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it is a truth universally acknowledged (but forgotten by me) that if you have an essay due and you really need to work during weekend naptime, your child will not nap

Coming down with a cold, writing an exam, staring down my own essay deadline, hoping against hope that students turn their work in: the quintessential last-week-of-classes mess

“Great! Some fresh snow to cover up the ugly snow leftovers from last weekend,” I caught myself thinking this morning. And I suppose that is how one becomes a winter person

maybe my most old-fashioned assignment is for students to memorize and recite a poem, and it is just so very fun to listen to them—strongly recommend you give yourself this end-of-term gift

Thanksgiving break was tough for a number of reasons, but: we cleaned & reorganized 2 closets, weaned the toddler off pacis, got 8 inches of snow, and saw a coyote stroll down our street, so maybe not altogether bad?

Ah, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the most pointless class day of the entire semester. So pointless that we’ve only had class on it for 3 years, and we’re abandoning this academic calendar and taking the whole week off again next year.

Yesterday I tried to put everything I knew about whistles—where to get them, where to get instruction sheets, how to distro—into one place so you can build off it for your own community's whistle needs: dansinker.com/posts/2025-1...

Today was ars poetica day in the intro to poetry class. Gotta add "break LLMs" to the list of things poetry can do...

this is beneath her, but I would so love a Patricia Lockwood review of this book

academeblog.org/2025/11/13/t... My colleague has captured what is currently happening at my institution. I have found the chipper rhetoric announcing it particularly depressing.

meeting spawns other emergency meetings because of [redacted] [redacted]

That the complainant is the Dean is deeply concerning www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/u...

Bribing my students to come to class

But the toddler doesn’t even have snow pants yet?!?!

My empire for a poll: do I cut Conrad, Fleming, or something else? FWIW, I'm already cutting Portrait (maybe keeping "The Dead") and swapping out Hamid for Ali Smith's Autumn. But something else has to go.

A hilarious thing is parenting a 2yo when you have lost your voice

"Print is a rent strike. Close reading is for everyone. Against long-rising disparities in education, we must not capitulate to A.I. shortcuts that some argue make reading more accessible. The point of reading is to read, not to outsource reading to a machine: Everyone deserves that opportunity."

Read a novel I bought 2 years ago when my kid was a tiny baby and I thought, oh so mistakenly, that I’d have time to read:

My most significant fall break accomplishment:

in delightful news, the 2yo just declared capers yummy

UVA says no to the compact

minor indignities of the day include being subjected to repeatedly hearing the word "visioning" in a meeting

Administrators at Indiana University baselessly fired the student media director and ordered the student paper to cease its print edition, so it'd sure be a shame if this excellent digital front page were to be widely shared today issuu.com/idsnews/docs...

i would like to talk to the person who scheduled all the parent & child swim time in chicago's indoor pools for naptime

going to try to summon the enthusiasm my 2yo shows for finding the moon every night and pointing out the orange cars on our street every morning

What do I cut from my c20-21 British fiction class? Conrad, HofD Joyce, Portrait Forster, Passage to India Woolf, Dalloway Achebe, Things Fall Apart Fleming, Dr. No Rhys, Wide Sarg Sea Roy, God of Small Things Z Smith, White Teeth Hamid, Exit West Bk orders for spring somehow due in a week—ack!

Does anyone still make coursepacks for students? Super common when I was in college & grad school, but I imagine putting PDFs on the LMS has mostly (entirely?) replaced it. Anyone just printing out everything for them?

the day-to-day demoralizations of working in a regional public in a red state in the age of AI hype are too much today, even when I know they're by design, even when (most) colleagues and (basically all) students are fantastic

I have read a little bit of this, and it's so very good: smart and insightful and just really well written

[clears throat]...I have another book coming out in the near future if you'd like to read a bit about LYRIC LOGIC, there are some very generous blurbs over at @columbiaup.bsky.social (my thanks to Marjorie Levinson, Oren Izenberg, Theo Davis, Nan Z. Da, and also @philipleventhal.bsky.social)

doing bound-notebook reading journals this semester: I have absolutely screwed myself with how much & how fast I have to read, but they are so much better than discussion posts in all the ways that matter

yes, professional development modules are surely the thing that will improve morale and fix all the systems that aren't working

Made plum torte last weekend and will make it again tomorrow

anybody have experience on their campus with EAB coming in to consult, and (if you have access to budget numbers) any sense of what their consulting fees are? feel free to DM

Filled with incandescent rage at this idiocy (even despite AHIP announcing they have better sense: counting on insurance companies to do the right thing is a terrible place to be) www.ahip.org/news/press-r...

This is good: With Trump/RFK destroying CDC, JB Pritzker's officials are exploring the possibility of buying Covid vaccines from manufacturers and distributing them in-state themselves, source tells me. Dem govs must step up and fill the void. New piece from me: newrepublic.com/article/1998...

Fuck these fucking fuckers for ensuring that daycares will be full of kids who can't get a covid vaccine

the biannual urge to catapult Bloom's taxonomy of verbs into the sun

I did it. I found the most 90s crayon possible

BRB going to color like it’s 1995 (with crayons from roughly 1995)

New trend in cover design, perhaps. Close-cropped frontal portrait to signal intimacy with (or scrutiny of) subject as well as honesty of writer (regardless of actual honesty). Only showing half the face to indicate the subject is complex and partially unknown to the public: …

at the risk of being all too earnest, sometimes writing is just plodding along, 500 words at a time, and hoping it'll eventually get good

Now Available! HOLLYWOOD'S OTHERS: LOVE & LIMITATION IN THE STAR SYSTEM, by Katherine Fusco. Use the coupon code CUP20 and save 20%: bit.ly/4kN4HcR @fuscowrites.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social

new genre of academic dread: awaiting news from meetings of the commission for higher education

Parental first: entire morning derailed by an attempt to find a stuffed monkey who appears to have vanished overnight. Curious George, where are you?

Peach for breakfast, cherries for lunch, watermelon for dinner. Living the dream over here

I am 2 years younger than Christopher Storer, and I have always grinned (or rolled my eyes, or fist-pumped) at the music in The Beat, but the specific Decemberists track in the wedding episode is just too too too on the nose

My two-year-old thinks the number after three is “whee!”

Came home from early a.m. swim practice to sourdough discard whole wheat crepes filled with Nutella and raspberry jam, so I am, in fact, the most spoiled person ever