“Through our displays we are also saying no to taste and restraint, & yes to erections and spectacle. We are saying no to self-control and decorum, & yes to demonstration. These are the ways in which, we say, we are not bound. The longer I live in this neighborhood, the more I’m starting to get it.”

"literary-critical inferences cannot be identical, but cannot be an interpretive free-for-all or just statistically approximated hearsay. AI cannot suffer the downstream consequences of faked comprehension+wrongful inferences in its body." Nan Z Da newleftreview.org/issues/ii155...

Hi all: reupping my perennial call for indexing and editing clients for Spring / Summer 2026. It might be my last year doing this work, so get it while it's hot! Email at [email protected] for rate and availability. Feel free to share!

The 3rd grader’s classroom is doing *double-blind* Secret Santa, an early start on the joys of academia

Terrific news for Americanist literary studies…

My friend Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan in IHE articulating a non-doom feeling I’ve shared this fall after a semester with outstanding, motivated students and a refreshed sense of purpose behind the lectern… www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Cool data project on Seattle Public Library checkouts, generously shared exploratory tool and data…

not clear if the loneliness becomes visible to the chatbot user, though it certainly becomes visible to tech companies, who have incentive to perpetuate it datasociety.net/points/all-t...

I’ve likewise been finding this semester that the kids are alright. Inspiring, even.

*Hejira*! The Joni Mitchell album. I wasn’t ready for it before, but now is the time.

“One person is an autocratic president of the university for decades” certainly wasn’t a flawless system but it’s clear that “admins hop from job to job scaling the career ladder by filling their CV with ‘accomplishments’ that are expensive burdens to the schools they leave behind” is even worse.

Around 11am someone in my neighborhood summoned a truck that says Arizona Margarita Rental on the side, happy Thanksgiving,

A truly gorgeous essay here, and now that, mysteriously, two copies of Close Reading for the 21st Century have made their way into my household, I’ll take this chance to also warmly recommend it, the opening gambit on Red Wheelbarrow alone is a marvel. They are making “glazed” happen!

"the heist film offers audiences a spectacle of highly choreographed expertise. From Rififi to Sneakers to Soderbergh canon (Out of Sight Logan Lucky Oceans 11–13), the genre has generated some of cinema’s most powerful allegories of collective action" homework: read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlant...

For the Monday morning crowd! My take on THE MASTERMIND and the politics of the heist film for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social lareviewofbooks.org/article/rebe...

A beautiful piece of writing and a valuable take on media coverage These Days,

Peter Coviello isn't on Bluesky, but this definitely should be: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

if you are wondering why the Trump administration is creating racist memes with images from Halo and Lord of the Rings

I reviewed Ben Mangrum’s new book, on the surprising range of American comedies about computers, for ASAP:

Thrilled to announce my new book (electronic version out now, print next month) — it proposes a new value theory grounded in the longue durée of literary institutions, 1800–present.

A truly legendary run, transformative contributions to letters & humanities, and a wonderfully supportive and insightful editor on a personal level. Congrats and thanks for everything @noctambulate.bsky.social !

Kitamura report: found *Audition*’s Goffmanian thriller vibe more exciting than its ending, but in *Intimacies,* the end made the novel. Further research (the first one) required…

I doubt I’ll beat Silksong (1/3 through Act 2), but awed by Team Cherry’s vision of gracefulness and fluidity, where boss fights and platforming sequences are explicitly *dancing*…

U of Arizona says NO to the Compact: president.arizona.edu/sites/defaul...

AAUP holds a day of action this Friday Oct 17 nationwide teach in against the loyalty oaths us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi... the original 9 persecuted campuses have in-person events find your chapter www.aaup.org/chapters/fin...

How W. E. B. Du Bois responded to government policing of "anti-American" sentiment during the 1910s: "I took great satisfaction in being able to sit back in my chair and answer blandly, 'We are seeking to have the Constitution of the United States thoroughly and completely enforced.' ”

crafting an administrative turducken: reporting on the reports to be reported inside a larger, meatier report

ACLS statement against White House “compact”: THIS IS SOVIET SHIT

Excellent analyses that go beyond a lot of the media coverage of the Compact I’ve seen. Esp good on the glaring absence of a carrot here, and on the significance of the range of medium-to-soft targets…

this great point about the social character of knowledge —how knowing real things relies on others signaling when you’re wrong—is another way of highlighting the political importance of social shame. It also clarifies the fundamental nihilism of the AI-industrial complex

“This is extortion, plain and simple. It is not hyperbole to say that the future of higher education.. requires that every university reject it…The only solution is solidarity and collective action against this effort at federal control over higher education.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

Recent reading: Marlen Haushofer, The Wall: amazing experience of reading thinking it was from ~2015, finding out midway it’s from 1963. Evergreen Robinsonade Mood Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud: Another first-rate encounter study Martha Wells, Murderbot: my students’ comfort reading, I so get it.

Recent reading: Mick Herron’s Slow Horses books, smack between Dickens and Le Carré, silly at times but still a sustained meditation on failure, hopelessness, dysfunction, delusion, incompetent leadership, corruption, decline etc for These Times. The short *spy novellas* are lovely studies in mood.

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

I genuinely think so much of our present pass is crystallized in the idea/hope that big data is the "end of theory." Similarly, Cass Sunstein on "infotopia" (and really his whole deal). Such a thirst for circumventing the social and politics as such. www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-t...

Still thinking about this, the idea of bespoke, custom, single-use text or code as the source of LLM appeal… McConaughey’s weird fantasy of his own LLM seems right in line with it…

Big essay out by @sdileonardi.bsky.social in @publicbooks.bsky.social today, drawing on 100 years of translations and bestseller data to show that the US has seen three waves of translation: European; Latin American Boom; Nordic Noir. And what this means for us. www.publicbooks.org/how-translat...

submitted revised book manuscript, joined AAUP (already proud UCW local), purchased vocoder, an excellent labor day.

This mighty book has arrived and I’m eager for it to be in your hands! It can orient us term by term to past struggles in higher education and the ones ahead. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

Background on the “Prompt Engineering” certificates my institution has begun to offer…

“It’s not that traditional liberal arts is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities values desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, an administrative class.” www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/o...

100 Years Appreciation Post. The University of Minnesota Press was made official at a Board of Regents meeting on July 16, 1925. We have marked this milestone with an exhibit at the U's Andersen Library and content that can be viewed at z.umn.edu/ump100. Thank you for following us. 💯

Breaking: Humbert Humbert *and* Clare Quilty put out statements endorsing Cuomo.

Timely work of interest with notable subtitle excellence: “BANNING BOOKS IN AMERICA: Not a How-To”

I wrote about mid-20th century speed reading and its surprising interest in novel reading. Come for descriptions of how to move your hand down the page to increase your eye span, stay for an argument about speed reading, like close reading, as a defense of human reading in an age of reading machines

Ishiguro, saying the kind of thing I’d hoped he’d say: “Aside from its simple elegance, what struck me about this title was the sheer impossibility of what was being requested. “Please hold me for a long time” would be reasonable.”

En route a day early to Society for Novel Studies. Talking about cultural appropriation w/ a social-networks angle, via Zadie Smith. I’m still building up endurance, tolerance for busy places after my brain interlude—will be pacing myself but am so excited to see so many folks whose work I admire.

Just for fun, marked the end of an unusually challenging academic year by laying down some liquid drum n bass compositions on the sampler, “Winds in the nighttime carry light vapors athwart the sky, and the constellations seem then to glide against the clouds”-Lucretius youtu.be/Si8eaBxocLI?...

Recent reading Benjamin Labatut MANIAC- if you break enough rules writing a von Neumann biography … it’s a novel. Into it. Katie Kitamura - Intimacies, yes, gotta read the others Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk and TH White the Goshawk: the Dark Souls of pet