Post a poster you used to have on your wall (or ceiling).

"a ChatGPT-generated spiritual world" — someone please point me to the university that is pouring resources into its religious studies department, since that's clearly urgently needed to understand out current moment (see also: Magnifica Humanitas)

Gender studies remains the most vindicated major of all time

to read alongside Mamdani's piece about his support for Arsenal

Articulating a positive case for the university is an important task for intellectuals in this moment, imo.

I know we like to shout at the New York Times a lot here, and often with good reason, but I'm enough of an institutionalist to be mostly thankful for the work its journalists, editors, and—ok, I'll admit—game designers do. M. Gessen's piece today on Hungary is great.

A queer New Zealander friend in New York City recommended her great London trilogy to me 30 years ago. I think it's time to reread this one (the third book) I still have. RIP Maureen Duffy.

this really works for American Studies

Miami is a town built on fruit. (This is basically the argument of my book.) Early Miami elites who are now embedded in South Florida infrastructure (mostly as road names), people like Brickell, Tuttle, Fairchild, Deering, Krome, Merrick, they all promoted and/or grew fruit. 🧵 1/

I can't recall who put "Luka" into my feed a couple of days ago, but whoever you are, thank you (genuinely) for the earworm

Food studies and Miami history friends: how easy would it have been to buy turmeric, coriander seeds, and chili peppers in early C20 South Florida?

Stumbled upon this ad for @ufl.edu in my archival research today—August 29, 1906, in the Daily Miami Metropolis. A High-Grade Institution for young men. Literary, Scientific, and Engineering Courses. Strict Military Discipline.

When the heat builds in the UK, I remember summer 2019 when my dad was hospitalized and the ward—full of elderly, frail people—was unbearably, dangerously hot, while the lobby (a newer part of the building) had AC, so healthy visitors could go to Costa and be cool while patients and staff suffered.

frangipani finally flowered

OTOH, this is making me feel better about how short the book I'm writing is — if 42K is enough for Magnifica Humanitas, then 50K is probably more than the world needs for Mangos.

Much as I love Middlemarch, this is why I (a Victorianist!) have to hand the Greatest Novel trophy to Moby Dick. Could there be an Eliot annotation to match this? "provincial life is important" "unhistoric acts are important" "hospitals are important" "not marrying a scholar is important"

Suez 1956 analogy still looking pretty accurate for the Iran war debacle. After Suez, PM Anthony Eden retreated to Ian Fleming's Goldeneye estate in Jamaica (really), then was forced to resign after returning to Britain. What will be the equivalent aftermath for Trump?

"City are losing a couple of great players, as well as this match." I'm taking a moment to recognize this lovely zeugma by Simon Burnton in the guardian football clockwatch just now, a classy rhetorical move that's tough to pull off in open play.

my unscientific research over the last couple of weeks seems to indicate I'm following more Spurs fans than any other premier league team or maybe they are just the most desperate

It must have been a bad week for the Republican Party because my extremely scientific María Salazar Bipartisanship Index rose by an incredible 60% to an all-time record high of 8 uses of the word "bipartisan" in her weekly newsletter. (She won FL-27 by 20 points in 2024.)

birds are undefeated

since we're talking about the politics of language in a Caribbean context: the Jamaican language is not permissible speech in the Jamaican parliament

I have no insight into the internal affairs of UC Berkeley law school, but it's going to be pretty interesting to see how their new policy effectively banning AI use in student academic work—no AI for brainstorming, editing, grammar checks, writing, etc.—syncs with "lead[ing] the way in AI".

Some have been advocating anti-corruption as the winning coalition message for a while, but I think it was only after Orban's defeat that the idea gained massive traction as a strategy to defeat Trump. His response: more, bigger, the biggest ever corruption. How's that working out for him?

work email stopped working on my phone about 10 days ago for unknown reasons and i have to say 10/10 highly recommend

I don't know why I read to the end of a story about a recent Trump favorability poll, but I learned that way that 35% of American Catholics don't know enough about the Pope to have an opinion about him, and that 35% of Americans believe the recent UFO files are evidence of extraterrestrial life.

I haven't read the story in question, but as the Granta/Commonwealth Writers Prize pile-on builds, I note that few commenting are Caribbeanists and that Caribbean writers and scholars are either a) not on bluesky in the first place (tells us something) and/or b) saving it for the group chats.

an interesting thread, perhaps speaks to our preference for apocalypse narratives this thread also brought home to me that, even though I'm a scholar of literature, I haven't fully come to terms with the fact that LLMs have all these stories baked into them as foundational training data

the 🥭 harvest begins

I'm currently writing our department's annual accreditation assessment report. Of the 9 aspects of student writing we assess, one has really improved significantly this year: "Student conducts close reading of textual evidence." As we know, numbers don't lie: It's the golden age of close reading.

Gotta say it’s a bit on the nose to have a ship full of wealthy white people and an outbreak that’s actually been controlled dominate global media while a major Ebola outbreak in DRC with cross boarder spread is going unnoticed. www.npr.org/2026/05/16/g...

Gardening gives you an additional year, in generally better health, on this green planet. (maybe not statistically significant enough to include in the study, but I did want to know if the 4 surviving members of the 1921 Lothian Birth Cohort in 2025—104 years old!—are gardeners or not)

Pick a Bond from the photos you already have on your phone.

This week's newsletter from Rep. Salazar: the word "bipartisan" used 5 times. (April 17 = zero mention of bipartisan, so there must have been a poll that spooked her later that month.) But there's also a lot of lauding cops and being tough on crime, so she feels a bit safer herself, I'm guessing.

As a child, I heard "population growth is going to destroy us", and now in old age, I hear "population decline is going to destroy us," and despite the Thailand head fake here, it's basically the same old white supremacy, then and now.

Close reading for the 21st century: "When it comes to understanding a culture machine, it may be better to do what those who study literature call 'close reading.'”

are we sure that Trump misheard "cisgender" rather than channeling a garbled antisemitic version of "the Talmud speaks of six genders", especially when the next thing he said is "a real hit on Jesus"?

Have you read a piece of fiction where birds really matter? 🐦 We’re looking for recommendations for our next Space for Reading. Share your books here: https://forms.office.com/e/YSSuGHEKRb

God bless the former student who-- even as I sit here in the Slough of Despond (I am grading final papers)-- writes to tell me they've gotten into their grad program of choice and to thank me again for the letter of recommendation. PLEASE TELL YOUR RECOMMENDERS HOW YOUR APPLICATIONS TURN OUT!

I read this to say: protest must stay within the law, and when it does (local DA says no criminal charges), it must respect the "rights and safety" of the university president, or it will violate university policies on expressive activity. The "rights and safety" of student protesters do not matter.

I confess that for years now, without really thinking it through, I've been telling students that I can't email them grades because of FERPA and I have to post them on Blackboard. I'm definitely thinking this through now, especially as we're being forced onto Canvas next semester.

Every university should have broad subject coverage; that's what a university is

Memory, poetry, the sounds of words: they are strange things, are they not? Reading about Andy Burnham's hope to become MP for Makerfield, a place name I don't ever recall hearing until today, the lines of a poem I knew in my late teens popped into my head. Why? "Yes, I remember Adlestrop."

this truly is the thing that makes the united states exceptional, and right wingers hate it so much they want to destroy it

I'm sure it was just a coincidence that I saw this snake climbing a wall of the building housing our humanities departments today.

after submitting my final grades I had a first go at this: at the congressional district level, "% population drives to work alone" correlates to "% voted Trump 2024" at +0.62, almost the same as correlation of Trump voters and "% population is white" (+0.61)

For further context: almost everyone in the Faculty of Arts is at risk of redundancy. Music, Modern Languages & American & Canadian Studies courses to close completely. History will not close but staff numbers will be significantly reduced. This is what 'right-sizing' looks like, apparently.

how many problems in higher ed on both sides of the Atlantic can be boiled down to this: "their financial strategy of always turning surpluses directly into investment into new buildings"?

Better Off Ed