Imagine a possible alternate world in which “pop” & “optimism” had not created an all-too-irresistible portmanteau term 🤯

I guess I should feel lucky the feds aren’t locking down our offices & jailing our PhD students, for now…?

Yeah, one single advanced assistant professor here at IUB English

Clear @naomiaklein.bsky.social reference from @theonion.com theonion.com/lebron-clari...

“It is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy”

Truly, it's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma 🧐 [cue spooky/ mysterious music]

👏👏👏👏👏

"Our students are not wilting flowers. They can handle controversy. They do not need sentimental, cloying nostalgia. They need encouragement to face a flawed and unjust world head on, using the tools we've given them: critical reasoning, careful research, sympathy for the oppressed."

The American public is a sucker for the corrupt tastefulness of well-bred English epics. (1970)

@karenhao.bsky.social’s “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI” hits hard

Journalist Julie K. Brown, a Bucks County native who spent years at the Philadelphia Daily News, has received a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize committee for her work regarding Jeffrey Epstein. www.inquirer.com/news/pennsyl...

Local advocacy led our Indiana town (@citybloomington.bsky.social) to vote to end a contract with Flock recently

Also shed a tear for the hopes unfulfilled of Pamela

Pretty badass lady 🐝🐝🐝

Sad weekend here in Bloomington but on the plus side, this guy was able to borrow a bike to get to his metal vocalist audition ❤️

Trump doesn't like it when people go after his friends and allies

Prince died 10 years ago yesterday-- I published this obituary essay, in which I consider his music as "a project of ecstatic de-repression," in @publicbooks.bsky.social a few days later. Still miss him (& Bowie)!

J.D. Vance in 2020: "My growing view is that too many American Catholics have failed to show proper deference to the papacy, treating the pope as a political figure to be criticized or praised according to their whims” 🤔

Ok I gather there’s some controversy but I listened & don’t really get it? “A flying “V” never fails to draw attention, but the geese on display aren’t forming letters for our benefit. In this book, beginning readers will learn about the many habits of geese.”

Gwendoline Riley tells it like it is in re: the violence of a bad editor

Well, I guess that worked last time with Trump

And “Putin’s mouse” (self-described, remarkably: “According to a leaked transcript of the phone call, Orbán also compared himself to a mouse rescuing a trapped lion after it spared the rodent”)

Praying that Orbán is going DOWN

I’m so embarrassed I just spend $500 to participate in a suspiciously unfocused conversation with “Patrick Radden Keefe” about P.G. Wodehouse

Boots Riley @iucinema.bsky.social @bootsriley.bsky.social

“The board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the word “sociopathic”…. Not long before his death, Aaron Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything””

It is difficult to focus on work when our president is threatening to unleash a horrific collective punishment on a modern nation of over 90 million people in the midst of a war one of the premises of which is that the majority of that population do not support the regime under which they live.

@danielhack.bsky.social's essay prompted me to finally read Carr's (very wonderful) novel! Glad he concludes with the amazing bit about finding traces of the medieval painter's beard in the paint: “he was fair-headed; hairs kept turning up where his beard had prodded into tacky paint"

💯

It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes AI?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific journalists. www.todayintabs.com/p/who-goes-ai

Yeah I can see how that would be discouraging as a Republican, lol

brb writing a new book chapter

I had not realized that Michel de Montaigne got so horny

For Arendt, “thinking properly depends on our setting up windshields, walls perhaps of canvas not of brick, behind which we can draw a breath and focus our eyes more acutely on what lies out there in the glare”

How did “sexistential” go unused in pop history until now. Saved for Robyn

“…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!