A bit eclectic, but a rich collection on Cultural Evolution: Language and Literature in the Hungarian journal Helikon, which focuses on contemporary developments. It's in Hungarian, but it has an English table of contents.

This was so interesting and exciting to work on with @heatherwolfe.bsky.social and Jeremy Lopez. Carl Berkhout spent about 40 years, off and on, investigating this book, and we edited this posthumously published text from his annotated drafts. doi.org/10.1093/sq/q...

For CRITICAL INQUIRY, I reviewed @leifw.bsky.social’s very important LANGUAGE MACHINES. Also, unless someone tells me different, I’m going to lay claim to the first F bomb in CI’s history.

I just found someone citing an essay I never wrote. I did make the point they attributed to me, and I did so in print—just not in the essay I never wrote, obviously…

Very rarely does a post warrant all caps, but: SEARCHABLE INTERIM MANUSCRIPTS CATALOGUE. At long last! searcharchives.bl.uk

Which is why narrowing the conversation to the technology or the product is never going to be effective. bsky.app/profile/sonj...

This is the kind of post I wish there were more of.

Meghan Andrews was an amazing scholar. Help make her posthumous book, edited by her friends, open access!

Let's make Meghan's life's work Open Access! Chip in if you can... gofund.me/08aa0ed6b

Meghan Andrews was an amazing scholar. Help make her posthumous book, edited by her friends, open access!

And, I'll just step out of my historical lane for a second and say that the 19C railroad industry--a bubble these guys love to invoke as precedent--wasn't trying to pump railroad into everything. There was no Railroad School. No Railroad Healthcare System. No Railroad Personal Assistant.

I'm so tired of people telling me to have students critique LLM outputs. I'm just going to print this on little cards and hand them out

I will add the following: our students lack the research skills required to audit an LLM essay for errors. They don’t arrive on campus with these skills; we teach it to them over four long years. So throwing freshmen in the deep end and saying “swim your way to a shore of rectitude” is folly.

Andy Warhol, Udo Kier, 1973 #RIP😢 whitney.org/collection/w...

This is excellent. Does anyone have the citation for the March 2024 paper referenced at 3:06, comparing ChatGPT to Jim Crow? Would like to read and assign.

AI is the perfect bureaucratic technology in that it offers effortless on-demand simulacra of governmentality.

hello friends! I'm giving a talk at the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar this friday -- it'll be on Ovid (ish), Petrarch (sorta), obscure 17th century English lyric (yes!), trans poetics, and maybe a hint of psychoanalysis. Abstract at the link below -- and if you want to Zoom in, DM me for a link :)

Oh, fuck. www.aboutamazon.com/news/books-a...

From the press “committed to the daily re-imagining what a university press can be.” Well, maybe try again, fail better…

Imagine you time travel back to 1847 and you find the left response to industrialization is a) machines will never be as good as human weavers or b) we need to copyright loom patterns or c) it’s a speculative bubble. You’d say “Y’all. Not helping. What you need is obviously a labor movement.”

Posting a photo of Ceausescu’s bathroom for no apparent reason.

An information session for those interested in learning about Rare Book School’s 𝗠. 𝗖. 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴 𝗙𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗶𝗻 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗛𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆, 𝗕𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵𝘆, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗛𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 will be held via Zoom at 6 p.m. ET on 29 October. Register at rarebookschool.org/admissions-awards/fellowships/lang

Do you work at a small U.S. liberal arts college or at a university with 5,000 or fewer undergrads? If so, check out Rare Book School’s 𝗠. 𝗖. 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴 𝗙𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗶𝗻 𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗛𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆, 𝗕𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵𝘆, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗛𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀! Application deadline: 𝟳 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 rarebookschool.org

Out Now: Some Essays by Heinrich von Kleist (trans. @unpaginated.bsky.social) Published in rapid succession during the last year of Kleist's life, these brief but challenging essays present the finest distillation of his philosophical thought: paradiseeditions.net/products/som...

It’s been a long while! Empyrean Series nos. 46–50 are announced & available for preorder as of today. Books by Jean Paul, Pierre Custot, & Fernando Pessoa are due out in November. Ludwig Tieck & Niu Sengru will be published next spring. asterismbooks.com/publisher/em...

Are you interested in how publishers’ archives illuminate the history of the American book? Apply for RBS's winter online course, H-95v: Reading Publishers’ Archives for the Study of the American Book! 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝘆 𝗯𝘆 𝟭 𝗗𝗲𝗰. 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁-𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. rarebookschool.org/courses/history/h95v

This is such a great piece about a place I barely (but at least barely) know—but it is not just about Berkeley and that stretch of Telegraph, so read it even if you have never been—it is so good. (And by the way the shoes improved and that is o.k., maybe the one thing that is.)

Recommended:

"By the 2020s, Krasznahorkai has become one of the vanishingly few living world-literary authors whose works are promptly & pretty much automatically translated into English." @andrask.bsky.social has a really interesting series on LK's route to "world authorship" open.substack.com/pub/translat...

It’s unsettling to work at an institution that is this dedicated to global collaborative and critical knowledge work and feel the contraction nearly everywhere, in small and big ways.

And while I am pro-open-source-AI, I have to admit that individually customized language models are not going to, um, *increase* the coherence of the fabric of reality.

My latest (50th!) weekly round-up of reading and listening recommendations, taking in colonialism and conflict in the Middle East, professional football, and the relationship between American film and politics. 🧵 #menasky #polisky #filmsky #skystorians🗃️ #envhist #litsky

Ich habe mir kurz die Mühe gemacht die jüngere Geschichte der politischen Morde in den USA anzuschauen. Zwischen 2005 und 2025 gab es 371 solcher Morde. 93% davon wurden von Tätern mit einem rechten oder rechtsextremen Motiv verübt. Quelle: Anti Defamation League.

“Oneiric technology” is the perfect distinction for describing everything from nanotech to ‘AI’. These are not technologies of the actual world, of physics and math and biology, but technologies of dream-stuff, of imagined sciences, materials, and logics that do not inhabit our real world

I am not sure what on earth the saturated field of JA biography may have been doing if not looking at her in the context of her society, family, friends…?

"Blocking Sci-Hub and Libgen thus acts as a mechanism of capital accumulation at the expense of India’s academic commons — reinforcing class hierarchies." indianexpress.com/article/opin...

Just seen this - a find with all sorts of elegant implications for Nashe. Bravo, Joseph Black. Lovely to see TN, who projects an air of brilliant improv, rechecking sources and writing corrections in his neatest handwriting. www.folger.edu/blogs/collat...

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

<<stage whisper>> It was never about jobs.

It's starting to get physically painful for me to watch a technology that could have been produced ethically and with an incredible command of a specific skill set that's useful to people but instead became a tech bro talking point be sold to us as the catch-all technological savior.

Green building Gibbon, MN

My colleague Prof Marianne Hirsch has shared a letter she sent Columbia’s Acting President Claire Shipman about the dangerous measures the university is taking as part of its “agreement” with Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. open.substack.com/pub/riseupco...

My recent lecture for @rarebookschool.bsky.social can now be found on their YouTube channel youtu.be/ElvNacFyoWQ.

Winning elections will only be the beginning of a long struggle.

"A key legacy of illiberalism turns out to be a series of institutional traps... Inaction leaves the damage unrepaired and demobilizes supporters, while effective action may involve capitulation to the illiberal playbook."

According to POLITICO reporter @kyledcheney.bsky.social, a federal judge has blocked the cancellation of NEH awards by DOGE.

This is a laundry list of rhetorical strategies to defend the adoption of a given technology for the purposes of advancing an ideology & economic regime: inevitability, unquestioning praise of “innovation,” buy-in from concerned stakeholders, assurances that partnership is not capitulation. 1/n

On teacher's union sipping the AI Kool-aid … This is a mf thread 🗣🧵🔥

educators HELPED design the curriculum?! helped whom? This is not just complete BS, but open admission of what RW is promoting.