and yet one of these does not appear on the guardians 100 best novels of all time list. INTERESTING

my firm take is that any man loudly worried about fertility rates is a fucking creep

100 best novels of all time: 100. art 99. refuses 98. the 97. quantitative 96. logic 95. of 94. ranking . . . 1. giovanni’s room

On the "don't know how anything works" scale, believing that U.S. bases in Germany are more of a favor to the Germans than a method of American power projection isn't at the very top, but it's up there.

Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto https://theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-cocktail-at-sam-altmans-home-claims-he-was-following-chatgpt-recipe-for-risotto/

I don’t want to be controversial but I do think it’s turned out that the possibility of nuclear war is a bigger threat to the future of humanity than the woke mind virus

UAntwerp Dept. of Literature seeks full-time doctoral researcher in contemporary anglophone fiction under my supervision. Fully funded up to 4 years. Deadline: 30 April 2026 @uantwerpen.be www.uantwerpen.be/en/jobs/vaca... #academia #literature #affectstudies #familystudies #envhum

I ended up reading some of his blog posts. He seems to argue that one reason why he must banish "wokism" is because left-wingers are intelligent, so they need to be "liberated" from "falsehood". Doesn't seem to consider that perhaps the intelligence might be linked to the views...

IMHO, it is important that Woke 2 be deemed "excessive" by historians, "sweeping too broadly" with "punishments too severe." It cannot be merely a course correction, it must be an overcorrection. Nothing less will serve as an adequate deterrent against the fascists and their collaborators.

This is a heart wrenching read.

Relevant to AI writing, Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, and Sonia Sanchez noted that many want to be writers but don’t wanna write. As Morrison said, “Writing has become almost a celebrity thing in the sense that people don’t want to write; they want to be authors. And that’s quite different.”

Now THAT's a headline. "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents" fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

some of you are looksmaxxing when you need to be booksmaxxing

I think the greatest gift college professors in the humanities can give to students right now is a seminar room where, for 80 minutes twice a week, nothing that happens to them is a sales pitch for an AI product.

there’s a word for something most people generate about once a day and it’s not “book”

I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

Woke 2.0 back with a vengeance. You love to see it.

disturbingly plausible

broke: jews aren't white woke: italians aren't white bespoke: scandinavians aren't white

A uniquely profiled tenure track (Assistant level) position is now open at KU Leuven, dl for applications is February 19: Tenuretrack professor in Cultural and Societal Storytelling www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

It is hard for me not to regard the failure to recognize that the AI boom is inextricable from totalitarian creep as willful ignorance, as either the delusions of those who believe they are immune or an endorsement that doesn’t require a vulgar red cap. But AI boosterism is Trumpism now. Full stop.

kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

1/Leaders are abducted/allies are threatened but pundits and governments are scratching their heads on what the US is doing. Danish PM on Greenland "It makes absolutely no sense". Why? Because actors using old IR models when we need a new lens. Enter neo-royalism. abcnews.go.com/Internationa...

It is 2010 and Thomas Chatterton Williams is releasing an awful anti-woke memoir. It is 2019 and Thomas Chatterton Williams is releasing an awful anti-woke memoir. It is 2025 and Thomas Chatterton Williams is releasing an awful anti-woke memoir. It is 2032 and

Tenuretrack professor in Cultural and Societal Storytelling (Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven) academicpositions.com/ad/ku-leuven...

With Alex Dunst, I edited a special issue on the question of literary value. Silkworms, angels, utopias, Edouard Louis, Thomas Pynchon, and much more. www.boundary2.org/2025/12/alex...

“The purpose of education is so you can get a good job” No it’s not…. Nooooooo it’s not The purpose of education is so you won’t be a dumb ass

Just discovered an insane new form of co-intelligence where you briefly share the mind of a great thinker in history and then a portion of their mind travels in yours for the rest of your life. Calling it a "book."

An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.

One day the US will have to face the shame and horror of what has happened here: that a cabal of wealthy people have elevated a monster into the most powerful person in the world www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/u...

Enormous news for US literature. A new, Mellon-led, $50 million fund for nonprofit literary orgs and publishers. Closest thing we've ever had to it was Mellon and Wallace in 1991, which, in today's dollars, was still less than half this. Open call begins Nov 10. literaryartsfund.org/about/

One of my niche ethical stances is that I think that people should use Wikipedia and donate to the Wikimedia Foundation and that ChatGPT and its siblings are trash and so are the people who use them.

The entire "free speech on campus" moral panic was manufactured to blackmail us into making space in intellectual life for bigots and charlatans who couldn't get there on their own merits. Its a DEI scheme for fascism. Congratulations to everyone who took it at face value.

Trump's literal AI slop shitpost is, if nothing else, an attempt to push the wonderful and encouraging images of millions of protesters out of the feeds and timelines. Flooding the zone with shit also means burying everything beautiful and hopeful under the flood. We should not support him in this

I know Donald Trump is a pathological liar, malignant narcissistic sociopath, racist, antisemite, misogynist, xenophobe, homophobe, transphobe, hater of our troops and believer in euthanizing folks with disabilities, but we too often forget that he's *also* an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon.

Mircea Cărtărescu’s Interview for De Standaard: On Theodoros, Giorgio de Chirico, Surrealism, writing methods, literary fame, ambition, tyranny, and his work in progress theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2025/10/09/m...

My take, which I’ve banged on about before, concerning the state of young people reading these days is that reading is a rhythm. It’s like a mix of slow breathing and being pleasurably bored. We need to bring back spaces and times where our young people can breath and think and get lost in a world.

Man, I'm sorry, but reading all these AI generated essays from students, it just sucks all the joy out of everything. It's exhausting, makes you into a weird paranoid cop, grinds you down, wastes your time, makes you feel like shit about everything. Fuck this shit technology and all its enablers.

Door te begrijpen hoe #pijn in het zenuwstelsel ontstaat, kunnen we betere strategieën ontwikkelen om #chronischepijn te verlichten. Prof. Iris Coppieters (VUB, KU Leuven, Universiteit Maastricht) legt uit waarom #pijneducatie cruciaal is. 🔗 www.tijdschriftkarakter.be/chronische-p...

Amateur view. AI bubble shows that there is too much money chasing too few opportunities for genuine innovation. The solution is to take a medium/long view and put much more funding into basic science in universities rather than cutting as is happening now. (But I would say that wouldn’t I?)

James Baldwin Review (JBR) is proud to announce the publication of its eleventh volume with thanks to the extraordinary collaborative vision of three European guest editors: Remo Verdickt, Pieter Vermeulen, and Gianna Zocco. #JamesBaldwin www.manchesterhive.com/view/journal...

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

Ik kan je verzekeren dat 'lekker discussiëren' met collega's aan de universiteit vele malen 'onveiliger' is dan zoals Waling elke week een EW-stukje tikken voor gelijkgestemden. De conservatieve-commentator-pijplijn is gevuld met gefaalde academici die échte intellectuele kritiek te gemeen vinden.

If a college or university pledged to eliminate not only AI but screens from campus, outside dedicated labs, I would want very badly to teach there.

Filip Brusselmans in Terzake, Fabrizio bij Peter van de Veire, nu dit: ik weet niet waar de openbare omroep met Vlaanderen heen wil, maar ik ben er precies liever niet bij als ze daar aankomt

I’m sorry but let me unbury this lede: *the genAI industry is literally the financial engine that is powering the fascist regime in the United States* I hadn’t even made this connection and now I’m even more horrified by this tech than I have ever been. Boosterism == fascism, literally