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."

The Frankfurt School be like . . .

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

I think more than anything else AI feels like a miracle to people with questionable literacy because it can read and write for you, and a lot of us who are highly literate underestimate how many of our society's leaders, esp in business, struggle with literacy.

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

Public Events on Memory & Responsibility 🌍 Roundtable: Practising Memory in Times of Crisis — Amani El Haddad, Manoeuvre vzw, Pieter Lagrou, Ann Rigney & Michael Rothberg 🎓 Keynotes: Carlos Fonseca · Sara Dybris McQuaid · Hanna Meretoja Info and registration: event.ugent.be/registration...

as hard as it is to imagine political solutions to the current moment, it’s even harder to imagine how we could be expected to comfortably share a society with these fucking babykillers

Accessible and expanding archive of resources tailored for teachers who are trying to explain and engender AI skepticism, create AI-free classrooms and curricula, & think with other scholars and educators who are doing the same.

Europeans have come to detest immigrants and can no longer explain why in any rational fashion. Islamist terrorism has declined to nearly nothing. Crime is low. Immigrants have jobs and so do locals. Only remaining one is blaming them for the housing shortage which is gibberish

Forget the comparisons to Hitler or Mao, the allusions to Orwell or Huxley, we are headed into new levels of distortion and deception fueled by a narcissistic ego and a collapsing empire, made possible by new technologies of fabrication and hallucination

So-called «artificial intelligence» is essentially an explication machine, rendering explicit not only latent patterns in masses of data, but also fascist tendencies in liberal democracies as well as the exploitative, extractivist, and ultimately destructive business models of platform capitalism 1/

I don't have a great answer on what this looks like or how to do this but it's pretty clear people want a job market that translates "work hard and do the right thing" into "stable middle class lifestyle" without engaging in a risky gamble about predicting the sectoral labor market 20 years from now

Life of an ordinary older academic

Backlash to AI is coming and honestly we might actually save the English major by just advertising it with: Write with your human brain. No bots allowed.”

Googled the Princeton-legacy Princeton professor who wrote that bad piece about generative AI in the New Yorker to try to figure out what his deal is and this 2001/2025 before-and-after makes for a real capsule history of the 21st century so far

Computers used to scream every time they connected to the Internet. They knew. They tried to warn us. We did not listen.

Dus als Iran terugslaat - wat het het recht heeft om te doen - zou de hele NAVO betrokken worden? En voor dat soort fascistische oorlogszucht zouden we 5% bbp moeten besteden? Zijn we collectief gek geworden?

The way nobody can drive well anymore because of GPS — not just atrophied turn-by-turn navigation, but the way ppl no longer know the layouts of their town or the names of roads or what to do when the map doesn’t match the terrain — that’s what genAI is doing to communication skills and literacy

Funniest detail to me re: Thom Yorke's weird relationship to Israel is that it's the first place Creep really took off so Israel kinda launched Radiohead's career. Israeli music fans could not get enough of a song that asks "what the hell am I doing here" and answers with "I don't belong here."

Wer "Elfenbeinturm" sagt und dass die Unis ja an Trumps Vorgehen irgendwie auch schuld seien ... hat schon verloren.

“Preserving art, literature, and philosophy will require no less than the creation of an environment totally and uncompromisingly committed to abolishing the linguistic alienation created by AI and reintroducing students to the indispensability of their own voice.“

This is so true and equally valid of Trump’s other fellow travelers: “free speech purists” who hate progressives more than they love free speech; “economic nationalists” who hate foreigners more than they love their own; and the tech billionaires who hate regulation more than they love science.

this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...

I think in part the higher education funding crisis and the LLM-teaching crisis actually strike at the same problem, which is that education doesn't work without a broad, society-wide sense that the *actual content* of education - not the credential - is valuable.