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"

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

my current pedagogical experiment is: any paper clearly written by a human person receives a B or higher

I like to think that the CIA only shadow-funded abstract expressionism because one of its directors had a really forward-thinking theory of aesthetics and an inclination towards the European avant garde

read Demon Copperhead and I enjoyed it but it was also -- and I want to say this as neutrally as possible -- the most "Pulitzer Prize for Fiction" book I've ever encountered

me granting my students' last-minute extension requests

using some advanced pedagogical techniques here (forcing my students to watch Kate Bush)

If we aren't going to have bananas, I think I would prefer to not have the bananas because of socialism rather than whatever this is.

Portrait of a horse’s massive ass with a cameo by George Washington

a funny story that I just remembered: the father of the richest girl in my high school literally rented a lab and staffed it with scientists so that they’d list her as a co-author on any papers. He also funded and publicized a scholarship and then awarded it (drumroll) to her!

I really like this painting of a cat that has the soul of a gilded age robber baron

“I was born and bred in —“ okay, well, I wanted to know where you’re from but I never asked about your sex life

If I had been added to that group chat I would have tried to run one of those “I need you to send me 10 Best Buy gift cards” scams

I’m surprised to have never heard of this before — what a concept!

I'm watching Nickel Boys and wow -- it was, at the very least, robbed of "Best Cinematography"

"We are deeply appreciative of all you do in the care of our students and community. Also we will be using your engineering class as a trap for students who protested a genocide before they're shipped off to a Trump blacksite, and it's not optional."

currently watching French language learning videos designed for toddlers and, unfortunately, they're helping

fascinated by the Wikipedia page on 16th century Italian poet Torquato Tasso, which appears to have been written by the poet himself while lying on his deathbed and reflecting ruefully on his accomplishments and regrets

Forgot I ever posted this one lol

my magnum opus, really

When I was 12 or so I thought that I had a clever idea and told my dad that I would always root for the team that represented the city with the largest population in order to maximize happiness and he looked at me with undisguised disgust and said "you would say something like that" lmao