsing out GPAs to the fifth decimal place.
The move follows an October report by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, sent to faculty and students, that called for the restoration of “the integrity of our grading system” and “the academic culture of… the recent past.”
Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist and Harvard professor of 23 years, expressed support for the proposal on X, writing “It’s a collective action problem (every professor has an incentive to inflate even while recognizing it’s bad when everyone does it). Voluntary guidances … are thus useless; only a college wide policy can work.”
He noted that, while his large intro class is still harder than the average at Harvard, the proportion of A and A- grades he has awarded over his career increased from 25% to 65% “so as not to drive away students.”
As a recent student at NYU and Columbia, I know he’s not wrong. High-achieving kids do swap notes on which professors are harder or easier. RateMyProfessor.com, which has been around since 1999, was a go-to for anonymous gossip from former students.
It’s not that kids are necessarily lazy. They just know that, in an inflated grade system, they need to stay competitive with other students who are also seeking out the clearest route to a 4.0 GPA to impress graduate schools or employers.
It’s a predicament that prevents students from challenging themselves for fear of a GPA hit — and professors from challenging them for fear of an enrollment decline.
Of course, current Harvard students aren’t on board. The Harvard Crimson spoke to two dozen students who “overwhelmingly urged faculty to reject the proposal.”
“You accept a bunch of top 3% students in the country and then get surprised that we’re getting all As,” one student said, as though Harvard shouldn’t be harder or more competitive than high school.
The same student had a remarkably consumerist view of college: “We pay to go here to get the product, which is to have a better signal of performance. If you’re just lowering that for everyone, then you’re just lowering the value you provide as a business for the same cost, even while raising tuition year over year.”
But you’re not paying for a gold star, you’re paying for a rigorous education, right?
Another student seemed to think college is more about making connections than learning. “It misses the point of college, which is to network, go out there, have fun,” they said. “It would create so much pressure where life wouldn’t be worth that much to live.”
The melodrama is ridiculous, but the sentiment is important: Gen Z students have been conditioned to expect laudation by professors and a down-hill battle in the classroom — even at Harvard.
The university should take up this resolution, for the sake of the institution’s reputation and the next generation’s educational integrity.
I was going to initially make this about how you should get an A if you earn the A and arbitrarily restricting the number of As available is inevitably going to punish students who genuinely perform well.
But then I saw the way the journalist responded to the students near the end. Did any of these people know they were going to have this guy was going to use everything they said as strawmen to knock down? That they'd be nitpicked and snarked at to make their concerns all come off as ridiculous whining?
I would be more inclined to take the article in good faith if the writer had extended that courtesy to the people they interviewed.
I can't get behind any system that grades students against each other. They should be graded on how well they understand the material. There is such a thing as too generous of grading but grading on a curve -- which this is, just dressed up -- isn't the solution, because it punishes good students who are stuck in classes with REALLY good students, and unfairly inflates the grades of mediocre students that are only being compared to other mediocre students. And learning the material, which ought to be the focus, is left by the wayside
I had an English lit class in high school that was graded on a curve. The result of this was that I got straight As and one other student got one B- and everyone else got Cs. Why? Because I got the material better than any of them. But that was because I'd been sitting in on college level English lit classes for fun for almost 5 years at that point. This isn't me being arrogant when I say that what was happening here was the teacher punishing these freshmen in high school for not getting it the same way a college student was getting it. Like. That's insane that he thought that was okay. This was years ago so I don't KNOW but I'm sure most of the kids in that class were at a perfectly reasonable level for high school freshmen, but were unreasonably punished because they happened to be sitting at the same table as Classics Georg. Do we think this incentivized them to learn? And do we think that being told I was the best and smartest compared to everyone else was good for me? This is also the time I stopped sitting in on those college classes and pushing myself to learn more and more on my own in my own time.
Anyway. Whenever you start pitting students' grades against each other it's a sure sign you've lost the plot, and you don't care for the students' education.
to dip my toe into a conversation where i was not asked:
The article isn't proposing a curve, per se: it's positing that the grade average for most classes should be below an A-. Certainly, one student could drastically distort the range of possible scores, but 66% of the class scoring above an A? That reflects either that A) your course is too easy for the level it's assigned (and may not adequately prepare students for further coursework or the field they're entering), or B) you have an exceptionally high-scoring group of students. One semester of 66% As is interesting. Multiple semesters of 66% As is now statistically significant.
I see the point of the student saying, "You accepted high-achieving high schoolers, so be prepared to see high-scoring college students", but if that's the metric, then the system of grading should reflect the supposed rigor. It is appropriate to see a distribution of scores between 60 - 100 : not a cluster all at the top.
Is education a process of training (complete task to succeed) or a process of developing habits and methods (integrate and synthesize information)?
No, it is a curve, it's just that instead of pushing everyone down the same amount, one smart student is potentially capping everyone else at a 90% grade, which is not better. IDK how Harvard does it, but in my college courses most of the high level courses were no more than ten students, often fewer. This still puts the scores of every other student in the hands of the smartest one. Every other student who is probably doing A-level work. You don't understand the concerns of the student who said they accept high-scoring high schoolers and should be prepared to see high-scoring college students. You don't understand any of this. You are treating the "supposed rigor" as a metric designed to ensure that most students fail. In your tags you complain about people being unwilling to accept less than perfect, but that's because our culture doesn't accept less than perfect. A B is as good as a failing grade to most of the world. It can and will prevent you from getting a job, or pursuing a PhD.
And, more importantly, there is an objective scale that can be used to analyze the degree to which the students understand the material and THAT and NOTHING ELSE is what the students should be graded on. And if 100% of students are getting in the top 90% of the scale? That doesn't mean you move the goalposts. That's abuser rhetoric. It really means you're a good teacher and you have good students.
People like you, and the writer of the article, are a certain type of person who, not to be rude, love bring the whole world down with them. Never willing to accept that maybe people actually are doing good, never willing to let one person succeed without ensuring that everyone else fails, never willing to see a good thing and just accept it.
And do you know what this leads to in the real world? When I was a head cashier, one of my duties was to provide coachings to the other cashiers. This was mandatory. Every shift, I had to pick another cashier, sit them down, talk to them about what they were doing well and what they could improve on, and then I had to write out a report of that coaching and submit it to corporate. The thing is, the report had to include a section where I mentioned something they were doing wrong. What's wrong with this? Well, I had good cashiers. I had a strong team and all of them did everything right, they even advertised the stupid store credit card, so when I filled these reports out, I had to make up a problem where one didn't exist. Me, one day, I coached this guy, one of our best cashiers, sat down to write my report, and picked, pretty much at random, that he hadn't advertised the credit card as my mandatory thing he did wrong. Didn't think anything of it, until two days later when he was fired. When he lost his job, his source of income, his means of supporting himself, because by bad luck, another head cashier had used the same story when she had coached him the previous week.
So I'm gonna be honest, I don't give a damn if this "hits close to home" for you or whatever. It's more important that we live in a world where people stop suffering because the people who were supposed to evaluate them were forced to lie about their performance and paint them as doing a bad job when they're not. Sometimes, everyone actually is doing everything right, and it's you who needs to learn to accept that.
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