Double buddies

I’ve been curious about how LLMs are changing things in the sciences, and was really glad to see this terrific piece of writing, which focuses on graduate education…

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...

It’s truly wild how many folks in the contemporary U.S. lit field have great-looking books out this year. It’ll be a tall stack of reading to keep up with…

I’ve been looking forward to this one ever since seeing Ted’s inspired riff on criminality in Highsmith, where upwardly mobile white criminals can be played as a delightful surprise (vs the racialized criminality in Richard Wright).

We the Platform is available for preorder with the discount code CUP20 if you order directly from the press! cup.columbia.edu/book/we-the-... A thread on the argument below:

Temps: Retrouvé On finishing Proust, first, the characters are at once oddly ethereal projections, centered on Marcel’s impressions of them, at the same time so many of them undergo profound and compelling transformations .../

Driving daughter to Saturday drama class, tried to avoid protest traffic by routing around posted meeting areas, and still encountered an almost-2-mile-long wall of easily thousands of sign toting middle age normies along Speedway, an awe-inspiring sight.

Thinking belatedly about DOGE AI use and genAI’s effects on cognition and culture, it seems like there’s an overwhelming tendency toward the Dunning-Kruger Effect’s uninformed overconfidence that I think we’re already seeing at scale…

Also tried to emphasize, to close, that any institution of higher learning that's genuinely interested in remaining relevant, enduring through volatility, and growing its capacities —that is, leading— should be betting all the chips on reinvestment in the core functions of liberal arts education.

This is great, and I hadn’t seen this Georgetown student journalist’s memorable formulation that the problem for critical thinking in scene-of-learning-AI is that it “deprive[s] us of ever being unsure”

For fun, a Jurassic technology conundrum: five wires, and the numbers on the buttons are probably old room numbers, hard wired into the wall, building from mid-1960s. Any ideas what it used to do?

My book, MIDDLEMEN: LITERARY AGENTS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN FICTION, comes out in six weeks!It shows how literary agents went from "cankers" to "mere peripheral necessities" to "the center of the literary establishment" to "the biggest fish in publishing." press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Man, one of the most depressing aspects of modern scholarship is finding a great article and then looking up the scholar to see what else they’ve done and just catching a glimpse of an abbreviated career hopping between visiting positions and publishing great pieces before disappearing from academia

Agreeing with the sentiment, I read this kind of thing mainly as another point in the awfully round evangelist-scammer (engagement bait + slop/spam content for sale) Venn diagram...

My latest piece, "Prestige Fiction is Dead," from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social, reviewing Evan Brier's excellent book, NOVEL COMPETITION. This one ends with some reflections on SFF publishing, so worth it whether you're into literary fiction, fantasy, or SF.

I’ve long been curious about the presence of fiction, like the BookCorpus/smashwords corpus, in LLM training sets. Interesting steps toward understanding them in this article.

There’s been attention—rightly—to the ways in which the heyday of literary theory can speak to AI authorship and writing. But we should not overlook the contributions of more traditional forms of literary *history* which have done much to demystify and materialize pieties around literary production.

Lil backyard friend among the orange blossoms

3 years, 9 months post-Covid, all my bio-markers—brain waves, eye movements, inflammation bloodwork, HRV—are finally back within normal ranges.🎉 Still working past needing a daily power nap, but then again naps kind of rule.

y'all !!!! I love that the blurbs are basically like, "listen, she is never not telling you about some bleak shit" 😍❤️‍🔥 (thank you @aarthivadde.bsky.social and @markmcgurl.bsky.social)

So grateful for this thoughtful, generous review: "Those of us who care about what books can do should consider what these contributors have to tell us."

It's available for pre-order!

HR email waxing poetic, “Build your ‘done list’ before your wins fade” 💀

@karlsteel.bsky.social @glavey.bsky.social @profneilh.bsky.social Hey Proust hive, dying to know if any of y’all have forged ahead… It’s gotten progressively less book-group-able as it repeats motifs and gives on-the-nose answers to all our questions, but just finished the Fugitive & it was 👀👀👀?!

Now that I've 1) as an exhausted VAP, passed out while doing last-minute reading for class, arriving late and unprepared, and, 2), today, had a chalkboard's sharp edge *rip my pants during class* I shudder to think how any future teaching nightmares might need to raise the stakes.

Ooh, I’ve put in a lot of time with an untold number of this year’s songs, always love this ongoing collective writing project…

PSA This is a fantastic resource, I enjoyed teaching a few selections from the New Negro Anthology last semester with it, students really connected with the less-often-taught Georgia Douglas Johnson poems.

The business pubs are continually rediscovering this year after year. Let em!

Just discovered the ft. ODB remix of Mariah's "Fantasy," a true marvel. Mariah's isolated ad libs are a 10/10 pop song, ODB skimps on fully enunciating the "house" in "in da house" love this for both of them. A pal pointed me to Tom Breihan's # 1's column, it's great: stereogum.com/2181534/the-...

If there’s such a thing as “AI literacy,” it’s knowing enough not to let oneself become a mark for these bottom-feeding scammers, who naturally make absolutely no guarantees about the output quality.

Precisely why we drafted this on behalf of @modernlanguage.bsky.social. Ed tech providers (like Canvas) need to take the lead in cutting this off at the knees. Professional organizations and our institutions can’t do it themselves. cc @annamillsoer.bsky.social www.mla.org/Resources/Ad...

Been meaning to try tostilocos for a full decade. They did not disappoint. @angermonsoon.bsky.social : relevant to your interests? Thx to @faith-harden.bsky.social for *elevating* Saturday.

"At the name [of] a place where Albertine had told me that she had never been, my breath stopped for a moment. The truth is the most cunning of enemies." Proust, The Captive

Here’s the online version. The whole issue, “What is Academic Labor Now?” is deeply important.

Heard about this AI usage report for MS Copilot through IBM’s Mixture of Experts podcast: Copilot chat, whose user base is overwhelmingly folks with corporate MS Office, was most often used in 2025 for looking up health issues. Clippy MD: less accurate than WebMD! microsoft.ai/news/its-abo...

Was not counting on being moved by any "Infinite Jest"-at-30 essays. And but then @pauline2k.bsky.social performed a tour de force of reparative reading. This is so lovely! www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/infinity-plu...

Found this bit especially fascinating, the alignment of the prevalence of Bildungsroman in HS English, pedagogy of identifying with characters, and HS English as almost a lab for students’ reflection on their own character development. Terrific essay and project…

As some of you may know, I’m writing a book on the history of high school English in the United States, and I’m excited to share a new article from that project—“High School English and the Making of American Readers”—out today in American Literary History! 🧵 academic.oup.com/alh/article/...

Recent Reading: Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: I'd done several grad courses' worth of reading without ever getting the bus-tour overview of the intellectual history, enjoyed. Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah: my highlights were Cottard's scientia sexualis & Brichot, place-name-etymology pedant

Really interesting essay. I especially admired the disciplinary history here around Auerbach, even as I'm productively puzzled by some of the other stakes ... 1/

This is also an opportunity to articulate new visions for what America could be. I touch on it in a different context in this essay, but I think the image of America as a mosaic articulated by the work of Karen Tei Yamashita is a pretty damn good one

The whole thing was phenomenal but the moment when he points at the camera, “tú también deberías de creer en tí, vales más de lo que piensas,” was the moment I won’t forget

I'm in the new look @publicbooks.bsky.social talking with @anniemcc.bsky.social, Vineeta Singh, Dan Nemser, and Rana Jaleel about higher education, how we have studied and organized around it, and what possibility lies therein.

wow

Coming this August! Have me come tell your students that everyone is a digital humanist now, in an age of pervasive digital mediation -- happy to bring free copies

Wrapping up a review (for Af Am Review) of this @uminnpress.bsky.social book and I refuse to wait: recommending now Bartell’s uncannily relevant *On the Eve*, about how MLK, the Panthers, the Boggses, LRBW & comrades discussed tech unemployment, UBI, labor & more www.upress.umn.edu/978151791393...

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

Page proofs arrived today (!) and actual book coming August 2026!!!

Me on LLMs, Grok especially, as epistemic weapons: