oh noooo lolol

Reading ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE alongside PONTIUS PILATE is crazy serendipity. What strange books with which to play in hypothesis land.

Wow ok unfollowing now. I loved him as a loyal butler, did not know he was an unreliable narrator

I have reason to believe that outsourcing a responsibility whose intricacies you don’t fully understand to someone else with even less grasp of those intricacies is a bad idea.

Tonight is a good night to bring up––once again––how I attribute my scholarly methodologies, habits, and perspectives to the fact that 80% of my readings in undergrad were shitty photocopies of my profs' books.

Spent 40m today reading a kid’s essay and writing to her about it. The takeaway won’t be better writing—it’ll be that someone who cares about her thinks she’s on the right track. Everyone who thinks they’re smart thinks so because someone took time w their work and told them so.

so good to see @kjavadizadeh.bsky.social’s Close Readings finally back, & with a beautiful ep on beloved Alice Notley w/ @nicksturm.bsky.social

I can't believe I deleted Twitter before getting a final tally on how many people I successfully bullied into reading McTeague

Nathaniel Hawthorne will never break your heart like this

One day I would like a researcher to analyze what collectively shitting on the humanities for 20+ years and pushing everyone to STEM has done to our collective critical thinking abilities

"When I moved to America from Russia to join a biology lab at Harvard Medical School in 2023, it felt as if I found my dream job. America was a paradise for science...Instead, my visa was revoked and I was sent to a detention center in Louisiana." www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/o...

"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging." Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council. I wrote about my decision in TIME. time.com/7285045/resi...

RIP Henry James you would have loved the story of an American from the Midwest who enters a world of European intrigue

I think you can draw a direct line between the proliferance of MBAs and every industry becoming a uselessly incompetent gaggle of morons and failures

I wrote about my old friend Joshua Clover: elizabethmccracken.substack.com/p/so-blue-co...

I ran grant programs at @nehgov.bsky.social for over a decade. With colleagues, oversaw review of thousands of grant applications. Witnessed care & thoughtfulness of hundreds of reviewers. This statement is insulting to all of them. Whoever wrote it should be ashamed. www.neh.gov/news/update-...

📍 Budapest

Alumni Development orgs are going to try to squeeze donors harder as the schools lose grants just as the donors' 401k's will be down 20%.

i think it's so important to not limit ourselves; to allow us to think of a better world, even if that gets us called idealistic or naive. i'm talking of course about imagining a universe in which a personal printer that works has been invented

“Scholars have lost access to one of the members of the very short list of funders still funding the academic humanities. Ford, Javits, and Carnegie, to name just a few of the biggest foundations, largely abandoned grantmaking for humanists in the 2010s.”

Apologies to everyone’s quarter-century lists, but my real hope that the best novelist of the 21st century has not been born yet

Just got word from my college roommate - who is the state archivist for the state of South Dakota - that due to the DOGE shutdowns of IMLS, they can no longer fund InterLibrary Loan in SD. This means exchange between libraries, ability to get books delivered across the system, is gone as of 4/30.

Quick appreciation post for Mildred Barnes Bliss 🩵 She was a member of the Hroswitha Club who lived through WWII and that's exactly what she is referring to with this quote.

Does it say IDEAS???

A big part of academia consists of inputting your CV into different formats.

my hope is that AI can empower the Dumbest, Least talented slobs i know to replace everything i ever loved with One Million Years of Content

This video literally inspired us to bring the old school dictionary upstairs from the basement storage. It’s now on the coffee table, as the good lord intended. A constant reminder to all who dwell here that as for me and my house, we look shit up.

Disgusting. Meanwhile Trump is gutting the NEH which never has had a budget even close to $1 billion.

My algorithm on here is showing me many rats, chinchillas, and rabbits, no matter how often I ask it to show me less like this

in order to be considered real children of the corn they must come from the demonic region of nebraska, otherwise they’re just kids of the maize

“Eliminating federal funding for the humanities saves next to no money, but it will cost the American people something precious: one of the few federal institutions whose whole purpose is to foster community and thoughtful discussion across the polarities that increasingly divide and depress us.”

@indivisible-ba-sd.bsky.social showed up!

The longest Zoom meeting I ever participated in (Summer 2023) was an NEH review panel. 5.5 hours, one 15-minute break. The fifteen of us all spent weeks preparing. All of the contenders were fantastic. D0Gee could never compete.

I received a $6k grant from the NEH that changed the course of the research I did—the most concerted effort to date to provide archival documentation about commercial book artists in medieval London. That’s all it took—the humanities are cheap and repay society a billionfold. +

Resist the regime. Reading books is resistance. Buying books is resistance. Sharing books is resistance. Celebrating books is resistance. Resist this regime.

We ultimately should be working for a world in which all of us have the resources - time, money, materials, community - to explore, write, think, teach, under the freest possible conditions. The concentration of resources/capital in a few select places is antithetical to the spirit of democracy.

If you haven't had a chance to use this tool to contact your reps to protest the attacks on the NEH, note that you can use it to contact both your reps in DC AND your local / state elected officials to let them know how devastating cuts to the NEH would be for your local community!

Valuing the humanities means supporting Federal funding for the humanities. The humanities are not a luxury.

On Monday, March 31, 2025 we learned that DOGE is targeting the NEH with the aim of substantially reducing its staff, cutting the agency’s grant programs, and rescinding grants that have already been awarded. Learn what steps you can take here: nhalliance.org/federal-fund...

If I was going to Cory Booker about the value of the NEH I could start in my ❤️ Virginia or my new home state of Rhode Island, and I could fill 20 hours easy about the role of NEH funded work for kids and teachers, for museums and other public sites, and for our expanded understanding of Who We Are.

Back in 2017 when Trump 1 wanted to zero out NEH I spent half an hour in my office looking for books that got NEH support. These books. These titles. Another 30 minutes & I could’ve reached the ceiling. Now they’ve actually done it.

The NEH has immeasurable impact. The people who work there are wonderful, dedicated public servants, many of whom I have the privilege to know and work with on awards I have received. It is horrifying that this agency could be dismantled on the whim of an unelected billionaire.

It’s so weird how we’re all just working like this is still a normal country.

NEH and IMLS have very small budgets but the impact of the work these agencies do is felt literally everywhere in the US, including in many of the places that voted for Trump.

“…at least fight against the theft of your soul.”