This is so cringe. You can’t have ✨debate & discourse✨ with bad faith ghouls. Rufo is an astroturfed “intellectual” troll who was willed into existence by RW $$$ & liberal naivety. He has openly bragged that he uses outlets like NYT to prestige launder culture war agitprop for normie audiences FFS!

Tomorrow’s #literacies chat Play and Interaction in Literacy Learning will take place on 6/30 at 8-9:00pm EST/ 6:00-7:00pm PST!. Join us!

I’m pretty sure @writinglit.bsky.social folks are going to want to check this out! There are quite a few books coming out of literary studies exploring similar terrain to #literacies scholars—albeit from a slightly different vantage point. @karismjones.bsky.social @sarahejerasa.bsky.social

"[A] sharp and welcome rebuttal to the fatalistic 'end of literature' narrative. WE THE PLATFORM maps the complex convergence of legacy publishing and platform capitalism" - Rita Raley WE THE PLATFORM by Aarthi Vadde: bit.ly/44g6ZeG #LiteratureNow @aarthivadde.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social

What‘s the evidence that students are not 𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 engaging in “meaningful, difficult conversations” without the assistance of these right-wing initiatives? The goal is to control conversations so they don’t threaten the entrenched interests, like big tech, that rely on universities as profit centers

I know not all educators are in a position to do this, but I think a lot of teachers can/should take this approach more when it comes to how they run their classrooms—particularly if they’re confident what they’re doing is best for their Ss.

Don’t study Classics, History, or Philosophy they said. You’re less likely to get a job they said.

amirite?

Is it a hot take to say we need to be more imaginative about how we frame texts? Too much: -YA because “Hello fellow kids!” -Bildungsroman because youths -Shakespeare because Bill -Canon because canon -Novel x because I ❤️ it What they read matters, but how we frame it also makes a big difference.

"Hiring of college grads is down across the board. But certain majors are able to access opportunities in a wider array of industries, new LinkedIn data shows." ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH 69% VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS 68% www.forbes.com/sites/courtn...

It’s Special Issue Summer for #HackYourStack at @cite-ela.bsky.social! First up is @mraleosays.bsky.social! In addition to his study, check out our video essay card on Notion for mentor texts, scholarship, and teaching resources for video essays. bit.ly/hackyourstack1

This is one of many reasons why I’ve been loving Jameson. While he had an enduring appreciation for & deep knowledge of literature, he had no qualms about engaging with contemporary forms of popular culture & media. He regarded both as subject to the same material conditions & ideological forces.

Based on my initial skim, this is good stuff. One thing I appreciate is that it avoids pitting media education and “literary” approaches against each other. Better still, it understands that books *are* media & can be studied as such. Anything attempting to transcend that binary is a win, IMO.

"as we read these books, they did not fill out graphic organizers, hunt around for literary elements, or try to make a closed case about what the text means. Instead, they kept a journal" post45.org/2026/06/fost...

Relatedly, I think the phrases “research paper” & “literary analysis essay” have become so deracinated from the actual scholarly communities that birthed them, they’re borderline meaningless. Ss often experience them as schoolish simulacra of academic writing—more perfunctory than purpose fueled.

As someone straddling the same institutional divides, this resonated. I’d also posit that both HS Eng & first year comp have both been savaged by the last few decades of skill-ification & would benefit equally from reconnecting with other humanistic disciplines AND drawing on Ss own literacies.

Very cringe but unsurprising to see the paper of record make an announcement that they’re going to be “tastemaxxing” in an attempt to reclaim their waning social influence. Someone in the c-suite must have seen a TikTok about how taste will separate the elites from the AI underclass of normies.

Chef's kiss, salute, tears, all of it

In case you missed it, my post from last weekend on: ● The difference between knowledge and understanding ↓↓ #EduSky

Have you marked your calendars for our June #literacies chat Play and Interaction in Literacy Learning with Dr. Alex Corbitt @alexcorbitt.bsky.social ? We would love to hear from scholars, students, and in-service education professionals alike!

I do sometimes wonder whether making bibliographies for every episode is a good use of my time, but when over 200 people link-out during the first day, including 29 clicks on thus Iris Murdoch essay from 1964, I feel really good about my labor.

L to R: Chris Richards: biracial kid from Alabama who speaks about black history and has tattoos of MLK, Ali, and Obama Sergiño Dest: Dutch-Surinamese, emigrated to Brooklyn as a kid, naturalized Fola Balogun: born in Brooklyn to vacationing parents, raised in UK but CHOOSES to play for USA

Many thanks to @cnewf.bsky.social for publishing my remarks at the CICH Conference in Banff last week on building political support for rebuilding our humanities research infrastructure. This was all before the Vandy report but feels even more urgent now. utotherescue.blogspot.com/2026/06/we-n...

Me after a few beers talking to my normie dad friends about America: “Yeah, but like—I’d argue Trump isn’t a political aberration as much as he’s a symptom of a longer standing decline of American empire blah blah” Me after a few beers watching the #USMNT with my normie dad friends: “WOO AMURICA!!”

This, for me, was the central contradiction driving my need to write the piece. "Education freedom" was never about giving parents a choice between "woke" public education & "non-woke" private schools, it was always about comporting the entire public & private system to sectarian religious beliefs:

I *so* wish that awesome World Humanities Report had gotten even one percent of the attention it deserved. Kudos to Sara Guyer and CHCI for putting it together-- over six years! worldhumanitiesreport.org

Brett has basically assembled The Avengers of high school English. Already excited to be a part of this session!

Pretending that education is just job training and that it should be stripped of all non-utilitarian elements is one of the worst ideas in the history of ideas. Acting like it's some kind of axiom we should be using to orient ourselves at the moment is disastrously wrong-headed.

Appears problems are isolated, but please check your feed. Vandal Live takes us to Berkeley for a collaboration with brilliant Yael Segalovitz. I loved the topic she & David Marno conceived, & live audience clearly agreed. The final hour is little like having my therapy session recorded. Be kind.

Great piece by @josheyler.bsky.social on Harvard's ludicrous decision to put a hard cap on A grades. (Spoiler: Josh is not a fan 😏)

There’s been a lot of Discourse™️ about the (so-called) literacy crisis. I have a lot of thoughts, so it felt good to finally start getting them out there with this post. open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...

It’s equally fascinating and frustrating that many of the methods meant to account for the deeply social & collaborative nature of academic writing (genre structures, citations, peer review, etc.) have become the most perfunctory parts of secondary writing instruction. Exacerbates AI issues too!

Messi proving MLS players have the juice!!!

I think this captures the current moment of New York joy amidst federal angst in a way that is especially comprehensible to elder millennials like me Also, I would have absolutely watched this movie on WPIX every other weekend afternoon

The fact this happened *AT STANFORD* is wild.

Fascism's a fever you break with shit like what happened in New York last night. Create more excuses to feel things like that together.

A scene report from Brooklyn, a reflection on something I never truly believed I would live to see, with photos and videos.

Last image from tonight (short film in the morning): this brother out here with his Singer sewing machine, gifting people a custom embroidery on their jerseys and hats with the name and the date, was more artistic than anything at Burning Man and ad gorgeous as a Caravaggio. Magic! Goodnight.

What in the Baudrillard is happening with that picture of the White House in front of the White House

Me after a few beers talking to my normie dad friends about America: “Yeah, but like—I’d argue Trump isn’t a political aberration as much as he’s a symptom of a longer standing decline of American empire blah blah” Me after a few beers watching the #USMNT with my normie dad friends: “WOO AMURICA!!”

Instead of funding our schools and our teachers, we are prioritizing a multi-billion-dollar war that has no end date. More in my oped for TIME time.com/article/2026...

Don’t want to jinx but the USMNT looks… good? And not in like a “Yeehaw! Donovan, Deuce, and the boys are playing with their hearts on their sleeve!” kind of way. Like technically and tactically we know what we’re doing. This feels very odd. I’m scared to like it.

Surprise, surprise! The Vanderbilt report decrying the state of scholarship in the humanities is itself a terrible work of “scholarship“:

Well, debating teacher autonomy versus teaching consistency is all the rage on LinkedIn, apparently. But when a well balanced post is written, hardly anyone reads it. People still want one-sided hot takes, it seems. christianmooreanderson.com/the-problem-...

It’s pretty wild how many of the worst ideas from edu-consultants, admin, central office types, etc. are microwaved managerial approaches from the corporate world that have long past their expiration date. The MBA-ification of everything is seriously a scourge.

"Guilt is not a fruitful basis for political renewal, any more than moral superiority, which is often only the mirror image of guilt...What exhortations have the power to call forth... conscience and responsibility?" Ehrenreich

If people are concerned about AP score inflation, just wait until they realize that what those tests are measuring bears very little resemblance to the forms of reading, writing, & thinking they’ll have to do in their college humanities classes!