This is the truest truth of any creative career

This better not be the start of an enemies-to-lovers romance between me and ChatGPT.

Kicking off the semester asking important questions. By which I mean that I had a class discuss whether "creating [written] content" is synonymous with "writing."

Hope is fucking hard and you’re being lazy bsky.app/profile/prof...

There needs to be more space for frivolity, especially with every structural force pressing against it.

Saint Paul schools will be closed Tuesday and Wednesday to prepare for optional online learning. I’ve seen schools close for snow, for pandemic, for natural disaster. I’ve never seen schools close because of threat from our own government.

The Rubicon was and indeed remains a small stream in Italy. It’s not a raging river like the Po, Danube or Mississippi. You might not even notice that you’ve crossed it. But you have.

The great @usefulnoise.bsky.social made a request that we all write something about what life in Minnesota is like for folks who live elsewhere or might be outside our normal neighbothis-Bluesky footprint. So I went to cursed Facebook and wrote this. Maybe it will help you share your own thoughts.

This anecdote bothers me for several reasons, irrespective of the Stranger Things connection. I liked the first season but stopped watching watching after the second. The bigger the show got the less I cared because the central premise just seemed unable to sustain such dramatic expansion. 1/

It’s a lawless totalitarian occupation of an American city.

Boston University, where I teach, has embraced AI - but has left it up to instructors to decide whether to use or accept the use of AI in their classes. (I prohibit it) Humanities leaders have organized a symposium - “The AI-Free Classroom.” Happily, the AI folks have co-sponsored it.

I got a lot to say about this study and no time to say it, but any time someone thinks using AI is helping students learn writing it is likely to be the opposite and rooted in a view of what learning writing is like that must be challenged and revised. www.npr.org/2026/01/14/n...

Time for this gem, again: youtu.be/gp5JCrSXkJY?...

First Day Fragments Spring 2026 Some fragmentary thoughts for the first day of class.

Where is the outrage about schools having to close now, due to ICE/CBP attacks (with no end in sight)? No concerns about learning loss? It’s bad to have to close for public health reasons, but not because our society is being ripped apart at the seams, and our government is attacking us?

1. jesus was jewish. i’m having to say that with increasing regularity. 2. the gospels contain a lot of judeophobia. 3. well-meaning christians: don’t tell jews that this arsonist isn’t a real christian. re-claim the tradition like a church father mad at marcion.

Debating whether to refer to this meme in a thing I'm writing about Thucydides.

Every new gambling commercial is more repulsive than the last one.

I chair the acquisitions meeting of @reaktionbooks.bsky.social, an independent publisher. We're open to unsolicited book proposals: history, art, music, film, food, animal studies and any great indefinable non-fiction book ideas you might have. Check out the list and get in touch.

Regarding “The War on Protein,” so much of the dietary advice I’ve read in my adult life has been a variation on this McSweeney’s column from last year. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/you...

They're canceling the "war on protein" and by that they mean soylent green is people.

Weekly Varia no. 164, 01/11/26 New varia post: I avoided getting distracted by a story idea while getting ready for the semester and links about history, teaching, writing, classical reception, AI, and some current events.

still determined to do a podcast called “Reviewer 1,” where i hit up my favorite scholars and do a version of inside the actor’s studio, except about y’all’s work. i want to get in alllll the weeds. and i want to know alll the ways my friends & mentors think about writing as craft.

Inching closer to finding out how many due dates for this semester I failed to change on the LMS site (because I will release the courses and students will spot the inconsistencies).

we’re in the vet’s office waiting room and they just called for Agamemnon. we all looked at the Great Dane but it turns out Agamemnon is an orange kitten in a backpack that makes him look like an astronaut cheese puff

I've been looking for a classroom tool to replace Jamboard since Google sundowned the app. There are several options that could work, except they all require paid subscriptions to allow non-subscribers to contribute and asking students to sign up for a 2x/term activity requires too many steps.

What—and I say this is my most professional professor-of-art-history-voice—the HELL are we doing here? WaPo is committing a fundamental category error. That category error is like gripping the neck of the journalistic integrity in two hands and squeezing it till the lights go out. 1/n

So awful. And the historical continuity sick. Glad no one was hurt and the Torah survived (again).

There are debatable exceptions, but as a historical and theological matter, no, most likely would not. Some Founding Fathers were deists. Some were Quakers. Others were Presbyterians who wrote a lot about religious freedom. And some were, uh, Thomas Paine (here in a later edition of Common Sense):

Seeing my book in the book room = very cool. Doing a conference with a monstrous caffeine-resistant jet lag that had me wide awake at 4 am and a pumpkin by 7 pm every day = very uncool. Great to see so many of you, though! Let’s do this on the East Coast next time.

I'm like Wilson W. Wilson, if every shot of him was obscured by a cat blocking part of his face.

yes! a good number of MAHA-approved products are just repurposed waste from beef production

Historians are often seen as not having methods and theories like *real* disciplines. But this piece is a great demonstration of what we actually believe is necessary to ascribe intention--and the way that even asking for that evidence makes us real bummers, apparently.

The paperback copy of _Strike_ is out and I have an extra 10 copies. If you are a grad student, please message me with your address if you want a free one! 📖

So ultimately academics end up fighting in a stupid sandpit over LLM-confected cheating while the real shit is happening with the data harvested from your canvas courses and the models that data is being used to train (not GenAI!) to annihilate democratic society. It’s a red herring.

GenAI is a window-dressing project. Everyone either oohs and aaaahs at its parlor tricks or its deceptions while healthcare systems, insurance claims, and parole decisions are offloaded to algorithms trained on citizens’ expropriated data.

A Little Friday Pedagogy Talk

A Little Friday Pedagogy Talk

Every so often I have an impulse to get into fountain pens and spend the next week debating whether it would be worth the hassle.

Ironic, given the school motto.

I'll probably never be in a position to supervise graduate theses so peer review is one of the few times to give extremely granular feedback. I take that responsibility seriously.

My very limited take away from the new food "guidelines" is that we don't talk about gout enough.

Across hundreds of cases, intentional VRAs have a "signature." A purposeful approach line toward a person. Commitment to that line. Steering corrections that track a target. Acceleration and follow through. All of these are absent in the videos of the incident I have seen thus far. 5/7

Want to hear me talk about a post apocalyptic future and how a man writing in the 1950s imagined that knowledge gets transmitted? Well, that’s an oddly specific request, but I have JUST the thing for you.

Some have pointed out that the whole letter would have fit in the alt text window, so here is a version with the whole letter in alt text.

As a little celebration of the newest entries into the public domain in the US, I offer this little essay by Willard Waller from volume 4 (1930) of Prairie Schooner. It's an evergreen question: "Should Professors Think?" www.jstor.org/stable/40622...

Minneapolis.

If this happened in a different country the headlines would read “right wing security services murder single mother in broad daylight”

Set out to run an afternoon 5k, felt pretty good and then weather is unseasonably gorgeous so I changed my mind midway and ran my first 10k of 2026.