It me, I’m the live bagpipe music at the Robert Louis Stevenson birthday celebration happening in Saranac Lake, NY next week.

“Turns out that AI is very bad at most jobs, and this pivot to leisure is likely indicative of the industry’s mounting desperation, … now that it has failed to ‘outperform humans at most economically valuable work.’” www.thecut.com/article/woul...

Mamdani got a humanities degree. His win helps to illustrate that one of the central forces driving higher ed’s dissolution of the humanities is the fear that teaching people how power works can also lead to their interest in seizing it on behalf of the less powerful.

Major in Africana Studies or any humanities course like English Literature! You could be mayor of New York City. You could do anything.

Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.

teaching Woolf is going great, as you can see

A few years ago I replied to a twitter thread about improvisation by recommending some other folks' work. Sheila, insightful, perhaps picking up my nervousness, inquired about my own. I was dead thrilled that she ended up citing me in her gorgeous book Hanging Out, and am now doubly grateful.

After several long years, I am thrilled to have this review of @dandipiero.bsky.social’s wonderful book, CONTINGENT ENCOUNTERS, finally appear in the African American Review

If you read an amazing article from Teen Vogue about politics in the last several years, chances are that Lex McMenamin wrote it. Any publication that is serious about meeting this moment would be lucky to have them.

CAMPUS VISIT WITH THE VAMPIRE TEACHING DEMO WITH THE VAMPIRE SIT-DOWN WITH THE DEAN WITH THE VAMPIRE APOLOGETIC EMAIL THAT THE SEARCH WAS CANCELED WITH THE VAMPIRE

In a draft of a story that was later published posthumously, Edith Wharton commented, “I have reached the age when the only night of the year when my little house is really crowded is on All Souls' Eve when I sit alone and [my friends] come, who have been the joy and solace of my life…”

Yesterday, I had to pack a lunch to take to an all-day workshop and was running low on groceries, so I quickly assembled a *brussels sprout sandwich,* which I then had to consume in front of other people like a total weirdo

Galadriel except make it bling

5 students in my 8:30 class this morning. Let’s just declare Halloween a national holiday already, for the sake of the youth.

“… the ability to determine what is being argued for and how is not dispensable. No aspect of cognitive understanding is perfunctory.”

I made a haunted house and Dave made, uh, an “eye of Sauron”

Forgot until just now that the sunrise was glorious this morning and that I got a photo before it faded to solid cloud cover

This is sometimes read as "look 'AI' isn't working". But the opposite is true. _This_ is what "AI" is _for_. Push down labor power, push down wages, make employment more insecure. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/forrester_ai_rehiring/

Today a colleague walked into my classroom while I was teaching, placed a bouquet of flowers in front of me on the lectern, and walked out again. ❤️

Whatever strategy you’re about to suggest, we’ve thought about it. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Taught Adrienne Rich this morning and Virginia Woolf this afternoon, aka a perfect day in my little corner of the universe

Finished up my VT Film Fest experience with last night’s showing of THE SECRET AGENT (2025) — tense, disturbing, profound, and wonderfully acted.

BREAKING: economist discovers “second shift,” a concept coined by sociologists almost 50 years ago; gives it new, stupider, and less explicitly labor-oriented name

Private tech companies feeding at the trough of taxpayer-supported public institutions www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/t...

I love shopping for whiskey while wearing a kilt, which always make me feel like an accidental piece of viral marketing

About once a year I get really upset about Horace Greeley’s neckbeard

You guys, I am over-the-moon for BLUE MOON, which I saw the VT Film Fest last night. Proof that a) Linklater’s still go it and b) movie viewers, contra Hollywood, still have an appetite for *well-written* films that are mostly just TALKING, but finely tuned talking

“horror has emerged as the genre most capable of processing our fractured moment … it is revealing itself as the defining genre of the 21st century.” www.theguardian.com/film/ng-inte...

My best friend and I are hosting a Federici reading group and everyone we’ve invited has declined so it’s just going to be my best friend and me which is fine, actually

This whole article is fabulously smart, but this line, in particular, is its crowning glory.

“When people sense that power is beyond challenge, they redirect their energy into trivial disputes. And those trivialities, collectively, are enough to erode a society’s very foundations of justice.”

How to stay focused on teaching when this is the view from the classroom:

You'll have to wait for July to read it, but @seeshespeak.bsky.social and I recorded our conversation on Monday, and we have THOUGHTS.

“I feel offended that anyone would think this is what humans want from companionship: a voice with no interiority giving the verbal equivalent of a thumbs up emoji … Surely being alone is preferable to bland inanities?” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

lol I’m applying for promotion to full professor and my college is demanding OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPTS — as in the kind you have to pay for — from the schools I’ve attended, which I did not have to provide in order to get hired here in the first place

o canvas we love you, get up* *don’t, because we don’t

As a 3rd generation academic, my family has been teaching continuously since the 1950s and only the last 20 years involved Learning Management Systems. They’re by no means necessary to the project of learning, and if they demand surrendering autonomy to corporations then they should be discontinued.

Get ready for WICKER MAN WEEK at @flaminghydra.com

Canvas is down because of the AWS thing and, aside from all the emails I’ve had to field about it being down, I’m having a lovely time.

When you play bagpipes and all your friends play bagpipes but then, at a bagpipe party, someone shows up with a set of the most insane (17th c German) bagpipes you’ve ever seen.

Got to teach some of Millay’s sonnets in class today and then got to brag about living in her barn for a month last June.

“… the Iowa farmer who can’t run his combine because of a farm equipment monopoly has a heck of a lot in common with the Bangladeshi dad who can’t work the morning commute because he’s locked out by Uber.” newrepublic.com/article/2011...

Do you ever feel like you know too many people? Like maybe it would be okay if you just knew like 4 or 5 really nice, good quality people?

Was looking for an email I received yesterday and couldn’t find it and then realized it was 3 pages back in my inbox already, fml

GOP’s labor market policy is market protectionism for white men.

“… the gross repeal of a right that took decades to build is at risk of going unreported … Without culture, our capacities for self-government atrophy, our local communities wane, our intellectual and emotional lives wither and default to AI slop, and our paths to meaning and fulfillment close.”

For a century, the BBC has broadcast the weather report for the seas around the UK. "The Shipping Forecast" has informed and lulled generations who tune in to hear it.

This is how I spent my day and it was disgustingly, astonishingly good.

Watched IN THE DARK (2000) for the first time last night — a film that is so cheaply and basically made, it ought to be awful. But it’s not; in fact, it’s proof that sometimes all you need for a really good film is a *really really good script*.