“…the college assumes we want efficiency at all cost through automated rather than hand-pulled coffee.” I maintain that human services, including library services, are often inefficient when they are good, because the care & connection of humans is not quick work. Oberlin Luddites, I stand with you!

Check out Alex Murray’s blog post about his article “Gatekeeping: Publishers’ Readers, Gender, and the Literature of the 1890s,” which explores the often reactionary and sexist genre of the reader’s report during the complicated cultural politics of the 1890s.

Had an amazing meal (pizza and beer; we brought our own salad) at Scratch Brewing in Ava, Illinois (semi-finalists for a James Beard Award for best bar this year). Foraged beer! -- made from e.g. wild carrot, nettle, pawpaw, & fig leaves foraged from the property or the woods around it

Grey Gardens shoutout!

“From the moment when somebody invented a way of duplicating books from moveable type, the mass-produced sixpenny became inevitable.” —Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, 1938. (Le livre de poche est mort. Vive le livre de poche)

The Femcels are hilarious- “You’re Gay and You’re in Love With Me (Please Let Me Touch Your Boobs),” “No One Will Fuck Me When I Wear Two Different Shoes (One Jordan, One Gucci Flip Flop),” “Please Don’t stab Yourself (Like Elliot Smith)”

This whole situation is such a PK Dick nightmare to me nymag.com/intelligence...

Bloomingtonians w/ blue/purple/whatever hair ftw

This rules. JCO won the Canon Wars.

so true from JCO

I keep making Adobe Acrobat tell me I have too many tabs open, feel perversely proud of this. Feels like, 'oh you can't handle this, huh??'

This meme will never not be funny (as long as we have Nazi types in our government, anyway)

Haha I came here to see what the @nytpitchbot.bsky.social take on Noem would be. Good one

Always reassuring to see Archduke-Ferdinand-assassination analogies 😬

“Sargant’s prescription for her? Since she was trapped in a miserable situation and her husband’s sociopathy was incurable, she should have a lobotomy. That would make her ‘indifferent’ to her husband’s mistreatment” Jesus!

Just sayin’

Brad Lander: “It’s pretty outrageous…once people think that they don’t have to follow the law because the president doesn’t, workers suffer, our universities suffer, students & faculty suffer.” St. John’s University can’t just UNrecognize faculty unions after 56 years. That’s not the law works.

❤️ “Whenever I'm in some small town or anywhere, I'm always drawn to the library. I just find it so wonderful, like just welcoming. That may be how some people feel about going to church. You know, they go in and have the same feeling of comfort.”

Trump in 2011: “Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective.”

At least the Bush administration made some effort to keep their story straight when they lied to the American public

jesus

I’m normally in the “anything that gets people to read challenging 19th century novels is good” camp… But am having trouble with this one

This article has it all: *racist nudists vs. Christian, family-friendly nudists *a giant kitten-eating python *a tax-evading bigamist and his 5th wife *a film about a troubled man who parachutes onto an island of lady nudists 🪂 *”sass” used as a verb in a legal document

“The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may have its longest life as a particularly vivid example of the ways in which bad faith will always manifest in terrible prose.” Brutal (but fair) close-reading takedown by @jonahssiegel.bsky.social

This a really great read. The characters he talks to are real, but also very clearly fake. They are pathetic is all senses of the word. It is obvious that the world is rewarding people who should never be put in charge of anything.

Sam Kriss in @harpers.bsky.social on AI very grim, but funny. I am getting the sense that our AI overlords do not value literature. "My mom tried to put me on classical books and I couldn’t understand, like, the bullshit Huckleberry, whatever fuck bullshit” harpers.org/archive/2026...

Social media fed me this story, with a photo (about a 20-year-old pregnant French woman, Éliane Vauclerc, freed by a Nazi in 1944). I googled and can find no source outside of Facebook posts, so I'm virtually certain it's entirely made up. There's going to be so much of this...

2003 book in my local little free library. Hard no!! 😳

BE THE ELDRITCH POWER YOU WISH TO SEE IN THE WORLD

Very young college-radio dj playing Billie Holliday’s “Summertime”, a song she’d never heard, saying “some of you may recognize the melody from Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” or Lana del Ray’s cover of that.” I winced (but appreciated the enthusiastic curiosity even so)

Was happy to dip into the symposium at the Lilly Library on the incredible dictionary collection of Madeline Kripke, self-described “Lexicunt”

Who could have predicted that a memecoin called "Fuck Joe Biden," managed by Steve Bannon, would have involved financial irregularities? substack.com/inbox/post/1...

I like this Frederick Wiseman line as an adage about creativity: “I am trying to harvest a crop,” he said, “which I have not planted, and which may not exist”

Menus-Plaisirs is sheer pleasure. Highly recommend for anyone who cares about food

This story and interview are hard to read, but this woman is probably among the toughest humans who has ever lived. Few can say they would have the courage and bravery to talk so openly about what she endured. GIFT LINK. (and content warning, of course)

Thérèse Raquin is a good reminder that no matter how questionable one's own romantic choices may have been, at least you did not (hopefully!) collaborate in a drowning murder scheme in order to be with someone, after which realizing that you both despise one another but cannot escape

Happy Valentine's Day from Émile Zola ❤️💘 (from Thérèse Raquin... next Emerald Fennell adaptation??)

I absolutely am not

Yeah, I’m sure in its full context that message to the Emirati businessman about “loving the torture video” would seem great

Sounds like “a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response” was basically the equivalent of “deadly attacks on agents by Alex Pretti and Renee Good”

Actually a great use of an LLM— to not-listen to manosphere podcasts at scale

New Wuthering Heights adaptation looks interesting

I liked Catherine Robson's conclusion (re: Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights): "you know, it’s her fever dream." Fair!

“”Clarissa” is a modern reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” in which society woman Clarissa (Okonedo) prepares to host a party at her home in Lagos, Nigeria” 😎

The Surprising Adventures of Bigenio, an Hermaphrodite, Or Human Being, Endowed with the Propensities of Both Sexes. @ Lilly Library 🙏 to @arkhamlibrarian.bsky.social for pulling this & other treasures for my class to see

Amazing how Cory Doctorow can produce this stuff on the fly, at Eminem-like speed From convo with Tim Wu on @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social show

People talk about "On Solitude," "On Cannibals," "On the Power of the Imagination," et al.., but to really grasp Montaigne you need to go to the deep cuts. Like "On Thumbs," which is kind of like a Notes files about references to thumbs in history and art

Idk, I am enjoying reports on its stock’s price collapse. Those are good reading imo

Important fact I learned today from @arkhamlibrarian.bsky.social… The author of the first publication in English about birth control by a physician (The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People, 1832), Charles Knowlton, was SMOLDERINGLY good looking

always bears repeating that this is NOT a financial decision. jeff bezos is worth over 250 billion dollars. he can afford to lose many millions and never even notice it. this is, at its core, a political and personal decision by bezos to destroy the post