“The water would be supplied by Carvins Cove Reservoir, the primary drinking water source for Botetourt County and much of the Roanoke Valley” 👍

often attributed lol

Big arch Holtville, CA

leveraged, partnered, advanced, precise — somehow even more grotesque when the numbed, bullshit jargon of corporate marketing, already nihilistic, is transposed into the domain of state murder

shifting my life savings from the nuclear-war-is-imminent polymarket to the one that says nobody does even one day of jail time for this burn after reading-level crime

Pretty excited for HOW TO SURVIVE THE TEXTPOCALYPSE, the seminar I'm teaching at @emorycollege.bsky.social next fall with @shsalter.bsky.social (and with a nod to @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social for title inspo)

[gyre widening]

Anyway, this is the climate crisis.

incredible that this article, which describes billionaire hedge fund managers & tech magnates all fighting each other to buy $50 million compounds inches above a rapidly rising ocean, doesn't mention climate change or the coming reinsurance crisis but i guess what is journalism

Hoping to activate my LLM-simulated academic persona & set it to autogenerate scholarly outputs, which other LLMs can then process so other bots can make yet more outputs based on those, & so on, until students can at last access the glorious final product via Grammarly & achieve Total Enlightenment

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed. Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn

Maybe we'd still have our jobs, too!

"I hope this comes to an end soon so I can be with you, and if it does not, I will carry you in my heart."

this is a framework for capitulation to fascism, with some fancy medieval citations thrown in to smarten it up and give it a gloss of moral seriousness

#Hagerstown There is a (short) public comment period now: actionnetwork.org/letters/emer...

for what it cost for our allies to shoot down three of our own planes by accident in a murderous illegal war we could have funded the NEH at 150% of its historic peak funding for a year

sorry I was in a full day seminar about biodiversity collapse and climate change did I miss anything🙃

The world is a grotesquerie of violence, stupidity, and loss, but Adam made shirts of the original serial cover of *Middlemarch*, and they are gorgeous.

the both-sides framing of this reaction piece on GU's forcible onboarding of AI systems into the scenes of research & learning is frustrating, if understandable from the perspective of students trying to get perspective on a topic on which conflicting institutional signals are being sent.

Wow and I always thought the most damning citation of Larry Summers was the epigraph from *Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor* (2011)

It is honestly inspiring to see your university colleagues working so bravely in service of truth

I am headed to Nashville tomorrow for a book talk and workshop at Vanderbilt. I spent two years with this department after I finished my Phd and before I truly conceived of what I was doing as writing a book. It feels so special to come back now! as.vanderbilt.edu/english/robe...

Just piecing together a few unrelated items in the feed

"The app’s Play Store page says after identifying a device, a user “may act accordingly.” [The developer] said he can imagine that including what the woman on the subway allegedly did, [i.e. breaking the glasses]. “Or people just tell them politely to f**k off.”

the rollout of Georgetown's just-announced contract w Gemini was tightly choreographed the way you'd plan a dance: each supposedly preparatory step ("new courses," "pedagogy initiatives," "faculty-led discussions") was organized by admin, funded by donors, & set in train w this outcome in mind

Check out what @uvalibrary.bsky.social has put together as an open source AI policy guide: library.virginia.edu/news/2026/pr... libraopen.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/...

“Not mild aesthetic preferences — descriptions of physical illness. Nausea, revulsion, skin crawling, the body rejecting something at a fundamental level.” Women’s embodied refusal of AI and what we should learn from it 👇👇

students know they are being cheated

My general feeling is that every summary tool shortcuts the library shelf. In grad school there were few things I adored more than finding a book on the shelf bc I inevitably found six or seven other books on proximate shelves that I didn’t even know I needed! Process is the point!

this was a beautiful and moving and completely packed event, commemorating the legendary books section of the Washington Post, RIP

Hey if you recently tuned into this channel I’m a writer, independent scholar, and editor, but you will find far more puns about specialty coffee/Frankfurt school critical theory/Japanese whisky here than professional business.

“The growing representation of private equity and hedge fund managers on university boards of trustees is analyzed to show how this increasingly wealthy sub-group of financiers gained elite social ties despite the decline of bank-based interlocks between corporate boards.”

Requiem at @politicsprose.bsky.social for the WaPo Book World, a major cultural institution and site for the serious public discussion of literature, just gone

Lots to be depressed and angry about, but this bullet point hits home. What happened to the Education in Higher Education?

The UK has exactly that configuration -- unions but no tenure -- and I have got to say it is not going great qmucu.org/qmul-transfo...

This article, in the new issue of @aaup.org’s magazine *Academe*, should be required reading for all university employees everywhere, especially administrators. +

The unfinished project of modernity—almost finished!

I just learned that I have five free ebooks of *Action without Hope* that I can give away— I am told they can each work on up to five different devices “once you download the free software.” Please hit me up via dm if you’d like one. Solidarity 🌿

PROFESSION has always been such an important part of how I understand, well, the profession. Please consider submitting and share widely this important CFP on precarity.

“Stumbled into a little bit of the history” 🫠

College writing was nice while it lasted.

“There is nothing ambiguous about the law,” reads the tattoo inscribed over and over again, in agonizing cursive loops, onto the skin of a still-sentient narrator in a Kafka story

late-phase imperialism, seen by children—as Conrad said, "not a pretty thing when you look into it too much"

I see they settled on a framing in the donor group chat

In just a page Brontë has Lockwood oscillating b/t an empty tourist sentimentalism(“This is certainly a beautiful country!”) & incipiently violent self-assertion(“fairly pushing the barrier”), diagnosing in a few lines the colonizing mentality of a rising capitalist elite—call it the provostial mind

teaching it again this week and didn’t even PLAN for there to be a gloriously insane adaptation all over the discourse at this very moment 🤩🤟🎉🌿

Against Archival Erasure: a conversation on Caribbean women and the archive. 2/27 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

What is intellectual freedom, when the very wealthy have a disproportionate influence on higher education, as they do in politics? And what is the effect (on intellectual freedom) of academic careers premised on seeking fame and public influence, with help from the very wealthy?

dude what