The ideal librarian isn’t a gatekeeper. They’re a conversation catalyst—curious, participatory, radically open. They don’t just “give access”; they co-create knowledge with their community.

Pope Francis spoke of the poor not as objects of charity, but as bearers of divine knowledge. May he rest in peace — and may we inherit his refusal to look away.

So where do we go from here? Rebuild the mythic imagination. Teach novels like sacred texts. Let students enter the labyrinth of story. Because inside, there are mirrors. And minotaurs. And meaning.

There's broad agreement that students aren't reading enough literature. I wrote about Ralph Ellison's approach to teaching American fiction just after Brown v Board. Learning from him might help us think about where to go from here. libertiesjournal.com/articles/ell...

Obscurantism isn’t just about hiding facts; it’s about creating a world where questioning becomes too exhausting to bother.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard pulls us back to earth. Her materialism is not one of cold facts, but of an engaged witness to the struggle between beauty and brutality, the sacredness in decay.

The decline of philology begins in the late 19th century, when it splintered into specialized disciplines: linguistics, literary studies, anthropology. Its holistic methodology was seen as imprecise in the emerging positivist academy.

PEN International speaks of freedom, but who will speak of slow decay? Of the forgotten scripts, the orphaned dialects?

When knowledge is framed as a threat, surveillance becomes pedagogy. What’s at stake isn’t one institution—it’s the soul of higher education itself.

Anne Carson’s Nox redefines elegy through fragmentation, lexicon, and palimpsest. It resists closure, memorializing grief as a living, destabilized archive. Few American texts articulate mourning with such epistemological finesse.

We must reject the narrative that libraries are “nice extras.” They are critical infrastructure for democracy, literacy, and justice. Framing them as social infrastructure (à la Eric Klinenberg) gives us leverage to demand proper investment.

"“You don’t get paid enough to meet your basic needs. Your autonomy at work is consistently under threat. People who think that they know better how to do your job are trying to get the power to push you out of your position,” @edrabinski.bsky.social said." 📚 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Mbembe: “Necropolitics is the power to dictate who may live and who must die.”

It really is the final form of capitalism that we wake up every morning to be subjected to the innermost banalities of the world’s wealthiest-ever human being. Never before in human history have so many had to look at so little.

China rewards discipline and strategic investment. The U.S. rewards quarterly profits, dopamine hits, and clickbait.

As a citizen of an imperial nation, that, with Brexit, had its own unforced implosion: I think the thing that will hurt Americans most in the end isn’t the mockery, it’s the indifference as people move on from you. “We are the world’s laughing stock!” “No. They’re not even thinking about us.”

They’ve made distraction the opiate, and called it “news.” Meanwhile, they extract the marrow of the planet, quietly, efficiently. This is not incompetence. It’s choreography.

You don’t need censorship when saturation works better. The 24/7 feed on one corrupt regime drowns everything else. The true goal might not be justice, but cover— so they can drill that last seabed, mine the last breath of earth.

Ecology is now an afterthought. Climate collapse gets a sidebar. The real theft isn’t just oil or lithium— It’s attention. And with it, time. Time for the powerful to finish the job in peace.

Distraction isn’t mere confusion—it’s structural sabotage. That’s how power keeps you: sweating in the unnameable.

guess distraction is the point. to get us to the point of not being able to do what we meant to do. paraphrasing toni morrison for times under trump and the global far right.

The fact that this is being perpetrated by the worst students in class—the guys who snicker in the back of the room because they’re too arrogant to recognize their own ignorance—really adds insult to injury. I’ve spent a career training myself to be openhearted with them, as an ethical principle.

Choosing symbolic alliances over strategic ones is a symptom of what policy scholars call the post-policy age: optics over outcomes.

In the past, exposure took whistleblowers. Now it takes code and algorithms. AI will comb the 4chan leak, connecting usernames to Reddit, LinkedIn, Venmo, Steam. Digital masks are paper-thin in 2025.

Sociologists call it climate dissonance: we know the planet’s burning, but we glamorize tech escapes instead of facing our complicity. Emily’s critique isn’t superficial—it’s a call-out of deep cognitive detachment. Read Kari Marie Norgaard.

total clarity here from @edwardluce.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/4c4b...

I wrote a medium blog post about the fact that academia is relevant again.

What haunts this decade is not inflation—it’s institutional cowardice. Public investment is framed as indulgence, while wealth extraction is called innovation. We won’t roar again without redistribution, reparations, and reimagination.

We’ve entered the Ruined 20s: fiscal gaslighting, decaying infrastructure, rentier capitalism in freefall. Central banks dance with inflation, while wage growth is held hostage.

The UK’s leadership in open research is not accidental—it’s built on decades of trust in libraries as epistemic institutions. Academic ethics isn’t an add-on; it’s the operating system. Europe watches, learns, and follows.

The soul of the university was never in the algorithm. It lives in the archive, the poem, the difficult conversation. Courage isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s a department chair saying: “Let’s rebuild.”

Princeton and Harvard hold torches, but the path ahead is collective. Reinvest in the humanities, not as nostalgia, but as necessary infrastructure for psychic and civic renewal. We don’t need saviors. We need stewards.

Ethnic Studies wasn’t born in committee meetings. It began at San Francisco State in 1968, where students launched a 5-month strike — the longest in U.S. academic history. They demanded a School of Ethnic Studies. The university called in riot police.

Harvard’s defense of open inquiry is laudable — but real integrity means standing with the scholars and departments now facing cuts. The soul of a university is not just its endowment, but its willingness to fund complexity, discomfort, and dissent.

It’s not enough to defend free speech in the spotlight while shuttering disciplines in the shadows. Humanities, ethnic studies, and area programs are not luxuries. They are the conscience of the university. Harvard must protect them too.

MIT following Harvard's lead here

Mario Vargas Llosa has passed, leaving behind a mirror that Peru — and all of us — still struggle to face. “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” was not just a question for a country, but for the human condition as well. Rest in Peace.

More importantly anyone who truly loves science will tell you that at it’s highest levels science becomes akin with art in a way that a person who doesn’t understand the humanities will never be able to comprehend leaving us incapable of reaching new scientific heights.

Academia cannot afford to treat the humanities as ornamental. No civilisation ever survived without its storytellers, skeptics, or poets. The archive is not a luxury—it is a lifeline. Without it, even science forgets why it began.

Greek oracles were gatekeepers of wisdom. Today, we call them faculty committees and peer reviewers. Different robes, same riddles. Librarians still guard the temples.

Foundational librarianship was never about neutrality—it was about stewardship of longing. What are catalogues if not divination systems? What is a special collection but a shrine? We believed in gods once. Some of us still do.

A librarian once told me: “We don’t classify truth—we shelve belief.” The Muses are alive in the subject headings. Clio lingers in archives. Calliope wears a barcode. We serve myth in MARC records, without pretending it’s fact.

an early modern man walks out on a fine May morning, on his way to place an order at a goldsmiths. He enters the shop. GS: good morrow sir! EMM: good day! i'd like a wedding ring please. GS: of course sir. gold band do you? and the inscription? 1/

outside: birdsong, sunlight, warmth. inside: me, tracing the folds of Deleuzian multiplicities like a man trying to explain his own haunting. happy sunday.

Progressive politics without the humanities is a ship without a compass. Data can tell you what is, but only history, literature, and critical theory can ask: what should be possible?

The humanities are dangerous not when they’re abstract, but when they start telling the truth with names, bodies, dates, and stories. When anthropology speaks of extraction, and ethnic studies maps empire—it becomes insurgent knowledge.

You don’t attack institutions when they are dead. You attack when they begin to re-symbolize, to gesture toward a new kind of language. Academia had started to murmur again, not in slogans but in poetry. That murmur threatened power.

Culture is being punished for reaching toward ambiguity, nuance, contradiction. The moment it began to resemble life—messy, layered, full of longing—it was declared dangerous. What’s feared is not its weakness, but its rebirth.

Policy is now gestural, affective, not deliberative. The symbolic order flickers. What’s left is improvisation as ideology, and power as performance.