An extract from my and Amanda Anderson’s pathbreaking (though I say it myself) new book Humanities Theory. This section on sociology’s understanding of the humanities and its dangers.

Vico: “Monarchy is the government that most conforms to human nature, in the ages when reason is the most developed.”

Online asynchronous education is not going to survive the AI era. Colleges and universities that double down on small classes, expertise, and real mentorship will be the ones that flourish. www.chronicle.com/article/coll...

Looks good

The cynicism, cruelty and lies that now define Israel are infectious. The US is certainly infected by them.

Ah god dammit. Joshua Clover wrote about both people and music as if he loved them so much he couldn’t bear it, & indeed he really did love them like this, to the joy of those he knew & shaped, & to the consternation of those who loved either less. What a loss. www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/11...

Best @thejuicemedia.bsky.social ad yet! Hilarious, sponsored by Gina’s portrait🤣 Let’s get the dick out of Dickson👊🗳️ #Auspol #Ausvotes2025

Palestinian paramedics shot by Israeli forces had hands tied, eyewitnesses say

The view from our Berlin apt just now.

Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories: two novels (this ed 1945). This is one of the few volumes I long lusted for before I acquired it. It is such a handsome thing. Then I came across it quite by chance in Balfour Books, one of Toronto’s best used bookstores, while attending a conference there.

The sooner Musk gets his ass to Mars the better.

I believe the world’s moral compass will one day be restored.

Didier Eribon, Retour a Reims (1980). A famous (Bourdieuean) reflection on/theorization of the author’s life (a provincial queer working class lad’s rise up the academic ladder into the petit bourgeoisie) as triggered by a trip back to his home town upon his dad’s death. Interesting, very French.

The Ukraine situation doesnt in fact divide into a good guys v bad guys scenario and we should resist slipping back into cold war melodrama thinking.

The last dated Gertrud Kauders drawing we have. So cool!

C.P. Snow, Death under Sail (1932). Nice cover, lousy book. What a creep was C.P. Snow!

Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors. I have vivid memories of reading this book, astonished, on the London Northern Line in the days I worked in advertising in Hyde Park and lived on Parliament Hill. “Baron in the Trees” in particular really got to me, and it remains an ur-text.

Ladies… this advice, written on marriage in a pamphlet by a suffragette in 1918 is still relevant today 🤣 It is currently on display at the Pontypridd Museum in Wales.

My Secret Life (1966). The famous (or just once famous?) Victorian male hetero porn book which the late great Steven Marcus edited and brought back into circulation, upon which I think it became something of a bestseller. One of the more, how to put it?, perverse pathways into 19thc England.

A Gertrud Kauders work on paper

So this is what it is like

BCharles Jackson, The Lost Weekend (1944) I’ve vague memories of reading this bestseller in my adolescence and think I saw the movie too. If my memory is sound, the dustjacket here isn’t very appropriate. But pb publishers of the period weren’t concerned with the fit between the jacket and the work

Launch event for From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey TONIGHT (6:30) at @strandbookstore Tom Fitzharris, the recipient of these letters, will be speaking with Robert Greskovic, a noted dance critic and longtime friend of Gorey's. www.strandbooks.com/events/event...

Politics is a mugs game. But we are all mugs.

Kirsty Bell, The Undercurrents. I enjoyed this as most people interested in Berlin will. An American art-historian’s divorce lands her with a largish building beside the Landwehr canal and she becomes obsessed by its past. Fascinating.

Forceful detailed essay on Germany’s profoundly disturbing failure to acknowledge what is going on in Israel

Can we please just put Bob Dylan out of our lives? How hard would that be? He deserves a rest.

Mary McCarthy, The Group Everyone read this when I was young. Before feminism, before the pill, before the ‘career woman’, it’s about a bunch of Vasser girls out of college. It’s more about class thansex and gender, even if its historical role was to intensify women’s awareness of how gender works.

Trump wants to buy Greenland, he wants Canada to become another US state, he wants Gaza to turn into a real estate opportunity for developers like him. But he knows very well all this is bullshit, none of it is going to happen. His reasons for saying such things are political.

Wow. RTL+'s 4-er true crime tv series, based on Die Zest's podcast, is hands on some of the best tv I've watched, ever. not sure how to see this outside of the Republic, but if you can, do it. abolition, structural racism, reparations, civil cruelty must see.

A Gertrud Kauders self-portrait just in from the framers

Gosh The Conclave is a silly movie! We progressives should be ashamed of it.

No idea who Neil Gaiman is but wanna talk about Karl Philipp Moritz?

Unification anyone?

Gertrud flowers in oil

On October 1 1924, Jimmy Carter was the first future US President to be born in a hospital.

Yes. Exactly. We are on the same page.

Is “Decolonizing the curriculum” predominantly a literary project, a political project or a moral project?

Putting a name to something that's been quietly clear for a while, @simoncd.bsky.social discusses a "Conservative Turn in Literary Studies." Not conservative at all in public electoral terms! Just an interest in disciplinary history paired with a back-to-basics emphasis on the literary as such.

Trump brings Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire to life again, a ghosting effect.

So now people want to come stay in Berlin for New Years Eve so they can go onto the street and explode their own big bangers and fire spectacular rockets

Trump is, in terms of ancient Greek political thought, a tyrant. And, as Athenians knew, tyrants were the rotten fruit of faulty democracy. Healthy democracy has no truck with them.

Henry James, The Awkward Age (1899). First US edition of one of James’s finest novels. Why doesn’t Vanderbank want to marry Nanda? If you know, tell us please.

From the ‘Flowers of Evil’ show currently at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg. Very enjoyable.

A nice oil Gertrud Kauders self portrait as a Xmas pleasure.

A reminder that the Vic Govt has used scares over anti-semitism to propose laws that are mostly going to affect climate-change protests.

An open letter to Enviro Minister Tanya Plibersek urging her (begging her!) not to approve Woodside’s North West Shelf expansion-a climate time bomb & threat to 60,000 yr old Murujuga rock art at Burrup. Please sign (& don't forget to confirm/click on the email). openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Ronald Firbank, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1925). These Firbank firsts are very nice objects, and have their cult. Firbank is of course one of the true pioneers of the modernist novel, a giant of twentieth-century fiction, continuing neglect of whom is unfathomable to me.

Gertrud Kauders 24: My great aunt Gertrud Kauders’ works were concealed behind the walls of a Prague house before the Nazis murdered her, were forgotten and found by chance in 2018. Almost 700 works, her whole studio. Her maid Annerle, often painted.

Is there a book on the role the Iroquois confederation has played in Western thought?