Robert Pondisco of the American Enterprise Institute responded to a query on Twitter/X yesterday on the question of why academic writing is so awful. His pithy answer: The opacity of academic prose arises from the epistemological imperative to operationalize disciplinary jargon, facilitating intra-specialized discourse while obfuscating heterogenous interpretive accessibility and perpetuating a recursive dialectic of erudition and exclusion. Yup, that pretty much nails it. My young philosopher pal Spencer Case got the wise idea in his head to ask ChatGPT to render the Gettysburg Address as written by postmodern/radical feminist icon Judith Butler, and this is the result: In a...