Schools are choosing this in large part because many parents think reading novels amounts to “literary appreciation.”

Keep thinking that cruel optimism has shifted toward something like cruel inertia—feeling the enshitification of everything but repeatedly choosing the wan comfort of stasis over the minor inconveniences of salutary change

Just read “lifts the blockade on Iranian ports” as “lifts the blockade on Iranian poets” and what’s weird is it felt a little plausible

What’s the most abject contemporary genre? I’m going with short-form video, with special shoutout to explainers filmed in cars

There’s this kind of throwaway line in Szalay’s Flesh about fine dining being something that a couple with very little to say to one another can still enjoy together. Most cultural analysis could never

“Imagine a world where Microsoft, Google, McKinsey, et al … get to determine what and how you learn from cradle to retirement.”

OMG too real biblioracle.substack.com/p/an-unserio...

Hampshire College is already everything I would propose for a meaningful education in an AI‘d world and it’s hard not to read its closure as a harbinger of larger defeats…

Trump is dismantling the US Forest Service in his biggest smash-and-grab to date, closing ten regional offices and 57 research facilities and handing control of our national forests to pro-logging pols.

It's taken me over four decades and three careers, but I finally see the value of "lunch." As in, like, a meal and not a bar you had stashed in your desk or whatever was leftover from that breakfast meeting.

I have been pretty skeptical of the value of spending money on space stuff but now I see that is is actually not unlike spending money on the humanities—value beyond ”value”

Honestly, ”I can’t find the landmines I previously laid“ would be a great excuse to get out of many too-hastily conceived social commitments

I absolutely adore the clean professionalism of all of this, w/o bluster or hubris.

(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.

“You starve your public schools to feed your private schools and charter schools,” said one superintendent about the state’s efforts to grow charter schools. “Our foundation was set up for a free and appropriate education for all kids. All kids!” (Published Oct. 2025)

You ever think about the millions of Americans who are basically ok with this?

So I finished Szalay's Flesh on a plane and had to explain to some concerned citizens that actually I was ok, just overcome, etc. I've heard that something about flying makes us more susceptible to emotion—best/worst novel for testing this claim? I've got some long flights coming up...

I mean, of course a technology that yields “cognitive surrender“ comes of age under a leader who demands the old-school version of the same…

Liberal Currents has quietly become one of the few outlets taking male supremacy seriously, either as a foundation of Trumpist fascism or as a system of oppression in its own right.

Seeing one story about schools using "digital hall passes" to surveil student bathroom time and another about the Canvas AI rollout and its framing of classwork as "low value" and I dunno, one might surmise that our institutions of learning don't really respect their students much

I often see advocates of AI in the classroom argue that it’s good at helping teachers create “differentiated learning“ experiences for students, but 1. what this means in practice is not at all clear 2. this is more work for teachers. More. Not less. 3. please I beg you just hire more teachers

I appreciate @seanhollister.bsky.social 's reporting here about the latest step Google is taking in their quest to destroy the information ecosystem and disempower information seekers: www.theverge.com/tech/896490/... 🧵>>

This is the gut of it for me: they’re terrified of failing. Uni is (or feels like it is) such a high cost high stakes activity that they can never be bad at something, never take longer to figure something out than their peers, never fail, never struggle. a constant “am I cooked” level of panic.

Powerful stuff from our students: "AI cannot coexist with education — it can only degrade it.... With our own university leading the charge, AI is now corrupting those few sacred spaces and leaving us with nowhere to engage in true scholarship."

Realizing that I’ve lived in San Diego for almost seven years and have only ever thought of the numerous warships in the harbor as sort of decorative/theoretical

Of course, the larger question here is why a university needs a brand at all

Imagine being, like, 15 right now. What even.

Was literally recently asked to replicate all my LMS and email correspondence in a *separate app* designed to “collect metrics” in the service of fostering “engagement“

This episode puts to bed the most ambitious bit of live podcasting I've yet attempted. I'm thrilled we were able to give a taste of this unique event to an exponentially larger audience. Thanks to @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social @johannawinant.bsky.social, Emory & all the panelists who saw the potential.

Just thinking about how the generation with truly comparative knowledge of learning both pre and post internet will also be the generation to have the same of teaching before and after AI ... it would all be so interesting if it weren't all so horrible!

The situations where I find bot use more depressing are these increasingly frequent cases where a student seems genuinely unable to recognize that they are claiming something as own thinking that is not actually the product of their own thought

Erin is an extremely smart, weird, delightful human making smart, weird, funny things about our strange present. She‘s thought more about the highs, lows, and bottomless pits of ed tech than anyone. Give her a follow!

Is it AI or Just Gen Z: a 2026 story

Everyone’s chortling over “my creative mind dances” but don’t sleep on the abject nonsense of “filling my imagination with originality”

there is a macroeconomic reason novels are not written in the third person anymore and it is not good www.versobooks.com/products/303...

Had a really nice dream where someone handed me a cocktail called a “flip flip” and then the alarm went off. Will now spend weekend attempting to engineer the “flip flip.”

The Department of Silly Names and Made-Up Jobs is really having a banner few months

I hate how ”which books” debates can distract from the accretive nature of literary study. Reading *in quantity* is part of learning to close read individual texts well—you need the comparative tensions that emerge through engagement with lots of literature to hone in on nuance etc in a single work

So many delightful things about What We Can Know, but I especially liked the modesty of its long-scale optimism: the humanities still endure, mostly. Social media and AI still exist, but as public utilities. Most people avoid America when they can. A truly British speculative future.

I hope literary scholars are proud of the fresh, grounded stuff coming out lately. Big Fiction, Teaching Archive, now Manshel on high school English, McGrath forthcoming on literary agents ("Middlemen"). All the concrete aspects of literature-as-human-activity we used to ignore. +

It's here! I hosted a symposium on close reading at Emory in November. Matt Seybold recorded it for his podcast, American Vandal, and the first of three episodes is out today. Catch me, @johannawinant.bsky.social, @becimay.bsky.social, @bakaari.bsky.social + more podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

CALL FOR PITCHES @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not. Details below!

264 days until Halloween, which should be just enough time to finish your dancing grass costume

Technology that doesn't work is a desired feature to the surveillance state, not a bug. When everyone is a "maybe" match, then probably cause can be manufactured to justify whatever it is one wanted to do in the first place. www.wired.com/story/cbp-ic...

This would be a great piece for info. literacy, research, AI literacy topics in first year writing and beyond. Tracking the timeline of proliferating zombie citations. One challenge I see with undergrads is lack of concept of the ecosystem in which info is created and circulates.

My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power

Thinking about ecosystem collapse as a metaphor for what’s being done to cultural criticism. You wipe out enough individual parts, eventually the whole thing turns into a wasteland