ohhhhh what I wouldn't give for butterflies and brew at chesil beach.... (cc @sforrest.bsky.social )

Join me @tokyohumanities.bsky.social in a few weeks!

Where can you learn about the history of print in early modern Japan in its various forms? Revisit our #NCCSpotlight by Dr. Kit Brooks on the Pulverer Collection of Edo period illustrated books at the National Museum of Asian Art! ✨🗾 guides.nccjapan.org/homepage/new...

Would you like some whimsy? We're sharing introductions to each of the rats in our Rat Trail by artist/maker Fong Scott. Watch now on our YouTube playlist! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

get caught up on the backstory while you can't get caught up on grading theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/historyofc...

50 years ago today, Thomas Burnett Swann died of cancer. He pushed boundaries of gender and sexuality in his poetic, bittersweet novels and was easily one of the best writers of fantasy in the 1970s. You can read more about Swann and why he mattered in my @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social piece:

Y'all mind if I trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored?

What happened at the Supreme Court is about anti-Blackness and curtailing Black political power. Trump as a corrective to Obama. Anti CRT/ DEI as a corrective to Black Lives Matter and Black progress in education and the workforce. Anti-Blackness is America’s favorite manner of self-harm.

SHIBUYA maru-maru BOOKS, a "shared bookstore" where anyone can sell books for 4950 yen/month. Located on the 8th floor of Shibuya Hikarie.

but on the bright side: hydrangeas

reading people writing in the early 1900s about the malaise and stress and metaphysical emptiness of modernity and just thinking "yall ain't seen nothing yet :')"

New Fandom & Popular Culture Collection 📢 A collection of cutting edge research from our fandom and pop culture list • 12 journals and 52 e-books • Full Fan Phenomena Series Popular Culture Association Fan Studies Network www.intellectdiscover.com/content/fandom-popular-culture-collection

Me, at a naval museum, reading a display about sea mammals being trained to do recovery work: “Oh! Look! It says here that dolphins train for 5-7 years. It’s like they get a PhD!” [reads further] “Oh…no. Never mind. It also says that ‘naval animals learn through positive reinforcement.’”

God this poem is haunting me again.

Anti-War protest tonight at 6 pm at the White House. Spread the word!

Algorithmic media will send you endless signals about what you should create. Those signals will be expressed in unverifiable quantities from "proprietary" metrics. They are no disinterested. And you do not have to listen to them.

Herman Melville on moderates, all the way back in 1857:

The results have exceeded even our most whimsical expectations. Meet our rats!

Calling researchers of Japan! The JPP Library Services Team is interested in learning from you what services and benefits our team may provide to enhance the accessibility of Japan-related research and teaching resources in your region, language, institution, and/or discipline. 📋 bit.ly/JPPSurveyR

that whole thread is good but I simply had to share "consider the chad woodblock"

5) Consider the Chad woodblock: - Only needs one literate person (the copyist; the carver and the printer just need steady hands) - Makes print runs of one copy completely practical - Gives us the word for "copyright," 版權, pleasingly "control over the blocks."

I write about Elizabeth Cady Stanton for The New Yorker. www.newyorker.com/books/under-...

If you’d like to read my essay about George Orwell, writing by machines, and our current nihilism about meaning, I offer you the entire zine in this thread. I will finish the thread with instructions on how to print your own copies of the zine. #OrwellvsChatGPT

I am an Old and would therefore like everyone to appreciate the meme I just made for my @asianstudies.org presentation this Sunday. It's extremely niche, but I understand that's the nature of these things

haven't even achieved candidacy and am already like "well this could be a second book project..."

y'all !!!! I love that the blurbs are basically like, "listen, she is never not telling you about some bleak shit" 😍❤️‍🔥 (thank you @aarthivadde.bsky.social and @markmcgurl.bsky.social)

Do you want to find the best #books on #Korea? Well, I don't have time to read everything, but I do have some recommendations. These are, mostly, academic books. I don't read many mass market books on Korea, and when I do, I'm often annoyed with their facile shallow misunderstandings.

どなたかがついったで「『魂のルフラン』って、鮭の遡上の歌みたい」とついとしてたのを見て以来、あの歌を聴くと鮭の遡上しか思い浮かばなくなった… 歌詞がドンピシャで、もうどう読んでも全鮭🐟のために書かれたとしか思えない…

woke up this morning and was confused to be treated to an absolutely beautiful sunrise, when the day before I had woken up at the same time and the sun was already up. (another thing to get reaccustomed to when returning to the US!)

I would expand this and suggest many, if not most, people tend to be "vague on the mechanics of actual work" if that work falls outside their own experience/experience of their social circle.

On this #WorldWildlifeDay I saw a squirrel, mouth stuffed with fallen leaves, climb up a tree into a campus building's open window where it was building a nest, and also saw a Canada goose (closer than I've ever seen before!) very thoughtfully pause its eating to take a little poo.

Today is #WorldWildlifeDay! Celebrating familiar wildlife from the archives, illustrated by Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826): 🐿️ Sciurus vulgaris (MS Sherard 238, Pl. 8) 🪶 Ardea purpurea (MS Sherard 240, Pl. 79) 🦔 Erinaceus europaeus (MS Sherard 238, Pl. 6)

Lorraine Schneider, 1967.

“If the centralized state could not rely upon the inculcation of nationalist loyalties in public and private schools, its leaders would promptly seek to modify the decentralized educational system.” - C. Wright Mills

I continue to be fascinated by the phenomenon whereby an expert engages with any of the LLMs on their field of expertise and is instantly horrified by the wrong answers, and then goes on to use it for things they are not experts in as though it won’t be just as bad for those.

I have seen a bunch of things floating around lately about Making Humanities Graduate Degrees Useful, etc, and I think the number 1 thing I would want to see as of today in 2026 is "more collaborative work for humanities grad students early on"

みんな大好き、うつろ舟🛸。いよいよ明日から原本展示です❗ 国立公文書館で～3/13金まで。 www.archives.go.jp/news/2026021...

Popular literature at train stations makes me feel connected to 200 years of riders. I own penny dreadfuls from the 1880s for this purpose We do communal dining, and most of the people on this train are here because they want to. The travel is the point, not a hurdle to jump as quickly as possible.

When people decry the excesses of the wealthy/ultra wealthy, I often see retorts like "well, it's their money, they can do what they want with it" or "sure, they COULD use it to help the poor, but they don't OWE poor people anything." Beyond lacking basic human empathy, this is simply incorrect

The sense that women have excessive moral obligations to men—to care for their feelings, to defer to their interests—but can legitimately make only minor claims in such care from others is central to how misogyny actually perpetrates itself as an ideology.

There's this very mechanical way of thinking people have, e.g. "this vitamin found in fruit is healthy so I will take it in a pill," but time and time again it turns out the surrounding system is actually important too (e.g. sometimes you need the rest of the fruit to be able to absorb the vitamin).

I found this reply interesting ("Can those foreign companies open shop in the US?") I don't think Japanese or South Korean menswear can be made in the US. At least, not without losing something. Let's explore why. 🧵

Japan has 35 stunning national parks scattered throughout the country. Now, the nation is challenging visitors to visit all of them in turn with its new stamp rally, available in four languages. Here's an overview of the campaign, along with some park highlights. buff.ly/qeza0iv

If you study the zine movement in the Anglophone sphere, you should probably do the basics to familiarize yourself with the (history of the) genre in Japan, which is probably deeper/ wider. Studying Japanese is a prerequisite to really knowing your stuff, but at least read up on what's in English.

it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time

Translation is so misunderstood that sometimes clients will kneecap great translations in favor of awkward, clunky, unnatural ones simply because the client believes the latter to be more "accurate" and "faithful."

*bangs on the table in agreement* translator Cathy Hirano gave us the phrase 'spark joy' -- that's the power of a good localiser, the ability to convey something so well it goes from a national concept to a worldwide meme.

My latest article on #LGBTQ+ activism among Thai #BL idols has just been released free and open access in Celebrity Studies! The article explores how #EarthMix and #ZeeNunew used their celebrity platforms to advocate for marriage equality 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈 doi.org/10.1080/1939...

Can love hold a nation together—or hold it down? In her new book, @tingguowrites.bsky.social uncovers how Chinese leaders from Sun Yat-sen to Xi Jinping have harnessed the language of love—universal, ardent, paternal—to stir hearts, shape ideology, and legitimise power across a century.

There are lots of shocks to the system when you move back to the US after living elsewhere for a while, like applying for jobs and seeing them proudly list "healthcare" and "prescription coverage" under their benefits.