"This is what it looks like when workers hold the line – it sends a message to every media company in the country that AI cannot be used to circumvent union contracts or undermine journalistic integrity." Academics please take note!

Amazing news--congrats UPTE!!!

This special issue of @differences.bsky.social invites literary theorists and historians to engage with a question raised by this reader: For whom do we read? View the TOC and read the editor's introduction, made freely available: buff.ly/FYRFI0L

This thread is super interesting on how LLMs work by using familiar structures/patterns/genre conventions to produce something that appears meaningful (b/c it resembles other, actually meaningful text) but in fact is totally empty.

We need to permanently bar from our profession anyone who outsources peer review to AI

We already have the answer to this: the public research university. The Ivy League was never the answer and is not the relevant site for thinking about the future of American higher education. We need to invest in and democratize public higher education.

this would go so hard as an album cover

Thanks to this fire I’ve learned about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, site of a nuclear meltdown among the worst in the US. Fire has exploded and is now encroaching on it. Cleanup has been spotty at best. Really worrisome. insideclimatenews.org/news/1905202...

Very grateful for the opportunity to write about two new Octavia Butler biographies in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social that draw upon her remarkable archive at the Huntington.

“Mr. Rosenbaum said that if the episode ‘serves as a warning about the risks of A.I.-assisted research and verification, that is why I wrote the book…These A.I. errors do not, in fact, diminish the larger questions that the book raises’.” 🤡🤡🤡

Please consider making a donation to the Islamic Center of San Diego Victim and Family Support Fund if you are able. goodbricks.org/campaign/ics...

Spending lunch breaks reading Reddit threads on Tatis’s swing, somehow I have become a baseball person.

Please encourage any early career & NTT scholars doing fantastic work on Victorian poetries to submit to @victorianpoetry.bsky.social ‘s 2026 Early Career Prize — more info in the thread (have not had enough coffee, text of the call is embedded in a reply to the post linked below)!

Oh hai 🔥

Seeking jellyfish texts (esp poems) — published in any time or place, expressly about jellyfish or making only errant reference to them. Suggestions?

NEW: I've been shocked by some of the numbers I've been seeing on behind-the-meter power plants for data centers, so I did a little math. less than a dozen gas plants being built to power data centers for big tech companies could emit a maximum of nearly 130 million tons of CO2e each year (!)

Two copy editors high-fiving so hard right now

Loving the incessant invitations to complete surveys on the use of gen AI and to join gen AI “symposia” that are engineered to shut down even so much as a whiff of critique.

FYI @erinspampinato.bsky.social’s gorgeous conclusion for the Barbara Johnson book evokes the gutting, seething sense of abusive waste that is the emotional weather of austerity academia. Solidarity to all enduring this & please god, if do you have job security, find out how you can put it to use

The most daring & imaginative rising scholars are being cast aside systematically, abandoned by the very system that needs their ideas the most: the loss is profound, for everyone. And as in other cases of underinvestment the scale of damage will only become visible after it’s too late to fix.

My book, Probable Exhaustion, posits that literary texts of the long 19th c help us trace how a conception of progress welded to infinite growth and development is unthinkable outside of the threat of exhaustion. Will be out with @cornellupress.bsky.social Jan 15, 2027

There is something perverse & darkly significant in the fact that a widely published scholar whose *forthcoming book* traces a prehistory of the ideologies now disfiguring academia will likely have to leave the profession b/c there are no stable jobs for him. Infinitely sad, at so many levels.

CFP for VISAWUS 2026 online series on teaching. Please apply and share! TIME FOE TEACHING! A roundtable series to address the crisis in teaching Victorian Studies. Literary scholars, historians, art historians please join us! #VictorianStudies #19thCentury #AcademicSky

if you want to preorder this bad boy & set some of its very, very good essays on your fall syllabi, you can use NUP2026 to get 25% off —and I bet some of us would love to Zoom into your classes to talk?! 💗 @devingarofalo.bsky.social @nupress.bsky.social

And you need to read Lauren's whole essay (link in quoteskeet), but here's a little context on Rize.

(202) 224-3121 is the capitol switchboard for connecting to any senate or house office; even if you've never called; even though the lot of them are useless. no abominable war crimes, no war, no.

“During one conversation, we asked Altman whether running an A.I. company came with ‘an elevated requirement of integrity.’ This was supposed to be an easy question.”

What if we just went back to reading a bunch of books and thinking about them together, and that was the class? With syllabi no longer than three pages.

Resharing, for the Friday crowd, the news of this crucial special issue, in which I'm honored to appear alongside scholars and humans I deeply admire and to share the article I wrote when I thought it might be my last. Solidarity with all who have wondered the same. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

I cannot WAIT for my copy of @johannawinant.bsky.social's first monograph to arrive! I've just ordered LYRIC LOGIC from Columbia UP with the code CUP20. This review from Oren Izenberg tells you what you need to know. We all need pleasure, thought, & both buoyancy and precision, right now & always:

BRILLIANCE ALERT!

Fantastic job by @devingarofalo.bsky.social and the authors in this issue. Already scheming about how to make space for this on my undergrad intro to literary studies syllabus (required course for majors). These kinds of issues need to be center stage in our classrooms.

ICYMI yesterday afternoon, a new, currently ~open access issue of Victorian Poetry—abt VP & so much more—dropped ft a stellar intro by @devingarofalo.bsky.social, essays by @carolinelevine.bsky.social, @lerikscline.bsky.social, Ruth McAdams, & me, and a keywords essay by @ryancarroll.bsky.social.

Cannot wait to read this.

I'm so grateful to @devingarofalo.bsky.social for organizing this special issue and for offering me the opportunity to contextualize the events at St. Norbert College within a broader range of attacks on higher education. The thinking that went into writing this has been vital to me, in all senses.

The essay is dedicated to Alan and to my mom and was revised in a fugue state after she died in August (still feels so unreal to write that--it can't be true). I couldn't not finish it and have exactly zero idea how I did quite frankly. It was the culmination of too many yrs of thought & frustration

Another reason I wrote it is because Victorian Poetry, the journal, was the home of the one essay published by my grad school comrade and friend, Alan Young-Bryant, who died far, far, far too young and is dearly missed by me and others on here (hi @yblent.bsky.social & @docsthilaire.bsky.social).

One of the reasons I did--even though Victorian poetry is NOT my home field--is because the journal was formerly pub'd by WVU Press, formerly helmed by the great @derekkrissoff.bsky.social. WVU & and the badass staff, fac, & students there are near & dear to my (anti-Gordon Gee) heart.

I also call for not only more support but also more *STUDY* of university presses to keep up with & advance critical uni studies but also soc of lit, etc. Biggest of thanks to @devingarofalo.bsky.social for including me in this special issue and for bearing with and supporting me as I wrote it.

And don’t overlook the contributor bios—they’re worth a peek, too. The enture issue is OPEN ACCESS — so excited to see out in the world. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

@ryancarroll.bsky.social kicks off VP’s new keyword series with a brilliant essay on INFORMATICS. muse.jhu.edu/article/987315

Ruth McAdams turns to Ernest Jones to trace how structural forces position scholars analogously to Chartist poets. Chartist poets show NTT scholars how to demand space for their creative—& how scholarship is not activism but at its best makes activism possible. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

@rcolesworthy.bsky.social turns to the uni press, whose workers have a shared stake in fields like Victorian poetry. Discussing fantasies of crossover success & the little book genre, she attends to manufactured amateurism as struc condition & collaborative affordance. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

@lerikscline.bsky.social writes abt cuts at St. Norbert College & broader patterns of agentless budget shortfalls, “transformations,” admin hostility to protesters, & crackdowns on higher ed—these expose the tactical limits of a category like “Victorian studies.” muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

@carolinelevine.bsky.social explores how the first-person plural foments the speaking & breathing together, the collective sharing of energy & joy, that’s needed to confront structures of isolation & despair. Chartist fury meets union protests at UW-Madison. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

@devingarofalo.bsky.social shows how VP, the journal, exposes probs of intellectual labor, adjunctification, & attacks on higher ed. VP recently went through simultaneous ed & press transitions due to the gutting of WVU. The intro tells this story in convo w the field. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

This issue of VP is incredible — it was important to me to make space in the pages of VP for a timely convo abt the forces surrounding its simultaneous editor & press transitions. First time I’ve said anything in print as ed for reasons that become clear in intro. More importantly, the essays are 🔥.

Just hit send on my final book ms and all final submission materials. If anyone needs me please know I’m facedown on the floor. (This would be a good away message.)

Cover drop! Extremely excited to have this incredible sculpture, Marisol’s Love (1962), on the cover of Relatability, out later this year press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...