Merry Christmas!

this will become an increasingly common experience throughout the 21st century, but it feels very strange to live and work in a place that is now the subject of wild, mass conspiratorial thinking

Well, we’ve been told to drop exams and final papers, which seems like the right move

Just horrifying. I’m supposed to be grading final papers right now. Have no idea what happens next.

Active shooter on Brown University Campus and College Hill area of Providence. No suspect apprehended despite earlier report. Shots fired near Governor street.

I'm currently in the middle of nowhere (Smithfield RI, I took an hour-long bus to get here), sitting in a Barnes and Noble that hasn't been refurbished since the first Bush term, and I am experiencing the sort of serenity that one hopes people feel while succumbing to hypothermia

the dumb realization that helped me to better understand American politics is that Americans exclusively conceive of politics as "gay marriage/abortion/gun rights/trans women in sports" and everything else from the economy to the endless drumbeat of war is just How Things Are and Have Always Been

RIP to Frank Gehry. I'll always have a soft spot for the Stata Center at MIT for pissing off this mathematician so much (it embodies "deconstruction" which is, he writes, "the antithesis of nature's organized complexity" and therefore a "nemesis" to science, nestled within its very nerve-center)

SMASH BROS ANNOUNCER: ED AND LORRAINE WARREN!

none of the Wicked cast stuff surprises me because I saw all that happen to a dozen different grad-school friend groups. Not the eating disorders specifically but what I have come to think of as the Terminal Group-Therapy Social Death Stage.

a cool and under-appreciated genre of American architecture is “eccentric 1920’s-1930’s auto service station designed to attract attention from the then-new motorways”

"in your post you said that --" first of all, do not conflate me, the author, with the "speaker" of my posts

found what has to be the funniest artist's bio of all time

saw Night of the Hunter last night and I’m just glad that past-me left a movie that good for current-me to watch for the first time

I learned it by… READING!!! *my telekinesis throws everything across the room*

I really want to know what’s going on in the class that meets here before mine

choosing to read the Olivia Nuzzi piece in a kind of Harley Quinn voice just to make it all seem more plausible

my contribution to the "romantasy" discourse is that I wrote about one of the "a court of" books for sparknotes and the author uses the phrase "she gave a vulgar gesture" so repetitively that the mystery of the vulgar gesture in question quickly became the most interesting thing about the book

I am always getting on my pedestal to declare this but Jane Austen's "Love and Freindship" (sic), written when she was 14 years old, is so funny and bold and mean www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1...

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

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

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.