Gwendolyn Brooks (at 16)

Osita Nwanevu with the perfect rejoinder to that nonsense Compact piece (which way too many self-professed "liberals" took at face value), fleshed out with the types of actually diligent statistics and contextual analyses sorely absent from the conversation: www.ositanwanevu.com/on-race-gend...

*whispers* this would also be right about fan culture sorry 👀

Dallas City Council members approved exploratory measures for privatizing City Hall as they seek to sell the community site, demolishing its I.M. Pei-designed Brutalist building and a public plaza with sculptures to make way for a new casino funded by Trump donor Miriam Adelson.

I got kicked off a committee for repeatedly asking "why would we want that?"

Texas A&M University will not reinstate a lecturer who was fired after a video of her teaching about gender identity in a children’s literature class went viral, despite a faculty appeals panel unanimously concluding that her dismissal was not justified.

Like the suburban developments named after whatever natural feature was destroyed to build them

A better framework is to address the broader project of AI to displace interpersonal contact, thought, negotiation; and to normalize this project. This aspect of AI is essential to the economic agenda that it underpins. 2/n

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and she'd say "Nice catch!" when I pointed to a potential problem, or "Great observation" in response to my comments.

Steve isn’t here anymore, but he always posted this picture on Hanukkah so I thought we could carry on his tradition and remember him.

it’s St Lucy’s day, so you know what that means — time for the best John Donne poem

i really want to push back more forcefully on this dishonest portrayal of the self as a "neutral" party. like setting aside that it's categorically not true, it's specifically being weaponized by people who perhaps don't have expertise, but certainly have prior interests in these subjects.

To the New York Times, a constitutional provision is just something that's "traditional."

In addition to all of the other benefits already reported about NYC congestion pricing, "In the first six months of the program, air pollution – in the form of particulate matter 2.5 micrometers and smaller – dropped by 22% in the Congestion Relief Zone (CRZ)" news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

Wait did everyone else already just know that What I Got is Lady Madonna 🤯

A giant

Nonsense from Castro. Clearly having well-funded candidates across statewide races is a good idea, but JC could obviously run for AG in any case! The idea that having a high-profile Lieutenant Governor candidate is make-or-break for an AG race is bizarre and self-serving.

🚨🚨 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/

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...