The endgame of all rightwing crunchiness (anti-vax, anti-childcare, anti-pharmaceuticals during pregnancy and childbirth, MAHA diets, homesteading) is women bearing more sacrificial pain

this is a very sharp piece on why it makes no sense to run universities as if they are businesses. They're not businesses. www.afr.com/work-and-car...

Feels like university managers are practicing disaster capitalism everywhere in the English-speaking world, all at once

If it’s 1994, the opening shot is tree-height over a busy street, and the orchestra is hitting that diminished fifth, we’re in for some hijinks

📚 Now available! 📚 THE TIGER SKIN AND OTHER TALES OF THE UNEASY, published by @blpublishing.bsky.social I’ve wanted to bring Violet Hunt’s supernatural fiction back for a while now, so am happy to see these stories reach a wide audience again. Please share!

Grumpily disappointed by these hotel ghost stories. You don’t need a witch in a pond to make a hotel weird and unsettling.

So proud of the work our union has done to achieve this. I've been in a lot of change plans in the UK and Aus, and this is the most resounding victory I've ever seen. All other unis should be on notice: your governance needs major reform. (ps join your union 💪) www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09...

Statement of support for the Save Meanjin campaign, from colleagues in the Screen and Cultural Studies program at the University of Melbourne savemeanjin.org

This is disgraceful - both the workload and the AI ‘workaround’

So many of the half-baked AI implementations are happening in professional arenas that have been hollowed out by extraction and divestment. No journalist needs a writing aid unless they’re being paid too little to write too much, no teacher needs a commenting tool unless they’re overextended.

Have people read the original tale of the Monkey’s Paw from 1902? Because it slaps (the story, not the paw) www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1...

Totally haunted by this one melody open.spotify.com/track/4OByHK...

*Finally* a horror film about musique concrète www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj7U...

The University of Melbourne English and Theatre Studies Statement on the closure of Meanjin. 12 September 2025

RALLY TO SAVE MEANJIN Thursday 11 Sep 9am Outside the Melbourne University Publishing office, 715 Swanston St, Carlton. A number of Australian writers and editors will speak in support of this vital cultural institution

Australian universities are in a governance crisis. VC pay blowouts, scandals, mission drift — these aren’t random, they’re structural. This new working paper with @marijataflaga.bsky.social & Keith Dowding digs into why the system is broken, and how to fix it. doi.org/10.25911/MWW... A thread:

When Travolta wakes up in Face/Off

I like how Gail Jones writes about the weirdness of hotels

I like how Gail Jones writes about the weirdness of hotels

I think we should agree that the explanation proffered yesterday by the MUP board chair for Meanjin’s axing (“purely financial reasons”) is a nonsense. Which begs the question: what was the real reason? This is a scandal.

Open letter in support of Meanjin: openletter.earth/an-open-lett...

Mildly haunted airport hotel. Love me some non-place.

The loss of Meanjin is devastating news for Australian writers and readers. Always meant so much to see my work there. Some of my best experiences of being edited. An entirely avoidable disaster.

Fun, thoughtful, very personal podcast from @licencetoqueer.com on home and the queerness of Bond in Skyfall (an unsettling, pseudo-Gothic spectacle with lots of suggestive tunnels) podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/l...

we've hit 500 signatures!!

Given how Deloitte and other management consultant firms have inveigled themselves into university governance in Australia and internationally … this stinks

We'll go dancing down the street Kissing everyone we meet When that man is dead and gone www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv8L...

The rise of cozy/cosiness in the 21st century. "Cosy" goes up alongside the late-Victorian invention of the tea-cosy and the egg-cosy, but now we're in a post-Covid coziness peak, with cozy crime, cozy Animal Crossing games, "domestic cozy", cozycore, and the fetish for "hygge".

Latest dank purchase

1 week after reopening, WCK’s Damian’s Kitchen has scaled quickly—cooks are now preparing 68,000 meals each day. Hot meals are reaching displacement camps in Mawasi, community groups, and medical points daily. Across our network of kitchens, we are serving almost 200,000 meals daily. #ChefsForGaza

Everyone’s students are great, but this semester has reminded me of the truth universally acknowledged that English majors are the best of all possible students

These guys are the best (Gift link) www.themercury.com.au/news/tasmani...

Was thinking that Toy Story is secretly an existential horror story like Never Let Me Go (Andy’s house is Hailsham), and then I remembered that Klara and the Sun existed

WCK’s mobile bakery in Gaza is currently producing 45,000 loaves of bread every day. With more supplies, including flour and fuel, we'd be able to more than double that daily output and support more Palestinian families in need. #ChefsForGaza

This is the way www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

John Dos Passos, on the death of Sacco and Vanzetti, in The Big Money (1936)

good noise in nipaluna/hobart

Never forget that Australia has run multiple Alligator Alcatrazes for decades

Cat surprised in cupboard

Someone keeps pulling these down, but come along Hobartians

Is it this

There are only seven types of stories, and only two themes

This is my “music that sounds like a steamship” playlist. A transcontinental belowdecks folk bacchanal, toot toot open.spotify.com/playlist/2hd...

Nationwide march also in nipaluna

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

This is my “music that sounds like a steamship” playlist. A transcontinental belowdecks folk bacchanal, toot toot open.spotify.com/playlist/2hd...

I have almost run out of things to say about the people running Australian universities www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

"x is a distraction from y" is such a defeatist way to think about narrative-making. Let the plots be tangled! Embrace the digression and the minor character! Do the police in different voices! Draw improbable connections through coincidence, magic, capital, and romance!

“Writing studies as a discipline stands against linguistic homogenization, which is accelerated and advanced by GenAI.”