The new @bavs-uk.bsky.social newsletter is here and it is ✨stunning ✨ This refresh has been a long time in the making, with lots of work behind the scenes from me and @ireadoldbooks.bsky.social - we hope you love it as much as we do! Read the spring issue here: bavs.ac.uk/wp-content/u...

private equity nation: take over a brand, aggressively pursue insane changes that destroy any credibility formerly associated with the brand, walk away while it burns, repeat

Cusp 4.1 is now live on Project Muse. This issue includes a fantastic cluster, drawing from papers at the 2025 NVSA, on the Victorian Twentieth Century as well as a newly recovered prose piece by George Egerton. muse.jhu.edu/issue/56579

Or this one: Vija Celmins. Untitled (Desert-Galaxy), Graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 1974 www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks...

*breathing into a paper bag*

wow we are arriving at the exact situation every single person imagined within one second of seeing their first robot dog

Inadvertently makes a case here for why we need to keep the humanities in school

"I'm standing here in front of you guys because an English professor ... read something that I wrote —it was the first assignment when I was 17 years old, my freshman year— and said 'Hey I think you should go to Hollywood and write screenplays.' Literally said that to me."

In the years before he unexpectedly & tragically died, our friend Daniel DeWispelare was developing a project about social insubordination & creative dissent he called “Anglophone Riot.” He died while it was still in development. +

"A department generating high credit-hour production across the university but with few declared majors is not an inefficient department. It is a department whose students are not being counted in the metric being used against it."

Habermas outlived modernity—respect

uh okay

god if you’ve ever even thought of doing this please quit your job immediately and pray that your spot in this tiny and assailed profession goes to someone who cares about what we are all trying to do here— Jesus fucking Christ

oops sorry i stole your identity and by extension your whole life's work for my proprietary cheating software

What of Lake Powell? Deadpool creeps ever closer, when it will drop below the badly-designed dam’s intakes, placed far too high for a dwindling lake, and it will be unable to release water or generate electricity. The only thing left for it to do will be to collect silt, forever. (6/7)

it was the infinite media-sphere censoriousness about the rhetorical framing of climate change as a matter of 'hope' vs 'doom' that ultimately sent me over the edge when I had to finalize the title for my book

Wonderful chance to see legendary activists @billmckibben.bsky.social and @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social live, TODAY, as they discuss her new book "The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change" thirdact.org/events/rebec...

GU Students:

the brilliant people at GU Special Collections have archived the papers of our late colleague Ricardo Ortiz and the subject headings are an index to the mind & person we've all lost 💙😭✨ findingaids.library.georgetown.edu/repositories...

Reminded of buying a second hand copy of the 2003 Donald Barthelme's *Sixty Stories* in Penguin Classics and finding this. Guess which website no longer exists?

somebody i know met the fascist NEH head McDonald at a DC event not long ago &, knowing nothing abt academia or how it works (I do not at all fault for that!), told him about me & my wife’s work and then texted me this. “30k grants for interesting projects” are the gifts he could bestow at parties

Yes! And I wonder how anybody could ever hope to ‘know a field well,’ if they’ve never had to sort through a bunch of actual material themselves & figure out how it fits together? 🤔

Wild to know EBB was absolutely ripping laudanum and constantly high or in withdrawal for most of her poetic career

Is this what Clune’s judgment book was about

they are this afraid of people advocating for humane behavior nyunews.com/news/2026/03...

Entire research agendas + years of labor, knowledge, and expanded understanding torched in an instant because a fratbro tech imbecile in his twenties used “subjective judgment” to decide if something was “crazy”

there you go, @nathankhensley.bsky.social

“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...