this is actually such a good reason to write a book

My kid’s existence and thriving and free movement are all valid. These annihilating vile monsters

🎶I did my Admin but I did not do my Wriiiiiiiting🎶

me: oh, the students are writing things down, I'm glad they're finding this useful!! my students:

Excited to preorder this important collection edited by my old brilliant friend Sam Cohen with pieces by writers, scholars, librarians, and teachers including freedom to read hero @edrabinski.bsky.social. also it has a great subtitle: www.bloomsbury.com/us/banning-b...

The four-year-old is having an absolute meltdown about going to bed. “I HATE how the earth SPINS!! EVERY DAY it’s night to day night to day night to day ALWAYS WITH THE NIGHT TO DAY! when will it EVER END!!!”

falls of feugh all autumny plus bonus leaping salmon

good grief Peter Corviello is a fantastic writer

late to Marriage Story, I'm a third of the way through and feel sick

Niela Orr on Mamdani / parataxis / Whitman and more

"excluded from the world of informal exchanges" got me. That's the bit we still do really really badly. African scientists unable to get visas to attend conferences, mothers struggling with childcare, class exclusion. If we turn it into a "theft" narrative it's easy to say "oh well I don't do that".

“Franklin did not succeed, partly because she was working on her own without a peer with whom to swap ideas. She was also excluded from the world of informal exchanges in which Watson and Crick were immersed.” This is the painful part.

time to go

Secrecy or visibility? As William L (sometimes K) walked the Dilly in the mid-1920s 'his face was highly powdered and he had a beauty spot tattooed on his cheek.' He was described as part of a 'gang' who 'were known by feminine names' and 'had Gertie [his camp name] tattooed on his arm.' #20s30s

This person took this when they called the race

I‘m doing Noverwhelmedber

News from St Pancras www.pcs.org.uk/news-events/...

The good news is they will still (as always) accept trans students. The bad news is they won't affirm that position for new fellows, for whom "following the Supreme Court’s decision...when we refer to 'women' we mean those assigned female at birth." Source: newn.cam.ac.uk/research/res...

Good news.

✨✨I’m going to learn so much! I can’t wait

out: working at the weekend in: lying on the sofa weeping through the end of Derry Girls

how about, because sex between men was yet to be decriminalised?

A page is a marvelous thing.

Last week I posted that the image on the left was one of the single greatest pages in twentieth century literature, and I stand by that! But look what I noticed for the very first time: Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are closes with an almost-identical page layout, to wildly different ends

one of the most comforting sounds in the world is hearing my cat crunching on her biscuits in the small hours

Caged Pie. Wayne Thiebaud, 1961, currently at the Courtauld. Made me tear up a bit, weirdly.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

I just designed a class for my “Fascism in America“ course on how contemporary formations of fascism can‘t just be understood as mere repetitions of Germany‘s fascism in the 30s Meanwhile ICE:

Had a good time talking about Nancy Garden's ANNIE ON MY MIND as part of our Banned Books in Conversation series last week, covering: lesbian love stories with happy endings, proto-queer YA, new PEN America data, Mahmoud v. Taylor, recent developments in Texas, Lori the Librarian, soft censorship,

on reflection, perhaps this is more of a Monday morning question than a Friday night one

I'm teaching a UG course on POETRY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE next semester and I am very excited! Do you have recommendations for critical readings either on poems for kids & teenagers, or on reading and writing about poetry for the first time, please? (yes, the new close reading book is already on my list!)

good morning

It's worth adding that while the hack of 2+ years ago has been dreadful for British Library users, it is also been awful for BL staff, who cannot fulfil readers' requests and are then confronted by their consequent frustration. With no end in sight.

what else can we do? what do we want to do? what feels good? (thinking. making, making ideas....) how can I help you know you want to do this stuff? EDUCATION IS THE NONCOERCIVE REARRANGEMENT OF DESIRE and that includes the teacher's (thanks, Spivak)

I'm teaching a UG course on POETRY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE next semester and I am very excited! Do you have recommendations for critical readings either on poems for kids & teenagers, or on reading and writing about poetry for the first time, please? (yes, the new close reading book is already on my list!)

sometimes there's just Too Much World, isn't there

Can’t wait until tomorrow, it’s like Christmas. See friends, and presses you fancy, spend your pocket money, be amazed by the wild & bold brillance of the small publishers, hear great talks and rustle your bibliomania gently or militantly, as the mood takes you.

"...if you are a librarian, teacher, educator, parent, local politician, or activist who is aware of systemic efforts to ban books, censor curricula, defund libraries, or otherwise attack educational freedom," 404 wants to know.

My blog post with the ADAM network has now been published. It's about precarity, the future of small subjects, and communal approaches to academic work. I hope it will resonate with some. #IchBinHanna #KleineFaecher #SkandiRetten difficultmedieval.com/2025/10/23/h...

I wish I was at @smallpublishers.bsky.social #smallpublishersfair25

everything is terrible apart from the University of Texas Austin students who, protesting a committee set up to review the humanities curriculum, have produced this graphic arranging committee members by length of hair www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

extremely comforted by the old cast-iron school radiators hissing away in the library at work

one of the greatest single pages of the twentieth-century, a masterpiece

Deadline extended: abstracts due Oct 31

(almost) nothing nicer than the feeling of a thought untangling itself 🪡

unexpectedly transcendent Saturday night: Pina Bausch’s Cafe Müller and Das Frühlingsopfer at the Opernhaus Wuppertal

this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.

I will use any excuse to bring up Dürer's self-portrait again when talking about his drawings.

Yvonne Rosalind Barlow's 1983 painting of Nora Barlow, Charles Darwin's granddaughter, in the @theul.bsky.social. Living from 1885 to 1989, Nora was already nine during the Oscar Wilde trial and could (in theory) have played Castlevania II on the NES.