After all the talk about restoring the glory of American industry, here they go, "doing a regime change" without even manufacturing consent domestically.

How can professors prove their merit? Well, I recommend doing your doctorate with a friend of your Dad's from grad school.

I often let New Years go without so much as a party hat ("Gregorian calendar, mumble mumble, arbitrary, mumble mumble") but this year I decided to mark the day: from the old rabbit to the new, and some things I have never made before: Irish soda bread, and a vegetarian (!) hoppin' john.

When you get the reputation of being the guy with the encouraging words on New Year's Eve, it can start to come through as a little pressure -- what if the situation on the ground is worse than usual? what if people are more scared than they usually are, and with cause? what use are good vibes then?

Despite all my rage I am still just A) gnocchi, brown butter, sage B) cheddar plus skilled affinage C) a stained Silver Palette page

Too many book reviews are like “this is a well-informed study of the history of citrus-growing up and down the Italian peninsula. Unfortunately, the author fails to explain how this knowledge helps us to break the power of the Dark at its midwinter height.”

I’ve been following @meganlcook.bsky.social’s dirtbag medievalism project eagerly - looking forward to this:

established professor: they forced us to lecture in masks! me, as a lifetime observer of established professors: you were all wearing masks your whole careers, that's why they call it imposter syndrome.

per NYT, ”With Doge, Big Disruptions Returned Meager Savings.” But how about avoiding the inelegant “With…“ formulation: ”Doge Returned Meager Savings.” Saved three words and a comma.

Perhaps like myself, you have wondered if the staff at Berghain know that American high schools students have access to "Could You Get In To Berghain?" computer simulations. I can now report that, yes, they do.

A pet peeve: when an established scholar declares that they wrote their conference paper on the plane (or, worse, in their hotel room after a night of carousing). It either signals disregard for the enterprise or serves as a self-congratulatory boast about their own brilliance. Seems to me.

my favorite structure built in my home town since my birth is not a building. It is a stone bench inscribed with words from Woolf’s Orlando, now picked out in snow:

Dessert course accidentally celebrating Walter Benjamin, the great flaneur (flan, and tragically, but deliciously, gateaux basque)

All these posts about "academic" James Bond movie titles confuse me, because my own career as an academic involved car chases through the Alps, killing guys while wearing a tux, bedding age-inappropriate starlets, and listening to villain monologues while strapped to a space laser.

Maybe you haven't heard David Rakoff's remarkable report about his time as "Christmas Freud" in the window of Barney's, in New York? It aired in 1996 on This American Life, and it makes a perfect gift for fans of psychoanalysis, shopping, or secular Judaism. www.thisamericanlife.org/47/christmas...

“would you like an extra pair of hands?” I ask my mother in the kitchen. “Yes, but they need to be attached to my same brain.”

This Christmas, don’t forget the Reason for the Season

19th C Kyoto is on fire for my new browser, netsuke navigator.

In which Charles Dickens becomes synonymous with Christmas and invents his own form of time travel, with your guide, @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social - perfect for listening to whilst prepping your fruitcakes, Christmas goose, or latkes: omny.fm/shows/in-the...

for my PhD exams I spent months reading 300+ books in European intellectual history, modern European history, modern Jewish history, medieval Jewish history, and critical theory. There is a huge difference between the style of reading that accommodates this, and having a computer "summarize" books.

Hi all: reupping my perennial call for indexing and editing clients for Spring / Summer 2026. It might be my last year doing this work, so get it while it's hot! Email at [email protected] for rate and availability. Feel free to share!

in grad school in new york, certain theorists, like certain bands, became unavoidable - in the early 2000s, they simply read Althusser, they became Interpol-ated.

I have just taken the most hope-inducing step a human being can take (buying Jonathan Richman tickets for a few months from now).

was just rereading Benjamin's "On Language as Such and the Language of Man," (1916) an essay that I loved as an undergraduate, and I put it together that he was 24 when it was published, and this helped me to understand the parts I find weirdly inconsistent or wrong.

man, the director's cut of Until the End of the World is like 5 hours, you really feel like the director shouldn't have been able to indulge his every Wim

Holiday reading for the soul! An antidote to the bureaucrats and yes-men trying to turn us all into imbeciles

I have been told I did not receive academic jobs for so many reasons - insufficient hekatombs to Poseidon, looking too much like a young Allen Ginsberg, not looking enough like an old Allen Ginsberg, slaying and eating the beeves of Helios - lies all lies

Industrial baking, involving the taming of wild yeast, coaxing regularity out of its metabolism, nevertheless introduces too much conformity in pursuit of surface texture - each loaf pan a Pro-Crustean Bread.

two reading recs this pre-Solstice Friday: first up is @evankindley.bsky.social’s review of a new Gertrude Stein biography, a skillful meditation on literary afterlife: newrepublic.com/article/2027...

Garum sorbet. Gaulish wine sorbet. A little Ithakan olive oil sorbet. Just a few of the Sorbets Virgilianae.

You tried to talk with the Dean in the department, I tried to talk with the Hank, we are not the same.

This superb essay by @benwurgaft.bsky.social makes me want to talk to everyone about the problems with utilitarianism.

Recent editorial exchanges remind me to broadcast: I maintain a small freelance editing practice, and will have some space free for new clients in the new year. I help writers both scholarly and otherwise, as well as institutional clients. A short description here: benwurgaft.org/editing/

Reupping this as it may be helpful!

i have never worked with tile before; just added a new row to the backsplash over my mom’s stove (rocks from an island in Maine where my family used to live)

you couldn’t ask for a better illustration of media bubbles fooling the well-educated than my Dad thinking AI is poised to take every job everywhere (bubble = evening news) and me thinking puns about Attic Greek are a good career move (bubble = my brain).

Ah, I see that we are trying to apply justice to the random swerve of particles again (i.e. relitigate academic hiring)

The traditional accompaniment to latkes is not actually apple sauce or sour cream, but simply salt, to commemorate the tragic moment when Latke’s wife looked back and was transformed.

The bathroom reading chez my mom

America, when will you be ideational? America, I’m placing my analog shoulder on the wheel.

Hello friends. I need to ask you a big favor: If you have an e-reader, please buy this book, written by my mom. It will cost $0.99 and it will boost her visibility. This is the first book she ever wrote (a long time ago), an epistolary novel about an ER (TW: various forms of trauma) a.co/d/icbEntH

Inconceivable.

Well you can tell by the way I darn my sock

My friends at @unhappinesspod.bsky.social are doing a membership drive - 20% off (of your cost, of your symptoms) annual memberships. Psychoanalysis, culture, politics, and of course charming personalities. What more could you want?

I am literally an intellectual historian and I hear the phrase "history's great thinkers" as the declaration of an interpretive emergency requiring my expertise.

Twitter had some good moments. Among my favorites was asking people what the opposite of sobremesa (the deeply civilized habit of relaxing after a meal) might be, and the response came swiftly: "Protestantism."

Academic friends with children: no matter how tempting do not pose your adorable infants and toddlers “reading“ works by Marx, Schopenhauer, Schlegel, etc - look what it did to me.

it's a loss to literary history that Coleridge never completed his planned defense of punning and English trip hop, but i have it on good authority that it would have been called "Paronomassive Attack"

one of the laziest moves in tech journalism is to presume chronology - a technology is inevitable; human history is a movement from tech to tech. thus I am aggrieved to read, as an opening line in this NYT article about students reading, "In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading."

You have no idea what is inside the fake lacquer of the narrow box; you break apart the cheap chopsticks in anticipation of what might be beyond the o bento horizon.