In what feels like a fever dream, it turns out my old band will be playing Gilman St in May as part of a short west coast tour. If anyone on here has Bay Area recs—food, bookstores, practice spaces—I’d love to hear them.

Our local NPR station WOSU did a much better job with the headline. Of course, this is a professor at the Chase Center, which was established by state law & is supposed to be the anchor for "viewpoint diversity" and "civility." The stories write themselves...

The degree to which both of these people are so completely full of shit, name checking things they have no understanding of, free associating “deep thoughts” & yet so perfectly confident in their half-assed knowledge, helps clarify why the entire elite class is so desperate to get us all on ChatGPT

All of this!!! For example, Ohio State (not an Ivy but big deal R1) has... Wexner Medical Center Wexner Center for the Arts These are named after Les Wexner, who made his money on Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie, etc. + employed Epstein as his financial manager for 20 years + bankrolled his abuses.

I am planning Thursday’s class on climate anger as a form of political anger ( & using a wonderful piece by @doctorvive.bsky.social ) & thinking through different methods for analyzing emotion, extractive violence, & historical specificity and I think this is basically my whole pedagogy:

O-H ICE-OUT!

Reviews of my no tech, analog seminar were all positive: “this class gave me room to breathe,” “I loved not having screens in class,” “writing in our attention notebooks gave me space to think,” “this was the most immersive class I’ve ever taken,” “I felt like I could think freely,”l loved Sebald.”

It is worth noting that so many of these universities mandating AI are in states that liquidated DEI programs & made them illegal. Just in case you were unclear about the trajectory of “intellectual diversity” in higher ed, this is what it looks like.

We are under one of these impossible demands & I can tell you that one of the outcomes is backlash from undergraduates who will tell you (& Reddit & the school newspaper & anyone who will listen to them) that they don’t want the uni forcing AI on them (including the pop-up ChatGPT cafe on campus).

⚡️NEW from @dropsitenews.com: "Ask Jeffrey": Epstein Ran Wexner's Pro-Israel Philanthropy Machine, Emails Reveal The Wexner Foundation has long claimed Epstein had "did not make decisions regarding the use of Foundation’s funds.” New emails show that is...false. open.substack.com/pub/dropsite...

These are the new state mandated questions that will appear at the end of our student evaluations. Just in case anyone was curious about the effects of right wing higher ed legislation in Ohio:

The AAUP at Ohio State encourages all to attend this Tuesday event by Jewish Voice for Peace - Central Ohio @jvpcentralohio. We stand in solidarity with our colleague Tom Hayes of Ohio University who was removed from his teaching position after being detained in the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza.

Homemade costume for Jevil from Deltarune for my 11 year old. His friends also went as video game characters & we saw some amazing Hollow Knight costumes.

The AI industry wants us to believe AI superintelligence is the real threat from generative AI. But that narrative was crafted to distract from the many ways genAI is being used to tear our societies apart, as we saw this week when a deepfake video rocked the Irish election. It must be reined in.

This is very good & reads like a speculative autopsy of my own uni. I would add to this mix the privatization of public university infrastructure—parking, energy systems, etc—that was also done in the name of growth, all of it done un-(or anti-)-democratically.

This is also the case here and students in my async class are rightly concerned; my analog class though? Shit, we are just showing up on Wednesday to read Sebald together and talk about the poisoning of seas, fishery collapse, & the use of hypotaxis to register the catastrophes of modernity.

“Water neutrality”: Late capitalism has gotten so innovative that it has conjured “waterwashing” as a cover for its endless plunder: “AWS, Meta, Microsoft, and Google all have clear water neutrality goals.”

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

Writing retreat in the mountains of West VA is going well. I’m going to finish this fucking book & yes, until further notice, my preface poaches its title from this abandoned truck I saw in the Bakken: “Piece of Shit, Left for Dead.” I also scared two coyotes by accident on a hike in Canaan Valley.

Very bad: OSU unilaterally cancelled the registration of grad students attending the joint conference of the National Society of Black Physicists and the National Society of Hispanic Physicists. And OSU won't fund recruiting at the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science.

The midterms from my analog upper level seminar; they’re brilliant & full of theories on the function of art in the present while undertaking micro-scale formal analysis. An 80 minute class & no one left early. Print is a rent strike & a pedagogical asset for this moment. @mattseybold.bsky.social ✊🏼

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!! The University of Texas-Austin is beginning a process to eliminate the Black Studies, Latino Studies, and Gender Studies departments in the College of Liberal Arts. This is a grave threat to the educational liberty of students, faculty, staff, and the people of Texas. 1/

Matt Seybold joins Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson to discuss the political economy of literary criticism from past to present, amateur to professional.

Because they used to rip things off my office door or slide “Identity Europa”’materials underneath, I got a dry erase board so that it is very easy to clean up. I guess this is “viewpoint diversity”?

Something is shifting; cultural value is perceived, or felt, more & more to be asymmetrical with these platforms & the capitalist logic of engagement: “down with algorithmic listening, down with royalty theft, down with AI generated music.” As a child of the DIY 90s punk scene, I’m here for it.

www.chronicle.com/article/view... I didn’t choose the headline!! DM if you need a version that isn’t paywalled.

This was such a treat to be with @mattseybold.bsky.social @aprilanson.bsky.social @jeffreyinsko.bsky.social @jlb.bsky.social @natewolff.bsky.social( & others not on here?) to think through the knots of energy, aesthetics, politics & the hell we inhabit. Thanks Matt, Jeff, & Joe for having us.

🚨🚨 My dear friend and fellow academic, the Palestinian American sociologist @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social has been taken by the Cook County Sheriff near Chicago. They have not mirandized her. Please signal boost. All eyes on Broadview for Eman and the community she was defending 🚨🚨

Looking forward to responding to this paper & hopefully initiating some discussion that is worthy of it.

The slow civil war feels like it shifted to a higher gear in the last 24 hours or so.

We went into the hills and the caves and found large wolf spiders and something close to silence.

Ohio State is hiring for a TT prof in Writing & AI, which, as far as I know, includes critical AI studies and if that is you, please apply (I’m not on there committee btw): osu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/OSUCareers/j...

Friends, please take some time to read Sookyoung Lee's inaugural "Letter from the Field" in the Energy & Environment forum over at @mmodernity.bsky.social Print Plus. Soo asks us to "rethink professional life" as all of our infrastructural systems are either fraying or being weaponized against us:

New pub: @culturalstudies.bsky.social has just posted the interview that @imreszeman.bsky.social and I did with Andreas Malm re: Fossil Capital, the development of his thought, and plenty more. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.....

Tom Clancy, Reign in Blood (Ruin a record instead of a book)

Getting back to my modernist roots and tying up this essay for the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook to Caribbean Modernism. I always wanted to write about Andrew Salkey's Escape to An Autumn Pavement. I hope I didn't fuck it up.

I just can’t believe our Reichstag Fire is the Big Balls Beatdown.

"Through close readings of Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and others, the book challenges its readers to immerse themselves in the 'fossil-fueled lifeworld' of the nineteenth century." New in review, Karen Pinkus on Nathan K. Hensley's Action without Hope: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/karen_pinkus...

Environmental humanities & adjacent scholars: interested in collaborating on a panel for this @carsoncenter.bsky.social conference in July?! #envhum #STS #envhist www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/news/news_ev...

I’ve been looking forward to Jarvis’ book since I heard him talk from it at MSA in 2022. This is going to be so good.

Zuckerberg farted out some nonsense today, and since most media outlets refuse to report critically any time a tech CEO offers them some a pseudoserious press release, I've decided to do it for them. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/7/30/how-to-read-an-ai-press-release

WU-TANG FOREVER 👐🏽

Someone blazed past me on the interstate yesterday while texting on a janky ass flip phone, which I found both homicidal and charming.

“It doesn’t make mistakes.” Snake oil and false prophets aplenty in this regrettable century. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

"...graduates in computer science, computer engineering and graphic design all have unemployment rates at 7% or greater; young workers who hold a number of much-maligned humanities degrees—including English, history and philosophy—are all more hirable."

I’m enjoying this book & learning a lot about my disdain for optimism & “hopeful” discourse around climate, but not engaging with Berlant’s cruel optimism, while talking about optimism as a cruel philosophy via Voltaire, is a missed chance for some dialectical twists that could have been 🔥.

Education professionals, scholars, & writers in the academy: please consider signing/sharing this open letter from a global coalition of AI refusers, skeptics, & ethics watchers in academia. #EduSky #AIResistance #AcademicFreedom #AIinEdu #Lamplighter openletter.earth/an-open-lett...

My entire undergrad class last semester hated AI & the finance major in class called it “snake oil.” They knew it was deskilling them and they were pissed that institutions were forcing them to use it.

Grok just advocated for the holocaust but now the AFT president wants educators to go forward with AI

Proposed federal funding cuts could be devastating for Ohio colleges and universities. ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/07/03/h...