My soul is so tired but this is also very funny

It's National Alligator Day! Undated watercolor by... Mark Rothko!

Aaron Matz on what, exactly, satire is

A deeply troubled painter. His friend (my grandfather). A legacy of modern art. A sudden theft; it's psychic reverberations. The great art critic Sebastian Smee wrote about my family's story for the Washington Post: www.washingtonpost.com/entertainmen...

I reviewed Francesca Wade's "Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife" for the New Republic: newrepublic.com/article/2027...

THREE POEMS by Jordan Davis @jordandavis.bsky.social Poetry for BURNING HOUSE PRESS @thearsonista.bsky.social LANDSCAPE // LABYRINTH burninghousepress.com/2025/09/20/t...

"Escalator," a 1970 work by Photorealist painter Richard Estes

Our new magazine, Equator, is officially out in the world — and here @equatormag.bsky.social Sign up for preview emails, donate, and get tickets to our launch event in London: equator.org

Last year for The Chronicle I wrote about the long history of the first of these, which has been with us since the 1940s

My latest for @chronicle.com: Charlie Kirk's assassination on a college campus is a catastrophe for higher education and will likely only intensify the Trump administration's war on American colleges and universities.

@lareviewofbooks.bsky.social Did you guys spot this, in the latest New Yorker crossword?

My latest for @newrepublic.com: I went back to Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1974 book “The Denial of Death” to see if it had insights in an age of AI, nightmare tech bros, and the return of Trump in the wake of Covid-19. Turns out it does, though not in the way Becker quite foresaw:

Readers have long been frustrated by Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken". Thanks to AI, it is now possible to explore BOTH of the paths described by the speaker

My essay on the tense relationship between authors and AI, as embodied in a major lawsuit against Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now in the Chronicle of Higher Education: www.chronicle.com/article/what...

Worst thing to happen to book crit was getting mercilessly synced to pub dates. writer gets 97% of the coverage they're ever getting by the end of week 2, & if the book is widely reviewed (positive or not) in prestige places some of your would-be audience burns out on takes & skips the book itself.

Drank so much coffee that I can feel the Nothing nothinging

Read our blog to get an overview of the Anthropic settlement. There’s an FAQ for authors, too. We hope you find it helpful. authorsguild.org/news/what-au...

The Enshittified Ambersons www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

‘David Lynch had a peculiarly subtractive aesthetic. Just as the more you see, the less comprehensible it becomes, the less you can see (the lower the lighting, the poorer the quality) the more there is to look for.’ Ruby Hamilton on the filmmaker: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Did u guys see the Tesla robot video? I think it's dying

It’s publication day for Matthew Holman’s much-anticipated book on poet Frank O’Hara’s career as a curator Available now from Bloomsbury at 30% off in paperback www.bloomsbury.com/us/frank-oha...

Every single quote from the novel supposedly under analysis was hallucinated. Every single one.

Thanks to @evankindley.bsky.social for shepherding this into print. www.chronicle.com/article/peer...

“What is more precise than precision? Illusion.” Today, a long-overdue episode on Marianne Moore, with the great Siobhan Phillips. We talked about Moore’s wonderful poem “Armor’s Undermining Modesty.” open.spotify.com/episode/2FPe...

Wrote a little bit about this great new Rebecca Schiffman record.

“The days slide by and we feel we must / Stamp an impression on them,” Schuyler writes in “Hymn to Life.” “It is quite other. They stamp us.” @evankindley.bsky.social on James Schuyler:

I reviewed Nathan Kernan's long-awaited biography of James Schuyler for The Nation www.thenation.com/article/cult...

Alice Notley passed away yesterday evening in Paris. She said a few years ago, “What can we learn from the fact that we don’t die?” I’m heartbroken, & heartbroken for everyone who knew & loved her, her work.

some professional news

I wrote on Henry James and America for @chronicle.com www.chronicle.com/article/henr...

i wrote about every michael mann protagonist for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social lareviewofbooks.org/article/mann...

“It must be hard to be March, one of those adolescent months people patiently wait for the year to outgrow.” (line from James Schuyler's diary, March 10, 1971)

I’m hosting a celebration of Kenneth Koch at The New School on March 17 at 7 pm. Speakers will include Robert Polito, Ron Padgett, Maxine Groffsky, John Keene, Lucy Sante and Jim Jarmusch.

Melons could kill you; so could melancholy. In his new book Eating and Being, the historian of science Steven Shapin analyzes the longest-enduring system of medical and gastronomic thought in European history, dietetics. My review is up at LARB: lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-m...

It appears a rush of small magazines have all joined bluesky and so we have gathered them in this convenient starter pack so that you can follow them all, too. go.bsky.app/2JYffeG