Reading/re-reading this week after recently seeing the thrilling Tracey Emin exhibition A Second Life at the Tate. The works, especially the ones that are so familiar, retain all their power to stop you in your tracks.

Caiman wins ‘who wore the butterflies best’

How would I know we’ve not been on speaking terms since I told chapters two and four they’re not going on tour and made the coda lead singer

As I revise, thinking about Maggie Nelson’s interview in The Paris Review that quotes Barthes to describe the process of getting to the emergence of the second text - the active text of pleasure - by working on the first reactive text, that of defenses and fears, till it loses its ‘reactive skin’

I may have inadvertently scouted the next Wallace and Gromit stage set

After the recent heatwave here this neoclassical relic of western art surrounded by an algae bloom feels a pretty apt metaphor for #climate

“Maybe I write because it is a way of thinking that has no possible match. It is a very active way of thinking. You think more clearly when you have to put something down in words.”—Javier Marías

College is not a “stamp of approval” for “select people”; it is, overwhelmingly, public infrastructure whose function is to educate the public and advance inquiry in all areas of study. It should be free to all because learning serves the social good and prepares people to participate in social life

Wrote a little about Kate Marvel’s Human Nature: 9 Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet kasiareads.com/2026/03/11/h...

Wonderful review of a performance based on Dürer’s Rhinoceros: “the performance takes up puppetry as a dynamic and … a unique access for us to reimagine the objects with a diverse mode of liveliness, demanding that we rediscover the subjecthood of animals that we have long ignored and suppressed.”

I made a WhatsApp sticker of my photo of my favorite Caravaggio. The app now offers to make it 3D with AI effects. I tried it: A swan head vomiting a shrimp(?), faces of pure horror, a partial decapitation, the LEGS, the HANDS 😬

www.chronicle.com/article/my-s... This article is necessary reading

Great editorial opportunity! 👇 ISLE is a great journal

In the latest play from Project 2025, the Trump Administration has announced plans to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a $368 million network of more than 900 instruments that continuously monitor the ocean. This is a deliberate destruction of critical scientific infrastructure.

Gave a work-in-progress talk today on “Emergent #Affects of the ‘Insect Apocalypse’” at Heidelberg University, the Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies. The ideas you feel least sure about often produce the best conversations.

www.regulations.gov/document/NOA... Today June 2 is the last day to comment on US govt proposal to rollback regulations on slow ship speeds that help prevent boats from striking whales 🐋 esp in areas of the highly endangered right #whale - in favor of what they term “alternative management”

This!! Reading parties, no-late-fee borrowing from public libraries, creating the conditions for readers to read. Italy Germany and France gave 18-year-olds a 500-Euro cultural voucher and in Italy 70 percent was spent on books. Make America Read Again www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/o...

Peer review and expertise in science funding decisions to be abandoned by new OMB proposal. The public comments section is open for 45 days. See below.

One of my favorite prints at the Hokusai exhibition. The waterfall, the vegetation, the cascading bubbles, the mossy roof, the figures, the colors! Modern art - perfection

Big thunderstorm suddenly ceased and all the church bells started ringing

Pop culture in Rome - okay Lego, but make it Pietà

Took pictures of a pink moon rising last night and my phone camera didn’t capture the hue - but somehow this face! Just on this shot; the others are plain moons with no face …

Reading right now

Watched a video of staff scraping Gloria anzaldua's name and the rest of the Mexican American and Latino Studies logo off the office door at UT

Shocked and Shattered Elegies for a Lost Utopian Dream www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/b...

Ahhh Feltrinelli Roma bookstore … follow me, dear reader! Questi libri, per favore; tutti i libri, per favore!

If I had to choose…

Please forgive any spelling mistakes. My phone comes with gratis typesetters who insist on Flemish spelling conventions. “(It didn’t help that one of the first presses to reach England came with Flemish typesetters who felt there should obviously be an H in “ghost.)”

Serendipitous discoveries in the archives and stacks aren’t possible if you shut them down “The document – a scrap of parchment inserted into an account of the Ramsey Abbey manor of Warboys in Huntingdonshire…”

how dare we

I stepped off the library dean path when it became clear that this would be the job--managing the end of academic libraries as we know them. Please know that these changes are just a result of defunding. They do not herald some bright digital future. There will just be less access to knowledge.

Today in accidental horror: Viewing the Equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius from below. Now imagine the nostrils are eyes. Once you the laughing 👽 face you cannot unsee it!

MIT (endowment: $27B) shuttering three of its four main libraries is one of those news items that just knocks you off balance, auguring, as it does, profound and permanent changes to the entire institutional apparatus of higher education in this country.

Wait I’m sorry THREE of MIT’s four major #libraries? Your response to a 6% increase in the endowment tax is mothballing 75% of your major Libraries?

Loved this display case at the Hokusai exhibition about Edo period travel objects. I need a BRONZE TRAVEL SHRIMP please

The aesthetic of Hokusai’s 1804 woodblock print “Chiryu Station, View of the Temple By the Pond” could be from 1984

Wise and knowing hare as if in earnest conversation in a Hokusai #woodblock print

Saw the massive Hokusai exhibition today in Rome. This #woodblock print, “Mitsui Merchant’s Warehouses on Suruga Street in Edo,” is one of the 36 Views of Mt Fuji c. 1832. The drama is in the hands, the forearms, the folds of the clothes.

Went to see my favorite Caravaggio, The Calling of St Matthew. The light coming in at the window in San Luigi dei Francesi the same direction as that in the painting

"[I]t's maybe the most important time ... to be publishing accessible, general interest books about science.”--Miranda Martin My amazing @columbiaup.bsky.social colleague, Miranda Martin, has just launched a great new series, What Science Says. www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

Okay, St Jerome but THE LION. The mosaic whiskers, the furrowed brow, the crinkle of the eyes, the wavy fur - in tiny tiles of color. Genius

Vatican dome from my window. I had forgotten how many seagulls there are in Rome

A daylong train ride in late May from Munich to Rome through towns, alpine terrain and fields was both beautiful and startling. There were so few birds. We didn’t travel at dawn or dusk and of course I didn’t look out the window the whole time. But in nine hours I counted just 20. #biodiversity

Castle seen from a train in northern Italy giving Mysteries of Udolpho vibes. See the clouds making horns over the leftmost rampart with its two widespread ‘eyes’? #gothic mood

Albrecht Dürer's study of a little owl from 1508. Inescapably cute! Dürer was born on this day in 1471.

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Trump has destroyed America’s knowledge infrastructure. This is an opportunity for knowledge workers across disciplines-natural science, social science, humanities-to see their interests in rebuilding this infrastructure on democratic grounds as connected.

A skink(?) has made a home where a mooring ring used to be in the river wall

A #heron hunting on the Neckar River #BirdoftheDay

"We envision a resistance that is...a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction." "How to Resist AI in Education" by me & @cnygren.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...