me bracing myself for all the circling back emails tomorrow 🫠

i’d be honest and say i’d miss MLA, not the morally defunct, undemocratic, spineless organization that decided to squandered what little symbolic power they have but for all the friends and colleagues i adore and don’t see often.

i’ve to say i’m not on board with all of this endless rain in the bay. if it’s gonna precipitate, can it at at least have the decency to snow.

New Year’s resolution is to write more publicly about teaching—have a couple things in the works that I’m excited about. Grateful for places like @mid-theory.bsky.social, who helped me make something I’m proud of, that are open to writing from some guy who teaches public school 🫡.

genuine question: what were airports like before cellphones?!

MTC New Year's Letter from our editor-in-chief plus our editors' picks of 2025. Thank you everyone for helping us have a great year! See you next year and happy holidays ✨ tinyurl.com/bddh3y4r

i finally watched the finale of the beast in me and wow, aggie is not a good writer.

Additionally, let’s not add -ness and -y to make nouns and adjectives. Let’s do the hard and beautiful work of description.

can we stop inventing new words for describing regular old things?!

it turns out i am always a really slow writer until i start writing something no one has asked for or cares about while way overdue on everything else.

a little known fact about me is that most people in my life know little to nothing about where i am from which in a morning like today and yesterday feels rather surreal.

in the spring, i’m teaching an undergraduate seminar on criticism that is solely organized around doris lessing’s the golden notebook and i couldn’t be more excited :/

for my PhD exams I spent months reading 300+ books in European intellectual history, modern European history, modern Jewish history, medieval Jewish history, and critical theory. There is a huge difference between the style of reading that accommodates this, and having a computer "summarize" books.

guess how many snacks i got for my marathon grading!? a lot but probably not enough 🫠

i’m currently reading a novel that’s genuinely bad for my health and general wellbeing and has intervened with my sleep and has put me in a very bad mood. and yet, i continue to neglect grading and other duties to read it. i’d like to see a machine do that

i’m currently reading a novel that’s genuinely bad for my health and general wellbeing and has intervened with my sleep and has put me in a very bad mood. and yet, i continue to neglect grading and other duties to read it. i’d like to see a machine do that

my mood at 9am on this sunday.

i don’t want to be around anymore.

as someone who went to not one but two small experimental art pubs parties last night and who co-founded another, i find the scene i just read pretty funny.

we just finished the last editorial meeting of the calendar year for @mid-theory.bsky.social. it’s hard to believe we’ve only been up for 14 months. personally & professionally 2025 has been quite the year for me, but MTC remains the thing i am most proud of & the one i’ve worked the hardest at! 🎉🥂

Thank you to the brilliant editors at @mid-theory.bsky.social for the chance to write about some of my favorite subjects: transfictional character, gender performance, and Daniel Craig’s tenure as a post-9/11, “serially straight” James Bond.

"It is a drag, and it is drag doing the gender work expected of 007. This year Amazon acquired full creative rights to the James Bond franchise. And as the quest for the next 007 drags on, Lauren Eriks Cline reflects on Daniel Craig's legacy in making palpable the character’s coerced masculinity.

we just finished the last editorial meeting of the calendar year for @mid-theory.bsky.social. it’s hard to believe we’ve only been up for 14 months. personally & professionally 2025 has been quite the year for me, but MTC remains the thing i am most proud of & the one i’ve worked the hardest at! 🎉🥂

every day this week, while i had been cooped up inside with a deadline, it’s been 50° and sunny, but the minute i finished and could go run errands and get life done, it rains all day.

i’m late to the party but only because i was late with an essay for @johannawinant.bsky.social this is stunning and true 🤩 “When offered a poem, and time, and attention, and good faith, my students offered their own arguments back as if they had been waiting their whole lives for the chance…”

Stephanie Insley Hershinow surveys recent Austen-related works on Jane Austen's 250th birthday: "Austen offers endless opportunity for examination and reexamination; still, it might be fair to ask what more one can say about our dear Jane." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/happy-birthday-jane/

i managed to meet my modest goal of finishing a shamefully overdue essay i have been dragging on all semester before the dept. holiday party this evening. only catch the essay is now twice as long as the word limit. but i think that’s tomorrow’s problem. for now i’ve earned myself a manhattan.

"With no closure in sight, readers join Alex in his pursuit of the unspeakable, hovering in an endless silence thick as blue smoke." Read Korey Williams revisiting of Richard Bruce Nugent's “Smoke, Lilies and Jade" for MTC celebration of Harlem Renaissance Centennial mid-theory.com/2025/12/11/h...

In honor of Harlem Renaissance Centennial, Korey Williams revisits Richard Bruce Nugent’s blazing queer short story ‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade.’ Williams reflects on the story’s treatise on love and beauty, its abiding legacy, and its singular lesson for today’s living. #HarlemRenaissance100

Graduate students! Submit an essay to the annual Northeast Victorian Studies Assocation "Expanding the Field" prize: nvsa.org/essay-prize/

me after spending 3hrs of my morning working on the second half of a single sentence about conrad: yeah, i’m garbage. i bet someone from denmark would have written it in minutes. wait, can i go to denmark? if i go to denmark, i don’t have to write essays about conrad. oh i could go for a danish now.

as a humanities scholar i do love to use the term ‘calculus’ to mean not math 💅

have you ever spent a day unable to workout a wrinkle in an argument and the next day you wake up and you go, “wait, this isn’t a problem, why did i think it was a problem?” but you cannot tell if it’s yesterday’s you or today’s you who’s daft?

“Broadening access to the humanities…—an effort that gives, for example, a room of public school kids the chance to experience the thrill of something entirely new—is needed now in ways that are difficult to overstate. There’s an essential kind of freedom at stake.” 💙😭🤟

i had bigger, more productive plans for this saturday, but i guess i’d settle for clean laundry. i have to go do laundry now.

"Those of us who reject romantic notions of individual genius nevertheless can admit that there’s something to be said for a dose of extreme, un-assimalable newness—an aesthetic experience that does not appeal merely to our existing tastes and preferences, that does something unprecedented to us."

Had a lot of fun writing this review of @tomcomitta.bsky.social’s strange, moving, and hilarious book. Gets us to think, as I argue here, about the value of an aesthetic education—something we all should aim for as we teach our kids. mid-theory.com/2025/12/04/u...

For MTC, John Downes-Angus reviews Tom Comitta's PEOPLE'S CHOICE LITERATURE and reflects on his experiences as a high school English teacher where on the daily he makes a case for reading the strange, the extreme, the unwanted—for the chance to accept "reading’s complicated gift to us."

Sarah Sgro and Olivia Stowell take on the "Instagram Theme Party™," dressing for the algorithm, and what these rituals tell us about the "kind of choreographed sociality that both relies on and is reproduced by algorithmic culture and platform capitalism." Article illustrations by Carolyn Jao

i only read memoirs by affluent liberal white women because absolutely nothing is at risk but the stakes are so high.

wow, flying out of atlanta and not with delta is an exercise in corrective humiliation.

i do not enjoy when cities i visit are big. it’s like please have manners and be a reasonable, manageable size. i am starving.

so planes now have commercials you can’t turn off or turn down?? everything continues to get suckier….

yes, i’m a class A curmudgeon, but a basic tenant of my professional life is to act as though the pie is always larger than we are told it is. i’m always happy to choose fellowship over ambition. i’ve no anxiety about influence. may this always be the case.

Editors have a really hard job, and the good ones can make something unreadable readable, and the great ones can make something unreadable into something good. But they're basically invisible, until someone tries to write without one.

teaching a short excerpt from rob nixon’s ‘slow violence’ this morning. this is how nixon starts the book, reminding you that the global south has always known larry summers for the moral degenerate that he is.

when i signed up i hadn’t realized that what i thought was a comments section was actually where your preferred name was supposed to go, so this was my name at the berkeley half marathon today 🤦🏾‍♀️

Go Bears 🐻✨

YESSS!!! 🧿🧿🎉🎉

***break from close reading promo*** Sharon Cameron's thinking about poetry has meant so much to me for decades now; I reviewed her new book and seized the chance to look back at her career. Thanks to the Wallace Stevens Journal, currently open access: muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...