some ramen places just have a dish they should call “shrug of concession to vegetarians.”

you hear about how Ithaca is gorges, but less about all the _caves_ at Cornell.

Apparently I come from a very small micro-generation.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom/for books of collage with postcards stuck in/I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them/first we take the Griffin/then we take Sabine!

I'm currently reading the new Daniel Mendelsohn translation of the Odyssey, which brings me to another related reading recommendation - "Outis Odysseus," @martin65.bsky.social's wonderful poem about Argos, faithful hound: contrarymagazine.com/2021/outis-o...

I'm just going to take last night as a big win for faculty brats wherever we are.

Nice to wake up to some good news for a change!

imagine calling it "The Mushroom at the End of the World" and not "The Morel Economy of the Crowd," SMDH

Every time I learn of a new Japanese mascot, say one whose head is a train and whose body is the flowers blooming along the tracks I think ”His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite.”

@ekphrastictactic.bsky.social has a new review article, "Field Work," in Modern Intellectual History. Just finished this morning over some coffee. An insightful piece that examines one work I'm intimately familiar with one that I'd never read before.

Whenever I'm reviewing a book and someone else publishes a review first, I think of the STNG episode, "Tin Man" in which Picard says " being first at any cost is not always the point." You see, in this matter, The New Yorker is the Romulans.

Papadum preach! (I’ve been losing sleep)

After any meaningful road ride it is important to do a few chores, drink a coffee, while still in your kit. This is your way of saying “hey, I’m a serious cyclist. These quads have miles in them.”

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Editorials on fire off the shoulder of the Crimson. I watched faculty meetings glitter in the dark near Memorial Hall. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to go emerita.

ugh, academic halloween, what do you mean you're "the time my grad school frenemy attributed a book to the wrong university press in his very first published review"?

"Dress for the job you want, not the job you have"

one tragedy of finishing grad school is that you no longer attend talks by visiting academic stars with your friends and then talk about what charlatans they are. which is why this site matters so much.

today a college student told me they "loved my vibe" so I am now on top of the world, not to be dislodged by fortune or chance from my seat of great happiness.

this is everything, or rather, this is what happens to everything

giving a guest talk in an Italian literature course today, and the real challenging question is whether one shaves for such an occasion, or (because Italian literature) does not.

a cat arrives in my study, jumping up on my desk. his paw knocks my pen away each time I try to write the word "pang." This cat has placed me under a pangur ban.

I wrote a short history of Williams College, focusing on its struggles with diversity in the case of Jewish students, and from a distance, this can only look like backing away from the significant gains the College had made: www.chronicle.com/article/trac...

Americanization is insidious. For example, UK websites don't ask your permission to enable "Biscuits."

one cool thing about Facebook is that about once per week I am served up ads for clothing brands once "liked," perhaps in 2011, by self-appointed guardians of Frankfurt School critical theory.

Halloween at the Media Lab. A pasty-looking fellow with a bow tie greets the trick-or-treaters. He prepares to give them candy. "One laptop per child!" peep their little voices. "One laptop per child!" and then their claws extend, a brief glimmer of flickering light reflected.

In the last week, Trump tore down a portion of the White House, claims that a friend of his is paying the military, posted a video of him dumping shit on the American people, demanded hundreds of millions of dollars from DoJ, and unleashed vicious ICE agents on peaceful American cities.

[explaining how the salad tongs only close when you invert them] “You have to ‘charges made against Oscar Wilde’ that sucker.”

it's good to say aloud that "content" is not a synonym for "literature"

frankly, I don't spend a lot of time worrying if the skull in question is specifically a nazi skull, pondering its facial angle, rotating it mentally so I can apply imaginary forceps - because I am not a cynically credulous dweeb.

speaking as a fellow member of an elite whose grandfather was also an architect, we have the same right to become credibility, I mean oyster, farmers as anyone else.

[entirely niche post, feel free to ignore] the sooner we can replace almost the entire cambridge (ma) city council, the better.

opening an arctic wildlife refuge to drilling is worse, environmentally, morally, and in ineffable-yet-damning cosmic terms than demolishing part of the white house

Convenience is morally corrosive.

I've been traveling. Along the way I've read, and viewed, and listened to things that you might like too - most recently, there is @zunguzungu.bsky.social's powerful essay on remembering, burying, and selling Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/war-is-over-...

Every once and a while I remember this conceit, from a profile of the Freakonomics economist - he drives past a homeless guy asking for money, but deduces they have the same headphones. Ergo the guys need is false. This passed as sharp insight at the soulless Venn of technocracy and conservatism.

Every time there is a major announcement of cuts to PhD programs at a major institution, it reactivates my own deep worry: to reduce or shutter doctoral programs endangers whole fields, and yet to bring young people into those fields, with no ability to provide jobs for their future, seems wrong.

Wake up, babe, the least subtle visual metaphor in history just dropped

I love when the slop of ”Japanese Techniques to Stop Overthinking” is restored to accuracy like “work endlessly to raise your economy out of the postwar rubble”

All credit to the organizers of "Twenty Years of Harry Frankfurt's Bullshit" for a truly great event title.

Yesterday, at No Kings, I took great pleasure in everyone's efforts to make clever signs. I have never been good at public displays of political passion (one reason I'm not an activist) but public wit is a genre I can get behind. Viewed via Instagram: "I Avoid Times Square But This is Important."

every time I write an essay, it would be nice to have a Great British Bake-off-style artistic rendering of what the essay wants to look like, at the start.

Look, I never felt much need for campus security, as your fellow Jew, but I also wasn’t invading other people’s dorm rooms and claiming their ramen packets as my own National cuisine.

The French are not historically pro-carryout. Nor, indeed, are they prokaryote. In this study we will ask if they want others to get them carryout.

wrote briefly about architecture and the situation at u Chicago www.thenation.com/article/cult...

Because Ben's generally too modest in promoting his own wonderful work, #skystorians: www.pennpress.org/978081222434...

[Looks up from book in his armchair by the fireplace] "Why hello. You may have heard the great news that Penn has rejected Trump's proposed "Compact." But did you know that Penn's press published my 2016 book on the limits of public intellectual life and the need to maintain intellectual freedom?"

You gently run your hand through the rack. You can feel it—pure cotton, rich wool, Irish linen. The plump buttonholes are handsewn; the buttons attached with a firm shank. You flip the price tag over. It's affordable You buy the jacket and go home, which is only 15 mins away. Your apt is $600/month

My Dad has these friends who are so intellectual that they don’t really notice their food; this makes me wonder if I could enjoy food even more by thinking less intently.

legal academia is a weird mix of some of the best and most immediately actionable policy research about the impact of specific laws and procedures, and also bizarre poorly executed historiography/political theory by way of literary criticism, by people trained in none of those things

Where is the line between the usual activities of a writing career, and what I was just told is called "attention farming" via social media accounts? Does that line just get erased and redrawn with new parabolas ever eighteen months?