BE THE MONSTER YOU WISH TO SEE AT THE END OF THE BOOK

it’s messed up that we spend so much time and money on moth ranches when we really only use the balls

if i were ms jackson, i would not accept that apology.

ahh, the famous anthology story, "The Lady or the Tiger?"

ahh, the monty hall problem

A thing I learned when I had small children, but seem continually to forget in relation to myself is that tired can actually point to hungry, and grumpy can mean tired.

Guy in the lobby of this doctor’s office watching videos on his phone with the volume all the way up. He’s watching Family Feud.

Tonight: taught Hester Pulter on motherhood and flowers, early modern representations of cactus, and two beautiful poems by @chera-writes.bsky.social

@catacalypto.bsky.social reading Renaissance descriptions of possums, so I thought of you.

The university relies so deeply on its faculty to do our jobs with sensitivity and care, going far beyond the letter of our contracts to mentor and advise and assist our students. You would think that it would see the inadvisability of treating its entire teaching staff with contempt. And yet!

I've been looking for moments like this ever since I read Gerda Lerner: moments when Renaissance women find other women writers and claim them. To that end, let me show you the best thing I've ever seen in an archive: a little note, in Mary Wroth's copy of Eusebius.

Trying to figure out if I have to file an Early Alert for all my students who got Raptured.

NEW: Angelo State University in San Angelo, TX has told faculty that they can't discuss trans people in curriculum. When I asked the justification for the policy, they referenced Texas state law - but Texas law doesn't forbid discussions of trans people in higher ed. www.chron.com/culture/arti...

Everyone in academia should read this piece about our dear, brilliant colleague @durba.bsky.social www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

a quick teaching observation: I've found it really generative to teach Petrarchism by focusing on female poets responding to him & his imitators. it makes a really nice class structure: showing the features of Petrarchan verse & how those features can test the bounds of the Petrarchan project.

a really fucking exhausting thing about this current moment is that any good faith efforts to reform or acknowledge short comings of knowledge producing and sense making institutions is promptly weaponized by people who want to burn the entire thing down and drown us in avalanche of bullshit

the long tolkien & sex thread is a mess, but i keep reading people arguing things like "he's writing an epic, and that genre doesn't have sex" and thinking about the aeneid and paradise lost and the faerie queene and and and

Mostly hydrogen & helium with some other trace elements. Maybe some helium-neon rain if she dunked her hair in far enough. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosph...

did we ever figure out what drops of jupiter were and why she had them in her hair?

[witticism]

me and who?

wanna fill a room with tylenol and swim through it like scrooge mcduck

Those are some well-laid schemes you've got there. Be a shame if they were to gang agley.

It is an absolute dream to have an essay in the Public Domain Review: publicdomainreview.org/essay/mary-c...

The thing that worries me is the possibility that students en masse internalize the idea that composition instruction is simply smoothing out the “problems” of their voice relative to an idealized normative templated prose proficiency. That “education” is the purposeful annihilation of voice.

Auden, @kqandrews.bsky.social, and either Augustine or Aristophanes is the group I get with the bookshelves near my desk. Not bad!

Is there a piece of writing on college's "hidden curriculum" (all the unspoken rules of college) that your students have appreciated? Can be short, long, whatever.

my office hours are weird because when i was planning for the semester i forgot about thursday. just didn't occur to me that it was a different day than tuesday.

Are there individual synopses for all of Margaret Cavendish's plays somewhere online? I'm coming up empty.

works with poems, too

Excellent topiary alert: If you find yourself in Bedfont, London close to Heathrow you might encounter these yew trees in front of a medieval church trained into the shape of peacocks starting in 1704.

like a lot of other Big Data problems, you wind up looking for the keys under the lamppost; your proxy metric is easy to measure but not a very good proxy.

What truly matters is: please appreciate that in the Middle Ages scribes recorded a story about a man who could make vaginas talk.

i am once again learning about the groypers against my will

i like percy's little enrichment enclosure

i like that this request to review an article doesn't try to flatter me.

Idea for someone: BOOK CLUB knuckle tats, you’re welcome

12 Sept 1680: Marriage of Arabella Hunt singer & lutenist with James Howard #otd Hunt later sued on grounds that James Howard was, in fact, one Amy Poulter. (GAC - Kneller portrait of Arabella)

not my most pc opinion or whatever, but i think if people are fooled by the rocks that you got, maybe they should look inward, take some personal responsibility you shouldn't have to keep telling them whether you're still, you're still jenny from the block

What a fun time to work on a college campus A+ no notes

@themedievaldrk.bsky.social because of you i'm constantly keeping an eye out for these.

i really like the bit in "life is a highway" where they sing "life is a highway" (skeet brought to you by listening to that song every single fucking day, because i have a six-year-old boy)

me and who

A friendly reminder that you can help preserve your well-being by muting certain words here for even 24 hours

Man, I don't even know the words for these fashion bits in English. Do we have a word for that extra bit of cloth that came down from a medieval men's hat and was draped around the shoulders like a cowl?

anyone know a good source for pants like these? considering tagging the menswear guy

What I really, really value about academia, even now: we all owe a tremendous debt to the teachers of our past, and we try our best to pay those debts through care of the future.