Say “empathy is suicidal” enough times from the apex of structural power and eventually people will shrug and say “ok sure empathy is suicidal.”

"What an art! You have struck yourself out in the very sentence in which I behold you. An art whose chief concern is to become artless."

Daniel Kraus's horror novel wins the Pulitzer. Evidently: a break-up in the post-45 genre system synchronized with the eclipse of the US imperial hegemony in 2026. Literary categories are analogous to political categories, as Jameson taught us in M&F. Living in his light years after his passing.

When you hear the French Revolution in the poetry of Wordsworth. Iykyk.

I remember a professor once saying there are a long list of people from the nineteenth century who are only remembered because Marx criticized them so ruthlessly

"Studies show that overreliance on these digital tools causes cognitive decline, but if current events are any indication, nobody’s making much of a contribution anyway. Go ahead and use A.I. however you like." So good.

My book, Probable Exhaustion, posits that literary texts of the long 19th c help us trace how a conception of progress welded to infinite growth and development is unthinkable outside of the threat of exhaustion. Will be out with @cornellupress.bsky.social Jan 15, 2027

I am interested in the role of exhaustion in the history of capitalism (and of critique of capitalism) if you have any recs immediately at hand, buddies.

But what about the falling rate of prophets?

Chapter 1, Volume 1, as an anatomy of commodity lust.

crucial coverage from The Guardian that features our collaborative, movement-building website against-a-i.com

Back on twitter, if only for a bit: x.com/involocution

Thrilled (and a bit surprised) to have just signed a contract with Forlaget Grønningen 1 for a new Danish climate book for readers aged ≈ 11–16. Part non-fiction (letters), part fiction (a crime story). I can’t share the title or details yet, but it will be wild & cute & involve a kidnapping!

Syllabus suggestions for a "Theory of the Novel" course? Graduate level. I want to blow them away.

So pleased to be presenting at a few Scandinavian universities next week, including Copenhagen, Linnaeus and U of Southern Denmark. Thanks to @mikkelkfrantzen.bsky.social & @lnuccon.bsky.social for hosting! artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/calendar/202...

Dec 2: rocked the baby / wrote a page / finished a chapter #acadecawriteathon

This is the importance of buying the books we write and teach from university presses. The same administrations that don’t care about the humanities would be just as happy to have academic publishing handled by these companies. We can save our own publishing ecosystem- but we have to do it.

Hi folks! Are you at a Canadian or Danish university? I will be traveling between Dec 8 and Jan 7 to Denmark, and between Jan 8 and Jan 20 to Toronto. And I am on research leave next semester.

TOMORROW! Join HELU's Contingency Task Force on Zoom for a wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast screening of ADJUNCT & a post-screening discussion with filmmaker Ron Najor! Saturday, October 25 at 2:30 ET / 1:30 CT / 12:30 MT / 11:30 PT. Register at bit.ly/watch_adjunct

Academia is where you learn to commodify knowledge, argument, and yourself as you write a dissertation that despairs over the commodification of everything.

Academia is where you find robust structures for the development of job materials at the same time that you find zero jobs in your field.

Good news is that there is no need to workshop your cover letter when there are no jobs and no universities.

When your toddler is experiencing a developmentally appropriate interest in four-wheeled vehicles, but you tend to take a dark view on things.

A major philosopher says yes to a 1.5 hour discussion with a group of critical theory enthusiasts: good things happen sometimes.

Loving the badass opening of the ACLA newsletter by the current President, Karyn Ball.

Something unworked in us but all-determining, a terrible negativity. (Freud on melancholia.)

Returning to Bluesky, with hesitation.

I get whole body hives when I hear robots read to me.

Harder and harder, darker and darker.

When a colony is founded, wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, 'among [the] earliest practical necessities [is] to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.' Hawthorne, early theorist of the settler-carceral-state?

[Adorno's] Negative Dialectics gives us another way of characterizing the dialectical process.

so much hurt

For the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which they are not themselves but stand for other things.

Another giant of cinema departs. Souleymane Cissé is best known for Yeelen (1987), which is a pretty magnificent film, but Baara (1978) is an absolute favourite. If one is interested in factory labour on screen, then one must, at some point, watch Baara and be awed.

I am deeply pleased to be facilitating a discussion on "Crisis, Temporality, and the Novel" at the upcoming Society of Novel Studies conference! Check out this line-up of stars. 1/2

temporalities of the value-form

Autofiction, the oddest possible antipode to the contemporary prevalence of historical fiction.