Joan Wallach Scott 4eva!

i’m not going to be lectured about political violence by people whose politics is violence

Sometimes y’all really do test me.

"How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor?" A Dramatic Reading of The Recent New York Times Dispatch from the Hamptons. Presented by The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector.

We need a Hakeem Jeffries of the right.

The critique that police aren’t workers hasn’t been helpful to abolition. It’s not about welcoming carceral industries in the labor movement. It’s about dealing with how the economy, public sector jobs, and budgets are entangled with carcerality. And organizing for a new public with different work.

Happy Birthday to The Women! The film was released September 1, 1939.

John Wood Jr. giving us an always useful reminder that advocates for bipartisanship, depolarization, etc. are almost always just opposed to you having any ideas which they don't agree with.

9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...

counterpoint criticism is the art of animating crap.

The Weekly Read is "On Exhaustion: Toward a Post-Care Feminism" by Samantha Pinto and Jennifer C. Nash. The article was published in Dossier: Limits of Legibility—Questions of Blackness and Sexuality, a special issue of @differences.bsky.social (36:1). Read the article for free: buff.ly/XDrQAhF

One of my favorite annual @democracynow.org traditions is that we always play this video of James Earl Jones reading Frederick Douglass's speech "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?" If you've never read or heard the speech, it's well worth your time.

Thank you @dem8z.bsky.social

I felt I needed to learn more about AI (even though the subject bores me profoundly), and this was a great place to start. Recommend highly! A few quick thoughts… 1/

OMG it is not useful. I say that because it does not work, from my perspective as a teacher & scholar. Stop trying to make fetch happen.

Our digital repositories team spends a great deal of their time now simply protecting our commoned public digital resources from bots. This insatiable, aimless, destructive desire to excrete novel slop is impeding our access to — and even damaging — our cultural heritage + vetted public knowledge.

I never thought there'd be a worse freshman-year assignment than me being required to read a Thomas Friedman book for an international relations class but this is it

I love the cover art as homage to Clueless and am totally looking forward to reading this book.

Tangential I guess but the beginningof my next book is about why we need science and poetry to help us understand metaphors or else we are politically fucked and this guy is proving my point 😭

I wrote about watching movies with my Dad.

This essay was a blast to write! Thanks to @wendyallisonlee.bsky.social for recommending me as a contributor, to @dfmorgan.bsky.social for being a fabulous editor, and to @carlospescador.bsky.social for his expert feedback.

My So-Called Life at 30! Edited by the amazing @dfmorgan.bsky.social and with an essay by one of my favorite practitioners of the art of overanalysis @cmceleney.bsky.social

Just out--I wrote a piece for the New Yorker explaining how the effects of Trump's anti-trans attacks go far beyond trans communities. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

The comment period for this ends in 3 DAYS. Please leave a comment telling them EVERYONE should be able to get covid boosters. www.regulations.gov/commenton/FD...

say it again: 4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

The way I am obsessed with this opening paragraph, seared into my academic consciousness forever for its unique combination of discursiveness and economy, and for its declarative nature and originality; the way nothing would be the same. Criticism is life. A+

Please read my essay in TIME, which @science.org did not do carefully before publishing this assertion. time.com/7285045/resi...

@cinementalist.bsky.social on The White Lotus is great: "what a sneer it is. In this one expression, we see the premise of the show in the promise of a lip. This sneer is also key to understanding the show’s farcical approach to class politics." I also love the turn to the question of genre.

fascinated by these hamfisted historical comparisons--this is what happens when you get your infomration as content without analysis

Tired: universal healthcare, affordable housing, parental leave, accessible childcare Wired: Nazi birthing medals

In an executive order, Trump targeted the Smithsonian and the National Museum of African American History & Culture suggesting that it is “divisive” and pedaling “improper ideology.” So, I took a trip back to the museum, and what I saw was a place trying to tell the unvarnished truth about America.

Interesting how the party who spent years telling everyone that learning American history is “too woke” is citing the most obscure 19th century laws to justify its actions.

This will be up on YouTube at some point after and I'll post a transcript to my newsletter

it's wild that today ICE was just like, "we're the thought police" unironically

Come see me this Monday! Ignore the strangeness of me smiling next to a headline about my own immiseration by an ascendant fascist movement!

I just wrote to all of my congressional representatives to plead them to support the NEH, for everyone, for public history, for scholarship, for teaching, for all of it. I used this widget: very easy, it has a template, and automatically looks up the emails of your representatives. p2a.co/DdtlGIT

Writing about how I'm tired of publishing crisis narratives, on the one hand, and a tendency to celebrate public-facing trendy hits instead of, you know, scholarly books, on the other, and lo and behold Brian, my grumpy kin in "that thing you hate is fine actually," has said all the good stuff here.

So a wannabe DOGEr at Brown Univ from the conservative student paper took the univ org chart and ran it through an AI aglo to determine which jobs were "BS" in his estimation and then emailed those employees/admins asking them what tasks they do and to justify their jobs. bloat.brownspectator.com

the avocado i tried to eat too early

join us in Providence on March 7th for Limits of Legibility: The Climate of Critique — a colloquium featuring Lynne Huffer, Axelle Karera, Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, moderated by Elizabeth A. Wilson: events.brown.edu/pembroke/eve...

Thurs., Feb. 13 at 4:00 p.m., Professor of French and Francophone Studies Thangam Ravindranathan will deliver the annual Elizabeth Munves Sherman '77, P'06 '09 Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Studies, entitled “Unearthly Literature: Re-reading Nathalie Sarraute.” More: https://buff.ly/3WhHu9p

Seats avail in GNSS 1962D: Visual Art and Black Feminist Theory. This course will closely analyze black feminist theory alongside a wide-ranging survey of significant painting, sculpture, performance, photography, & installation art made by black women. https://buff.ly/4aywf1a

Do I have the book for you

Hi all this is my friend & former neighbor Miss Christine Robinson. She is 70 and has been displaced by the fires. She is living with family. I cannot describe to you her kindness when we lived in Altadena. She brought us sweet potato pies every Christmas; I brought her my jams. gofund.me/0a52241d

I read zillions of Perry Mason novels and wrote about Erle Stanley Gardner, Cold War ideas of justice, and the War on Crime in the latest issue of Arizona Quarterly: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

differences 35.3 is out now! — edited by @teaganbradway.bsky.social, "Unaccountably Queer" features essays from Gila Ashtor, Cassius Adair, Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Jules Gill-Peterson, and more: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

I have been thinking about this a lot lately: that the “phasing out” of humanities scholarship as part of popular education is an effort to prevent people from being able to interpret their political reality.

Moving from aesthetic judgment to interpretation is vital for scholars. But it is not vital for the critic. The move is a move because these activities are not the same kind of thing. The role of criticism is not that it interprets but that it alerts us to what we should be interpreting. V J Adams

Moving this from X to here - reminder that Black feminist theory summer institute applications are open. Details here: gendersexualityfeminist.duke.edu/black-femini...

"The Department of History invites applications for an assistant professor who will make enough leftist remarks to annoy conservative talk radio hosts but whose politics will ultimately support the neoliberal mission of the university." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hon...