n+1 comes out swinging www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

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Next Monday & Tuesday, Sept. 15 & 16, I’ll give two talks in Baltimore, one at the Bird in Hand bookstore about *Freedom Ship*, the other at Johns Hopkins University about “How to Write (Maritime) History from Below.” sites.krieger.jhu.edu/tidewater/ev... sites.krieger.jhu.edu/tidewater/ev...

Join us

Next week! Marcus Rediker will be at the Tidewater Initiative in Baltimore for two events. First up: a conversation about the new book "Freedom Ship" at Bird in Hand, 6:30pm 9/15 @marcusrediker.bsky.social sites.krieger.jhu.edu/tidewater/ev...

It's publication day for UNIVERSITY KEYWORDS. Across 27 sharp essays, the book offers a critical account of the political economy of US higher education, how it came to be structured this way, and how together we might build a better university together.

Reading a copy of a book I’ve been teaching since the age of the course pack. Bring pack the course pack.

"Anyway the wind blows doesn't really matter to me" www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/c...

We’re kicking things off Sept 15 @ Bird in Hand with Marcus Rediker in conversation about his new book Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery at Sea @marcusrediker.bsky.social sites.krieger.jhu.edu/tidewater/ev...

We're launching a new Tidewater Initiative at JHU. Our research group on working waterfronts and coastal infrastructures includes a new student research lab, courses, programming partnerships with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, and more in the works. sites.krieger.jhu.edu/tidewater/

“So long, Mom, I'm off to drop the bomb, So don't wait up for me.”

AI is the intellectual equivalent of styrofoam: it’s cheap and easy for the individual user, but poisoning the ecosystem for everyone forever.

Something about the way LLMs build in the idea that to find something out, you shouldn't read an already existing text that other people have also read (ew!); you should get fresh text generated just for you. Each time, new disposable text.

Friendly reminder that Instructure, parent company of Canvas, is owned by KKR, a private equity firm that purchased it for $4.8 billion last November.

RIP Alice Notley whose poems are a Grave of Light

When it comes to the cultivation of human subjectivity I plan to go down swinging.

Jayme Collins—who podcasts about archival loss in climate disaster—discovered this envelope of dried mud from the 1966 Arno flood in the Ransom Center archives of conservator Peter Waters (the pioneer in salvaging water damaged paper). Amazing relic & great story—> global.utexas.edu/news/ransom-...

Great experience—we all sat around talking about meter, metadata, and how various societies construe poetic knowledge. Made me want to be a literature professor. Poetry’s Data, out now, wherever University Press Books are sold

I was privileged to have met Alain Peauroi a few times, and to have known many of the extraordinary landscapes he made with TERREMOTO. He was a gifted designer and beloved by all. Here is a beautiful tribute a few months after his passing. www.archpaper.com/2025/03/alai...

Pierre Joris was one of the great and rare symposiasts of the whole.

Rip Pierre Joris. Probably the translator who influenced my own practice/thinking about translation the most.

Experiential learning surges as educators try to lure students back to phenomenal reality

Just learned that James Ferguson died. That absolutely sucks. The Uses of Neoliberalism, Expectations of Modernity, The Anti-Politics Machine, those are incredible works of a kind of almost implausibly rare scholarly mind.

This general-interest book by legendary troubadour scholar Linda Paterson is a delight to read

Greg Barnhisel gave a great talk at JHU last Thurs on Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power. There were shades of a requiem for the bygone age of multifarious collaboration between academia and the state.

Now is the time of wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beasties

Great to see Francisco Robles’s Coalition Literature in my mailbox. This book puts together some broken shards of a US literary history fired in the kilns of the late thirties and helps me see how to embrace a “collective” dimension of our aesthetic politics. @franciscondine.bsky.social

Claire Seiler's excellent new article about a 'lost' J.G. Farrell polio novel exemplifies what literary studies can do when it dares not to police the horizons and idioms of literary studies. An untimely meditation on an untimely book, it arrives exactly on time. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

In college there was this thing called a campus bookstore. People groused that Barnes & Noble had taken over management, but the shelves were educational in themselves. Imagine like this whole room engineered to display knowledge production across the disciplines.

Great mail day courtesy of Nico Campisi

RIP Beatriz Sarlo, who was among the most extraordinary critics of Argentine literature and society since the 1970s

Once again in its signature “reverse spoiler” maneuver, the NYer would like me to read to the end to find out the name of the book nominally under review

Unbelievable to me that it is 5 years since David Berman took his life. Thinking of him today. Wrote this last year about his indelible poems and their insights into the despoliation of American landscapes post45.org/2023/01/davi...

I’d been back in Baltimore about 3 weeks when John Waters sidled up to my 5y.o. & friends as they gazed into the fountainwater at the BMA sculpture garden & asked “seen any sharks?” At first I disbelieved the truth before my eyes because JW sports the same, shameful “final sale beige” Allbirds as me

RIP James Scott, anarchic anthropologist and political scientist. I will continue to contemplate his accounts of tubers and taxation with deep admiration and a fragment of wonder. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Shelley Duvall was many things besides her early Altman gigs, but she was the very Virgil to the infernal Astrodomes of the 1970s New West. RIP to a great guide www.youtube.com/watch?v=chqS...

Volunteer tomato plant growing in a crack in the pavement 🌱

Self portrait of the gardener as a garlic scape medusa 🌱

Could not figure out why I kept this shabby copy of Frank Lloyd Wright’s The Living City then I realized it comes from Walter Netsch’s library. Wish I knew how I got it

Spring haulz: Radish, rhubarb, arugula, mizuna, merlot, sorrel 🌱

RIP Jerry Rothenberg (1931–2024), anthologizer and anthropologist and symposiast of world expression in its whole aspect. It was breathtaking to encounter his anthologies and assemblages in the out-setting process of breaking out of one's little world. Here is a way I once tried to characterize him

As if in a final burst of narratological legerdemain, John Barth appears to have outlived his own obituarist by fourteen years?

Good evening to the fourteenth largest city in Illinois

Happy birthday, Christian Wolff! www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/a...

We used to let poets die in something called a society; now we just torture them in departments.

I'm so sorry to learn that José Quiroga (b. Havana 1959) has passed too soon. A true original and a generous scholar in the field. diariodecuba.com/cultura/1705...

This is a good one