also, 21 years on from my last comp-lit course: I finally read Lord's Singer of Tales (in digital ed., h/t @dasmiq.bsky.social for the link on a syllabus of his). https://bookwyrm.social/user/agoldst/comment/9290902#anchor-9290902

@kjhealy you've done it! a grand unified theory of academic administration, at long last!

RE: https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115774921473852315 this functionalist theory of university websites is, however, in tension with the institutionalist principle that the people in charge have no clue & just want one that looks like everyone else's

an actually good critical genealogy of machine-generated articles: from Derek Price's bibliometry to PageRank to LLM-SEO, metricization is the institutional context for slop. https://artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/context-widows

postscript on "great books": you may not like it, but B Weiss is what a Columbia Core Curriculum education looks like

"Instead, what appears to have happened is a lot of empty talk, no real significant change, and backlash that is causing real harm. This is the worst of all possible worlds." https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/17/what-does-the-census-data-say-about-the-lost-generation/

The one problem that rules them all is taking away the wealth of oligarchs, whose personal holdings dwarf entire social problems for everyone else.

constative, meet performative

one of the great things about sticking with mutt as my mail reader is what it does to management holiday greetings, as if the boss had read Edwin Morgan's "The Computer's First Christmas Card"

it seems D. Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies was the 1st book ordered from amazon. Having been the kind of nerd who asked his mom for a copy, I feel…complicit https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/amazon-order/

such political, very literary: award-winning novelist's muckraking story about exploited content moderators, published by Amazon in their "Out of Line collection." "Borrow" it "free" on Prime

since registration's over, I can safely advertise my spring courses. Tagline: "Fulfills your AHp & WCd Core requirements & my need to teach metrics for one week every year!" https://andrewgoldstone.com/blog/s26offerings/

Newfield on university-finance charades: ignore the sword of Damocles and it goes away, right? In 6 months our mgmt has gone from "PANIC AUSTERITY DOOM" to "la la la it's fine" https://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/12/liner-note-44-2025-crisis-in-university.html

Q: you’re really supporting another GOVERNMENT REGULATION? A: uh huh

mandatory ethics training: groundwork of the metaphysics of pastrami on rye

attempted to relieve stress by fiddling with zsh completions for a while. Maybe I'll propose replacing the entire zshcompwid and zshcompsys manpages with the text "GIT GUD"

RE: https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/115703587197815919 Well, it matches MY age-8 experience of 8-bit gaming: baffling instructions, screaming frustration at getting through early levels, relying on perverse rituals in hopes of placating the machine-god

fantasy ethnography project: the people who make careers out of the disintegration of professions. Academic career coaches. Obstructionist professional-org staff careerists. Journalists on the beat…

Most enduring part of annual compliance training is the skit in which a woman mgr. sexually harasses an innocent pony-tailed male consultant ("it can be really hard lotioning yourself up properly")

reading Ligaya Mishan waxing lyrical about a $300/psn kaiseki place, remembering when she wrote "Hungry City," and yielding up moral questions in despair

every time I waver about bluesky, I go look at the replies to a post by someone I admire over there who is mildly popular. Duly reminded of The Discourse, I return to the calming silences of mastodon.

Experimental by @ncecire.bsky.social also contains what is certainly the greatest acknowledgments line in post-2009 literary criticism https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:r7q2q2tenibf5ekc6utn4zhy/post/3m6lt6rerbc2z

"a 'modern' young man lately come up from Rutgers or some such institution." Editorial, The Double Dealer 3, no. 17, (May 1922): 227, HathiTrust.

search result snippet drafted by Lucky from Waiting for Godot #waitingforgodocr

today's glimpse into the Web We Lost: the adherents dot com list of religious affiliations of famous science fiction authors, online since 1999 but now vanishèd https://web.archive.org/web/20190617075634/http://www.adherents.com/adh_sf.html

brief glimpse of deported reds singing the Internationale is okay I guess, the rest is just for modernism completists (not me) https://bookwyrm.social/user/agoldst/comment/9052044#anchor-9052044

Stick with the classics #phonebasedphishing

starting a file for an article titled "PhD, AO3: new trajectories of cultural capital"; first entry is this website profile of YA/romance author Ali Hazelwood

And Murderbot no. 3: #effort https://bookwyrm.social/user/agoldst/comment/9015258#anchor-9015258

A placeholder for more extended writing on the whole of Michael Mann's Sources of Social Power—a few thoughts on vol. 4 https://bookwyrm.social/user/agoldst/review/9015148/s/well-here-we-are#anchor-9015148

Some bookwyrm posts about this fall's bedtime reading. I read Asimov's I, Robot: confirming I don't like is=ought fanfic. I'll keep teaching "Reason," which isn't. https://bookwyrm.social/user/agoldst/comment/9015242#anchor-9015242

there it is

Kind of a heavy teaching load for a University Professor who is utterly disgraced, no?

remember 2000, when colleges couldn't assign calculus homework anymore because everyone could use Mathematica to solve all the problems?

in every sense, lucky Jim https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/november/a-diagnosis

I sure hope Zohran is gonna do something about this nyc schools “fundations” curriculum because spelling is not the only thing that needs correcting here

Gelman glosses LS with the malice he deserves & says "feel free to use this post in your next English literature class." Close-reading exercise: who is "you"? https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/11/13/the-value-of-close-reading-larry-summers-edition/

Somebot's sensibilities were offended by Wiki's page on "puce" using a line from Zola, "between puce and goose shit [caca d'oie]" & subbed "nguh" (?). Tried to fix but got autoflagged as vandalism.

As one of the chief architects of neoliberal shock therapy in Russia, Summers was directly responsible for suffering on the same scale as one of the world wars in the at country. Michael Mann:

Conclusive proof that he is the real problem #neverclick

Furthermore, a lot of people feel this way about reading, while also having internalized some idea that reading (as such, not necessarily reading anything in particular) is a moral good, leaving the whole area of literacy a maelstrom of cognitive dissonance and shame

also obviously #neverclick when it's the CHE but bringing in Danielle "will 'debate' Yarvin, am giving the 'compact' a fair hearing'" Allen is truly the ne plus ultra of Chronicle-ism.

worth pondering how and why accessibility compliance has become red meat for higher ed managers and the IT vendors that market to them

II was looking at the Kirkus review page for J Schumacher's Dear Committee Members (don't ask), & the same page has the review of The Handmaid's Tale underneath? I sort of see the connection, but…?

Really inspiring to hear the Internationale piped into all the subway cars this morning

O Rose treat or trick. The great Gummi Worm That flies in the night In the howling storm&m Has found out thy bag Of Almond Joy: And his Special Dark love Does thy teeth destroy. #blakeortreat

occasionally I think about how annoyed I was at the phase of DH where ppl were like, "sure it's kind of glitchy and doesn't show anything concrete but it's exploratory, it's aleatory, it's creative"

PCS on strike at the British Library. Solidarity! The institution is nothing without the people who make it work.

just bookmarking this for later, as one does. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (in The Affluent Society [NY: Library of America, 2010], 261–62)