🚨🚨 Texas A&M Board of Regents is meeting next week and set to approve a new policy requiring pre-approval of courses on race and gender. This is a blatant violation of academic freedom.

It is worth saying that putting “Africana studies” in scare quotes as if it’s a ridiculous concept is not a political argument. It’s just racism. “Africa is not worthy of a major” is the implication. Yeah dude you’re just racist. (From Gerard Baker at the WSJ today) www.wsj.com/opinion/mamd...

Oh my god

In contemporary authoritarian regimes, they don’t ban dissenting voices—they have regime affiliated oligarchs buy up the big outlets and force out opposition voices. Anyway:

The attack on transgender people is not made to solve a problem. It is fomenting bigotry to take power. Concessions are encouragement to do more attacking.

In real ways I think a film better understood as an adaptation/remake of Oppenheimer than of Mary Shelley

Two "ideas" about universities are gaining stature today: *universities should declare institutional neutrality. *professors' speech is government speech (not neutral, partisan) if publicly funded. Some individuals endorse both principles, which is logically incoherent. 1/

There are still people who tell me Biden couldn't have done anything differently— here is something that happened over a year and a half before Oct 2023 that the Biden administration could have done differently.

So you should really watch this. Just 2 minutes. But a window into the truly radical nature of the people Trump is nominating. When pressed today, the nominee to be Ambassador to South Africa refuses to oppose reinstituting laws to prevent black people from voting in America.

I love the French www.bbc.com/news/article...

So excited for "A Study in Empire: How We Read Now" with brilliant colleagues Olivia Lingyi Xu, Jacob Romanow, Nasser Mufti, & Meghna Sapui at #NAVSA2025

Wentworth fails to catch Louisa because, in his secret heart, he wants her to die

Justice Kavanaugh: “If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.”

Rooted cosmopolitanism vs rootless nationalism.

"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

Northrop Frye: “Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is a remarkable document, but as a piece of Wordsworthian criticism nobody would give it more than about a B plus.”

Victorian Network's special issue "Victorian Pedagogy" is out today, including my article "The Moralist Critic and the Student Activist: A Reconsideration"! www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn...

Exceptionally clear-eyed about the stakes and future of literary studies as a practical shared enterprise—as the BWWA so often has been. Worth a read. muse.jhu.edu/pub/30/artic...

"The indigenization of language and culture…is irreducibly a colonial process, a radical innovation in the name of return to the origin." (Aamir Mufti)

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

korean reporting is nightmarish on the conditions Korean workers were contained in

Actually, Frankenstein is a doctor success at the Venice film festival

I think in general, it's a mistake to think reception-side functionalism calls for production-side functionalism. Sure, you might want the piece of writing, or the dinner, or the car to just "do its job." But the more that's the attitude of the people making it, the less likely it actually will

Woolf

We need to stop using a framework of 'ChatGPT killed someone', it feeds into the myth of the system's agency & OpenAI's framing. The right framework to use: OpenAI is continuing to perpetuate an indefinite industrial disaster. The oil pipe is not at fault when it breaks. The company that built it is

there's good and there's not good, and this is not good

A diction addiction's conviction of jurisdiction is fiction

People present canons as fixed precisely as a rearguard maneuver for their own candidates. So it's worth noticing the vibe shift here vs eg this post from 2021. The right-wing fantasized continuity of canon in 2025 looks more masculinist + imperialist, less pastoralist, and much less Catholic.

Any diagnosis of the problem that doesn’t clearly see the “lecturers” doing the grunt work as the *colleagues* whose research careers are already being sacrificed on the altar of Capital isn’t going to identify a path forward for the future of the academic humanities /5

The interesting thing is that the centrists fantasize a “rational right” that believes all the things they themselves believe but are strategically unwilling/unable to position themselves as the rational right because of what that would entail confessing

Next time you're asked to justify literary studies, try this line with the dean's office and see how well it goes over: “Over time, we’ll find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable,” Zuckerberg predicted. www.reuters.com/investigates...

Robby Starbuck has been appointed as an AI bias advisor at Meta with the goal of making the company's chat bot less "woke."

"Many residents still do not feel safe." 41% of Americans feel that ghosts exist, which is why I am demanding that we set up a Federal Office of Ghostbusting

Yeah—part of it too is that this kind of claim is always a shell game where two not-totally-compatible definitions of "being a Mozart" (one about excellence of product and one about relative status/prestige/influence) are elided and opportunistically substituted for one another

One of the most brilliant comic minds of the last century. Here's to many evenings well wasted. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/a...

I guess I just want to say that Trump has captured every single institution. You can track variation in, say, court decisions or changing positions on tariffs but even conceding those things accepts that his whims run institutions’ priorities. Not a single one of them really stood.

Secret police” got the name because they do surveillance and are often plain-clothed (or in ICE’s case masked). But the thing that has defined them since the 18th century was that they operate independently of civil police with a goal of maintaining social and political control. Again, that’s ICE.

Less than a year ago @nytimes.com was sent hacked data about Trump's vetting of JD Vance, which they refused to publish. But Mamdami's hacked college application gets an exception because of interest from random online Nazis and Chris Rufo, the NYTimes' de facto executive editor.

I like Brian Wilson because he understood how painful beautiful things can be and he figured out how to live in that with joy

What you can control is whether or not you are helping the fascist cause. Are you blaming the people the fascists are scapegoating for fascist violence? Are you blaming people resisting fascist violence for fascist violence? If so, you are helping them.

It’s a difficult proposition for undergrads to work through, but choosing a major isn’t really about what kind of jobs you want to do so much as what sorts of questions you want to think about or *how* you want to think about questions throughout your life.

Here's the one chart you need to see: - Abrego Garcia deported - SCOTUS ruling gets press - News coverage shot up - Google search traffic shot up - Trump approval fell down and then - News media moved on - Trump immigration approval went back up Exactly as predicted by the survey experiment.

Happy 🎂, _Mrs Dalloway_. Here's part of Richard Hughes' lovely 1925 review: "to the reader, London is made, for the first time (this will probably surprise him) to exist. It emerges, shining like crystal, out of the fog in which all the merely material universe is ordinarily enveloped in his mind".

ProQuest automatically generating AI summaries of dissertations and plopping them up when you try to look at somebody's research seems ummmmmm like a disservice to the scholarship

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

Wut? newrepublic.com/post/195081/...

i mean whoever it is can take the papal name pizzaballa

As promised - voting rights attorney Patrick Roath is jumping into this race to make Lynch fight for his seat. No one is entitled to hold on to power forever. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/07/m...