Was reading Your Silence Will Not Protect You, an Audre Lorde collection from Silver Press, on the plan and I find it (maybe not so) amazing how urgent her writing feels in this moment.

“You simply cannot learn and know at the same time, and this is a frustration all artists must bear.” -- Mary Ruefle

David Brooks is exceptionally good at writing articles full of "duh" statements and passing it off as "insight." His solution to Trump? Re-envision America! Um ... ok. How will we do it? Platitudes, apparently! www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

I was published in this wonderful journal a while ago. Faculty editor Sarah Anne Strickley and the rest of the editorial team over there do fantastic work. Support them!

Whenever I ponder the question of what comes after postmodernism, I always think about this passage from David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television & U.S. Fiction” (1990). It’s a spectacular essay, very prescient, and a clarion call to novelists, poets, and critics.

baseball is the best preparation for death because it does not come with a clock that tells you when your suffering will end one way or the other

Cleaning out a leaking barn, so giving the bike a quick service before putting it into storage.

“These books ask questions about what it means to belong to somewhere, whether you are welcomed or not, what it means to stay or leave, or to exist in-between.”

bro what 😭

Forget all the noise: my students LOVE to read.

The @barrelhouse.bsky.social conference is coming back to DC on April 18, 2026, and we're open for registration! It's $95, and that includes the one-day conference, 1 book, 1 meeting w an editor, and your choice of literary stuff from our partner presses. www.barrelhousemag.com/conference

Another fantastic poem from @alinapleskova.bsky.social

“How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.” ― Don DeLillo, The Names

It’s amazing how many times you can rewrite a “simple” query letter.

I spent the summer reporting this essay on why it seems harder than ever to sell a book right now—especially if it isn't a debut and comes with the dreaded "sales track." I'm grateful to the writers, agents, editors, publishers & experts who spoke to me for this piece: thewalrus.ca/the-publishi...

Rotterdam. Burger joints on every corner.

Just getting to this great interview of Judith Butler from @politicsjoe.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=V07o...

Please join us in congratulating our Best of the Net 2026 Nominees! Good luck everyone!

Hmm. publichealthpolicyjournal.com/mit-study-fi...

“I am a writer. This means I can get through any airport using the shortest possible route, but I have to check my boarding pass to see if I am headed to Düsseldorf or Frankfurt.” In our fall issue, Anne Enright recounts her travels to Venice.

Wrote for The Metropolitan Review about the pros & cons of working w/ small indie presses vs. big presses, the journey from almost being a big fancy author to being a medium unfancy author, and mid-career re-evaluation of what I want out of the writing life www.metropolitanreview.org/p/to-go-big-...

Going to Cleveland tomorrow for the bucket hats alone. Might shave my beard into a mustache too. Fucking love trends.

This is very exciting news — preorder Erin’s book!

Kinda ironic the documentary about iconoclastic visual artist/musician group Devo is basically mapped onto the good old Freytag pyramid. But this is life, n’est pas? Are we not men?

Our 10-year anniversary issue of Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine comes out next week on Sept 1st! You can read samples from Issue 36 Fall 2025 and pre-order copies on our website: www.doorisajarmagazine.net/issues/fall-... #poetry #fiction #nonfiction #art #drama #bookreviews #litmag #doorisajar

"I will take you to a place / that opens your mouth with its bigness / it’s called America."

Discussing Moby Dick while eating pickled halibut.

I don't think AI will either become a totally revolutionary tech or be a nothing tulip/NFT bubble. I think it will be like social media: something that everyone knows is mostly bad and stupid but gets addicted to as it degrades our quality of life, politics, and culture in a million small ways.

27 years ago, two years after the introduction of effective HIV treatment, the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco’s lesbian and gay community newspaper, ran ‘No Obits’ as its headline. It was the first edition not to report an AIDS death in almost 15 years.

The amount of AI slop writers are submitting as prose for editorial consideration is so incredibly dispiriting. It's just... so bad.

if you have the opportunity to buy books using institutional resources, and if you can select a vendor, you *may* consider buying books from @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social, who sends proceeds from [W4G] tagged books to the sameer project

For the last time: ChatGPT is not a search engine. It is an aggregate, made to spit nonense information back to you. This is why it cannot be used in an academic context.

This gal loves to camp.

Got my lux Japanese tent set up on lock. No flight summer 2026.

I couldn't be prouder to have a new (very short) story up at @necessaryfiction.com. My thanks to Lacey Dunham and crew for giving this one a chance. necessaryfiction.com/stories/an-o...

Sat down this morning and opened Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song. It was good to hear his voice again, for a moment, in a world seemingly gone mad.

Just watched The Devil’s Bath film which is sold as a horror flick but is, really, just a good ‘ol slice of life: m.imdb.com/title/tt2914...

I won’t be designing chatbots for my classes, thanks.

OpenAI basically says they want college classrooms to be the test site. We’d be paying to be their subjects. No thanks. Pay faculty, hire more faculty.

I just visited a pro basketball player’s house and this is how I look in his bathroom mirror.

So saddened by this news. I actually gasped: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

My boy Dilla, eating anything not tied down … including my sandals, my bike pump, highlighters, records, etc.

We now live in the Pyrocene, a proposed new geologic epoch of fire activity brought about by human-caused climate change. Living in the Pyrocene means a new reality: knowing what the latest wildfire smoke forecasts are, in order to plan your outdoor activities. I review the best tools to do so:

I gotta say, I’m a million miles away from Cleveland these days, but folks in Gordon Square might hear me scream if the Guardians trade Kwan.

An oldie: "When wage labor disappears, the ruling class can continue to accumulate money only if they retain the ability to appropriate a stream of rents, which arise from their control of intellectual property. Thus emerges a rentist, rather than capitalist society." jacobin.com/2011/12/four...

. @npr.org is one of the only US national news organizations that still has a reporter inside Gaza, Anas Baba, and he keeps reporting even though he himself is starving. This piece is unbelievably powerful. www.npr.org/2025/07/05/n...

This is such an incredible listen from Humane Tech and their podcast Your Undivided Attention: podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/y...

“This is a hard book. Just as well. I like a hard book. Not this one, quite. But that’s beside the point.” New: Angelo Hernandez Sias on José Donoso and his translators. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

I keep having conversations with people who seem exasperated that I REFUSE to use AI. I’m exasperated with the idea that it’s a given I SHOULD adopt this new, not-threatening-at-all technology like it’s mother’s milk.