Angry 5yo: “you’re the worst mommy in the WHOLE UNIVERSITY!”

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” We just finished one of my favorites for bedtime reading. Any guesses?

My kids came to a talk I gave for the first time. 5yo verdict: “I’m hungry.” 8yo verdict: “actually kinda interesting.”

Cleaned out her backpack from last week and learned that my daughter votes third party.

Giving Seward a scrub in Mamdani’s NYC.

My daughter just announced that she was going to ask Santa for a dollhouse. This is what she got for her birthday in June.

This is so good!

Pls note, #litcrit Bsky, the bolded statement here from Frances Ferguson: "I have increasingly come to think that Clarissa is the single most important literary work in the history of British literature—& that it keeps holding its own". This is gospel truth, guys. Why aren't you already reading it?

If you don’t subscribe to our Substack, 1) what’s wrong with you, and 2) you should at least check out this post!

Congratulations to Nikki Hessell, whose essay "Robinson Crusoe as a Transpacific Novel: Hospitality, Recognition, Translation," has been selected as the winner of this year's Maximillian E. Novak Essay Prize. Abstract below: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1... #defoe #danieldefoe #transpacific #novel

It’s bulb day in Madison Square Park!

The Walton family (who own Walmart) are worth over $400 billion, yet many of their employees are on SNAP. Bezos is worth over $400 billion, many Amazon employees require SNAP. The people who need help are not the problem. It’s corporate greed. It’s an unwillingness to pay a living wage.

One advantage of giving a midterm in the survey is I get to read a short essay on “Chaplin’s Homer.”

Happy Monday writers @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social ! If you're interested in public writing, you might want to sign up for what's sure to be a fantastic event this Friday featuring Surekha Davies, author of Humans: A Monstrous History. Details below! Register here: tinyurl.com/bddsaav9

Just did this. Thanks for the suggestion/reminder!

Show my pumpkin to your small children. I don’t really care what you think. 😂

In which Johanna Winant (@johannawinant.bsky.social) and I make the case for teaching whole books. And argue for a model of close reading that would bridge high school, college, and professional practice slate.com/life/2025/10...

Update: never mind.

"Are my migraines hormonal, or am I thinking too hard about how Peter Thiel has more money than all nurses on Earth combined?"

Here at the CUNY Graduate Center, we may not have…any money whatsoever. But we DO have a coffee shop that plays a LOT of Mariah Carey.

If you find yourself in the NJ suburbs next month, come to my talk! You can register at ridgewoodlibrary.org.

Apparently CUNY has all the jobs. 😎

8yo just described something as “so the 30s,” meaning “futuristic.”

from my lunch today; "the trouble is not so much AI making you more productive, but that it's tripling the output of the biggest f***ing idiot where you work"

"Instead of mystery, Sinykin and Winant see possibility: to them, close reading is a practice that anyone can learn." I'm really grateful for @profdgd.bsky.social 's extremely thoughtful review in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social today as he writes -- "It’s enough to make the heart skip a beat."

folks can complain about the effectiveness of scheduled orderly mass protest but to think about it another way its the closest thing we have to the opening scene of A Muppet Christmas Carol where all the muppets sing "there goes Mr. Dipshit, there goes Mr. Ass" to Scrooge and it clearly bothered him

Repping our union and the left bank of the Hudson. #nokings

A good thing happened.

we’ll we’ll we’ll if it isn’t my old friend autocorrect

This story, of a woman denied treatment for an ectopic pregnancy IN ILLINOIS is horrifying. In conclusion, subscribe to @jessicavalenti.bsky.social's newsletter, Abortion Every Day.

I just got an ad for an app that gives kids age-appropriate versions of classic novels. It is clearly AI garbage but now I’m desperate to read the elementary versions of these books. Do you think they review any of the text before slapping it on there?

Tickled that one of you apparently bought me Maria Edgeworth’s copy of Emma. ~$300k? You shouldn’t have! www.sothebys.com/buy/b94a60c5...

You can't logic your way out of being burnt out. Unless you're me. Who should be able to do it and it's a personal failing that I can't

I wrote about the divide between high school and college English, and what we might do to bridge it, for @publicbooks.bsky.social—part of an excellent roundtable on higher ed under Trump organized by @dennismhogan.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/toward-the-h...

Just got a revision back and they did it. 😈

And who is the author of this op-ed? The billionaire CEO of an asset management firm who helped author the compact.

I realize this is a very American solution, but if I were y’all, I’d develop a religious objection to this as soon as possible.

Today you’ll hear a lot about an author you may not be super familiar with. Don’t worry, this series just dropped today, so I have you covered. www.audible.com/pd/B0FSTGX47...

Sometimes I forget to check in on Bluesky, but y’all need me.

I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

It’s come to my attention that some of you don’t know/forgot that Bari Weiss dated Kate McKinnon. This is a crucial element of her lore.

Irresistible. I can’t wait to read this.

Stephanie's essay on D. A. Miller on Jane Austen is, alone, worth the price of admission! It's how I'm closing out my grad seminar on close reading this semester, paired with her Norton Library edited edition of Sense and Sensibility. All to say: buy the book! It's shipping!

Truly think this volume is great, and I can’t wait for you to read it!

Here's a little thing I wrote about the book on Thursday clarissa2025readinggroup.substack.com/p/spelt-accu...

If your Klein be Naomi, then listen, homie; But if your Klein be Ezra, disregard what he sezra

battle of the mega tomes! Thanks to @sinsleyh.bsky.social and co, I am now fifty pages from the finish line of Richardson’s mammoth, heartbreaking masterpiece- we’ve been reading it in a reading group for a year- but today my follow up tome has arrived: I’m about to dive into the Schatten-zone

Sincerely stoked that 8yo came home from camp singing Wonderwall.

Read Penelope Lively’s Heat Wave, part of my summer books summer reading. Great character studies, good toddler business (reminded me of Kiesling’s Golden State), and a wallop of an ending.