"How the book came to function as a key representative of Canadian settler exceptionalism" -- a new study by my brilliant colleague Jody Mason www.mqup.ca/Books/B/Book...

Wrote this for @journalspectre.bsky.social in response to Vivek Chibber and the broader resurgence of economistic materialism. Drawing on the concept of fetishism, I suggest such approaches revive errors Marx had already sought to critique spectrejournal.com/beyond-the-w...

🚨 If you're in Montreal for #ACLA, come see this outstanding seminar! On Saturday at 4:00, I'll be talking about the secondary school's fascination with dystopia in a paper called "The Individual vs. Society: Doublethinking High School English"!

Doing a mini east coast book tour, starting this Friday: Montreal: Friday 2/27 at Librairie l’Euguélionne with @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social (6pm) Brooklyn: Monday 3/2 at The Word is Change with @downevent.bsky.social (6pm) Baltimore: Tuesday 3/3 at Red Emma’s with @keegancf.bsky.social (7pm)

Hell World's Chief Jacob Elordi Correspondent @raxkingisdead.bsky.social writes about Emerald Fennell's “Wuthering Heights.” "It seems to me she’s less interested in creating a mood of genuine eroticism than in detailing every possible type of goop that can drip out of a person."

Nearly all my thoughts about AI I’ve gotten from the three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse and it’s helped make sense of it all so far.

"Women adopt AI at rates 25% lower than men. This isn’t a guess. It’s the finding of a Harvard Business School meta-analysis examining eighteen studies, over 140,000 participants, across multiple countries." "Every AI Company Is Building a Different Wife" abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built...

I'm starting to get ready for the ACLA in Montreal next weekend. If you are looking for something to do in B stream, with one extra session Saturday at 4pm, consider this seminar on Conspiracism, co-organized with @lkonstan.bsky.social and @lalouverouge.bsky.social ❤️‍🔥

I have so much to say about the LARB situation & I’m probably going to swallow most of it, but here’s the single most important thing about LARB’s history that none of the recent bitter (& sometimes justified) rage-posting has mentioned:

I'll be having a live online conversation about it with her for @equatormag.bsky.social next Thursday. Register here: www.eventbrite.com/e/epstein-fa...

my dad just told me about his invented device to hold an ice cream cone from DQ drive thru (he has Parkinsons and can't drive with one hand at all) it's a toilet paper roll with just enough left on it that it fits snug in the cup holder free idea for anyone who has faced this struggle 😊

I find Sophie Bishop's research on "influencer creep" very generative and have been turning to it a lot. So I was pleased to be able to write a review of her book here!

all time absolute banger

One of my arguments in my book Family Abolition is that idealizing traditional family values, death camps for children, and systematic child rape are all different sides of the same logic. I did not expect news headlines to spend the next three years relentlessly proving this right.

How and why police actually support the federal invasions—I have been working on this article for ~6 months, trying to make sense of Trump’s nationwide surge of DHS officers, how it has evolved, what brought us here, and what will remain after it ends.

From tear gas attacks to violent abductions, we are collectively witnessing the mass-scale abuse of children. Young people are fighting back.

I find this so fucking sad actually it's from a great article by @bildoperationen.bsky.social journals.openedition.org/transbordeur...

if you will be in Montreal on ACLA weekend we would love to see you at this event Friday Feb 27th, 6-8PM -- celebrating and discussing Solidarity with Children by @lalouverouge.bsky.social

So, @ketanjoshi.co who has been on the beat for a long time, actually looked into the story of if "AI" can "solve climate change". Conceptually as well as evidence based. Super worth reading and sharing around.

I have a new post at the Remaking blog on That Atlantic Article. It blames Mellon for the humanities crisis, I say why this is misdirected. It's not the wokeness it's the weakness--weakness in (not) fighting for a funding system for ALL humanities research. utotherescue.blogspot.com/2026/02/line...

worth noting that the second rich people stopped being afraid of mobs tearing them limb from limb, they stopped building libraries and opera houses and stuff and started ripping the copper wiring out of the walls of society instead

finishing reading vol. 3 so that I may become truly insufferable

straight fire from Melinda Cooper as usual

I'm working on a reader (in both English and German) to collect literature critical of the employment of generative AI technologies within academic contexts. Please feel free to add relevant titles here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Excited to read this share.google/STKJgHop3FVm...

The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

I finally wrote my big essay about Daniel Berrigan! For anyone with an interest in non-violence, futility, the political/social/moral role of writing, and so much more, even if you've never heard of the man www.bookforum.com/print/3203/f...

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: “.. In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.” hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

I got to give a talk last week about one of my very favorite topics--prison education! So much gratitude to @ucilifted.bsky.social

I find this question about whether chatbots are “alive” to be truly, truly boring. You can torture a definition of “life” so that it includes chatbots or you can listen to actual, unequivocal flesh-and-blood people talking about harm it does them *right now*.

As some of you may know, I’m writing a book on the history of high school English in the United States, and I’m excited to share a new article from that project—“High School English and the Making of American Readers”—out today in American Literary History! 🧵 academic.oup.com/alh/article/...

Incredible, horrific piece. thebaffler.com/latest/im-no...

For the past couple of years I’ve been working on a weird little collection of poems about the Kaua’i ‘akioloa, a Hawaiian honeycreeper that was the last member of its whole genus. I’m over the moon to say that said collection has found a home at Flume Press: flumepress.com/contest/

Hell yeah.

Read this fantastic roundtable that @andyhines.bsky.social put together featuring faves Vineeta Singh, Annie McClanahan, Dan Nemser, and Rana Jaleel. The possibility of the university lives!

another thing about AI-enabled research is that academics in secure jobs will say this is economic exigency: "funding for humanities research is drying up so I might as well use this instead" the earlier research on which we established our careers was supported by paid grad students

LLMLM?

To be very clear, that lady in the NYT article is not making any money with her hundreds of AI slop books. She makes money by *convincing people* she makes money that way and getting them to pay her to teach them how to do it. It's an evolved MLM, and the NYT is helping market it.

the thing i'm waiting for with the ai romance novel lady is for another scammer to figure out that purely ai-generated material w no human authorship is generally not considered to be protected by copyright in the US rn, and saving themselves the 45 mins per book by reselling hers

We are quickly moving from “the inevitable future of existence” to “multilevel marketing wine club hustle”

this has been going on in non-fiction and low content books for a long time -- it was only a matter of time; Ms. Hart is selling access to her technique and developing proprietary tech, just taking advantage of how many people out there are desperate for some kind of income

‘The International Energy Agency reckons that if the current global expansion of data centres continues, the CO2 emissions for which they are responsible, currently around 200 million tonnes per year, will be about 60 per cent higher by 2030.’ Donald MacKenzie on AI. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

There's something very important in this from @alondra.bsky.social about how a government of bosses understands its relationship to AI: as a means to avoid preexisting, even nominal, deference to popular deliberation or expert consultation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

screaming, crying, ordering ten copies 💖❤️‍🔥

really really good piece by @mattseybold.bsky.social : theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/you-have-t...

this is a good piece about writers turning to AI not to generate whole stories but for speed up, because they are stressed out by online content expectations (h/t @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social who I believe recommended): www.theverge.com/c/23194235/a...

for those following AI & labour news, I was just reading about the Washington Post and: "The layoffs come as Will Lewis, the Post’s publisher and CEO, continues to push a new strategy centered on subscriptions, events, and heavier use of AI."

I am fucking DYING inside: "AI Slop serves a social function: it offers a supply-side solution to a variety of problems in cultural and economic demand—that, collectively, people want more content than humans can supply."