well those Epstein emails are pretty bad so I guess we can expect a Distraction within the next 24 hours

Just learned that “impregnable” is completely etymologically unrelated to “pregnant”

put my spring syllabus together : )

you'll never convince me that Derrida wasn't onto something when the richest man in the world just completed the phallocentrism-phonocentrism-logocentrism trifecta in a tweet about Homer

enjoying all these press conferences and interviews where senior dems are more or less saying “in heaven there is no suffering and your deaths will prolong Trump’s time in purgatory, which is sort of a win if you really think about it”

Heirloom debt is such a beautiful concept

econ prof holding student meetings next to me at the cafe just said, to a small group of students who are taking notes, "my big theory is that the two things people want are money and power," and I can't stop thinking about how easy it all must be not having to think like at all.

two weeks or so ago I had the pleasure of conveying notable cowboy-wizard-sci-fi-author Samuel Delany to his induction to the American academy of arts and sciences

Woke is not dead which can eternal lie

the only thing funnier than Jay Jones winning his race in Virginia despite the leaked texts is Carrie Coyner, who leaked the texts, losing hers

I’m having a “feelings night” which is when I let myself have feelings after a few weeks/months of being too busy for them and I just opened my phone and saw an old picture of Audrey Hepburn and immediately burst into tears (the stimulus for this sort of thing is arbitrary)

At least part of the reason why everyone likes Benjamin is that you can attribute virtually any idea (even contradictory ideas) to him and really, who’s to say that it isn’t lurking somewhere in the Acrcades Project (odds are that it actually is in there somewhere)

Done with grading so I’m going to treat myself to an hour of looking up whatever is going on with lily allen

Future anthropologists will note that, in the early decades of the 21st century, elite families demonstrated their wealth and prestige through the scale, variety, and tastefulness of their decorative gourd arrangements

grad school Halloween parties really were a mixed bag because on one hand nobody would just go to party city and pick up a no-effort costume-in-a-bag but on the other hand you have to tolerate costumes like “reification” and “the specter haunting Europe” (etc.)

I feel an extraordinary paper-title-envy when I remember the late Jonathan Goldberg's "The Anus in Coriolanus"

kind of obsessed with Oberon's slutty tunic and butterfly hair-clips here

I do understand the "bo'oh o' wa'er" jokes about (certain types of) British accents but I also believe that we should all think a bit more about what happens when we pronounce, say, the word "at," or (and this one is really uncomfortable) "uh-oh"

New London, Connecticut honestly shot way too high with that name

I’m the only person who was raptured because I got up here first and told them what’s been going on down there, like what you’ve all been up to in general. My bad.

My “it’s safe to eat out in Florida” pamphlet has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my pamphlet

Here in Rhode Island we’re just catching up to the summer 1999 news cycle

I love this 19th century depiction of Hotspur and the unnamed fop from Henry IV Part I for many reasons but chiefly because this is how I picture every interaction I have with my father

So if I understand correctly the official liberal-Zionist position of the Democratic Party is: Donald Trump, America’s Hitler, is wrong about everything except (randomly!) his hard-line support of Israel, which is both fully correct and completely unrelated to his broader political project

Very funny moment in this Agatha Christie novel (“The Moving Finger”); she’s a great plot-writer but also deeply incurious about the world around her and so her novels just pass on huge globs of raw ideology, undigested (this makes her interesting to read imo)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted Jimmy Kimmel, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York

sometimes I recall with limitless horror the period when I was applying to grad school and, on the dubious recommendation of my advisors, cold-emailed every single early modernist working at any college with an English grad program in the entire anglophone world

you have to sort of feel for Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, the perfectly accomplished late 15th century Italian painter whose Crucifixion has been mogged by Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper (on the opposite wall) for 5 centuries

assigned LeGuin's "Omelas" short story in my intro to lit course and found this morbidly funny fictional "response" from last year: clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

the two unskippable security questions for setting up a password at [redacted university] are "what is the name of your oldest nephew/niece" and "what is the date of your wedding anniversary"

So…extortion.

Barber: so what is it you teach again Me (trying so hard to be butch, lowering my voice into a kind of Batman impersonation): Uh, well. Renaissance poetry and drama mostly

Look at this utterly demented urinal

My biggest historical blind-spot is probably the First World War just because if I think about it too much I get so angry that I make myself sick

“Defy the gods” oh BROTHER

It’s a cool feature of the modern world that if you get a pet that is either really cute or kind of fucked up enough you might never have to work again

What are they pumping into the water at Bennington?

I can say with some real confidence that I was the only tourist in Springfield MA yesterday

Those white South African “refugees” are about to get sent right back lmao

Karl Marx? The early modernist? The scholar of 16th century British letters? Didn’t know that he dabbled in politics too

My Real Housewives of RI dream cast would consist of someone with the last name Patriarca, the woman who founded Alex and Ani, a yoga instructor from Warwick who is too scared to drive into Providence, a bored Brown faculty wife, the (former) rebelle bagel store owner, and Brett Smiley’s husband

Cruising Zootopia

the thing about midcentury paperback sci-fi is that sometimes you read an interesting little short story and look up the author and discover that he was the CIA’s foremost expert on psychological warfare and “the leading practitioner of 'black' and 'gray' propaganda in the Western world.”

I have googled "em dash" and copied and pasted from the results a hundred thousand times in my life and I'm beginning to suspect that I might have saved some time by learning the keyboard shortcut

I don't remember Jesus specifying that the robbed traveler and the good samaritan were twinks but I'll take it

at this point it would have been shocking if the transvestigators didn’t conclude that the pope had a “female skull” or whatever, like if they’d said “this one’s male actually,” that would have made me doubt it for the first time

a funny story about Percival Everett: I attended a reading of “James” earlier this year and students came armed with questions about his “takedown” of Mark Twain and Everett just kept insisting that he loved Twain and had read Huckleberry Finn about 14 times or so