Don't miss the first of this semester's New Faculty Voices Q&A series! This semester we were delighted to welcome Professor Farah Bakaari to UC Berkeley English. A scholar of 20th and 21st Century African Literature, you can learn more about her and her work in our Q&A - link in bio!

i know teaching is being rapidly criminalized in this country but it’s life affirming when a class session goes so well and when students on their own arrive and without using its name arrive at dialectical materialism.

Why the World Just Won’t Stop a Genocide. www.radicalbookscollective.com/p/why-the-wo...

“…children’s liberation from adult domination remains as urgent today as it was in 1933. Children continue to be harmed in all the institutions…meant to ‘protect’ them.” i felt so many unnameable emotions reading this piece for my own boarding school self, for all kids enduring tyranny everywhere!

For the first installment of our "Hold Up" feature, Sophia Marie Niang revisits Jean Vigo’s 1933 film ZERO FOR CONDUCT and what teaches us about the rebellious lives of children and the possibilities of forging comradely solidarity with them. mid-theory.com/2025/09/18/h...

there’s being an underdog and then there’s bulldozing bridges that are too big for you. oh my beloved lynx can’t lose like this. #WNBA

I almost only listen to leftist baseball podcasts but that’s just me. So many thanks to @alixbeeston.bsky.social and @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social for letting me talk about Downtime. Alix is the best reader and not surprisingly the best here too. Book is available from @columbiaup.bsky.social.

MTC first reading group on the award-winning translated stories HEART LAMP by Banu Mushtaq will take place tomorrow Sept. 18 at 5pm ET. Sign up here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

i think it’s great that the wnba playoff courts are sponsored by bumble…women make the first move and it might just be a 3-pointer from downtown 😏

go bears!

amazing review essay alert! a pleasure to read, to edit, to work with @nathansen.bsky.social ✨

here’s one major obstacle of living in the west coast, i’m constantly being asked to do math with the time. and it’s like sorry, i cannot always reliably subtract 3 from a number even if that number is less than 12.

It's publication day for UNIVERSITY KEYWORDS. Across 27 sharp essays, the book offers a critical account of the political economy of US higher education, how it came to be structured this way, and how together we might build a better university together.

otherwise known as my and dan’s 10th anniversary party 🔟 🎉

If you're in or near Atlanta, or *super juiced* 😜 about close reading and love to travel, come to Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century: A Symposium at Emory University on Friday, November 7. And hear from these superstars...

there’s simply no scarier omen on a monday than waking up and realizing you have no coffee in the house 💔

MTC is running two reading groups this fall. The first starts later this month. We will be reading HEART LAMP, a collection of short stories in translation and the first meeting is September 18. Get your books now and join us!! Sign up below: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

since discovering it 10 years ago, there’s not a single week that goes by where i don’t listen to the miseducation of lauryn hill ✨ especially when i’m up against a deadline.

You know it's there, but you can't play it! For MTC, Emily Naser-Hall revisits the VHS tape and its haunting resurgence in the present. A perfect, perfectly haunted piece of cultural criticism to start off your spooky season 📼

“AI will take your job” like any machine could spend literal four days writing and re-writing a single paragraph until it developed upset stomach, twitchy eye, and a case of all around despair and self-loathing.

have you ever spent 4+ hrs of your saturday getting 500 words on the page that deep down you just know are going to get cut.

I don't think Omid Bagherli is on bluesky (then again, why am I on bluesky?) but I'm grateful for this review and particularly happy to see it in ASAP/Review since a lot of this book happened because of friends and colleagues at @asapartsnow.bsky.social asapjournal.com/review/slow-...

Catch me promoting the @openletterbooks.bsky.social sale and some of my favorite #WiTMonth reads for @mid-theory.bsky.social!

this is the kinda rec list i dream of!! instead of reading the same 3 meh books on every mainstream list, why not do yourself a favor and read some interesting, fresh, weird, possibly out of print works in translation…and celebrate women in translation all year round!

For MTC, Nikhil Pandhi reviews A. Revathi's recent memoir REVATHI: A LIFE IN TRANS ACTIVISM, translated from Tamil by Nandini Murali. A remarkable book about the power of trans-labor and poetics in the world. Happy Women in Translation Month. @tiltedaxispress.bsky.social

the sharp, ever witty @maz-do.bsky.social writes about her visit to “cambridge’s most openly horny public space”: the new romance bookstore on harvard square ✨

Matt has revolutionized literary scholarship in ways that few others can claim to have done.

the sharp, ever witty @maz-do.bsky.social writes about her visit to “cambridge’s most openly horny public space”: the new romance bookstore on harvard square ✨

i’ve been itinerant for a month with erratic purchases that my bank put a block on my card and I don’t remember my account password nor have my laptop which stores my password manager. so fun. please enjoy the longest gourd grown in great state of iowa.

I think hunter biden is the flight attendant on this american airlines flight to chicago

i’m trying to pull off the impossible: 1) take only a carry-on and a small duffel bag for a 12 day trip. 2) don’t take my laptop with me. also did i mention i’m tired of packing a suitcase. i’ve done it 5 times in 5 weeks. serenity

Our second job material workshop will be tomorrow 8/8 @2pm EST. Sign up below docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

no disrespect to t.s. eliot, but august is the cruelest month, breeding anxiety out of deadlines, mixing memory and despair.

i’m trying to write a note in my syllabus that simultaneously addresses and de-centers AI. wish me luck.

the airport is the single most powerful PSA against marriage. *chills*

me everytime i eat salmon: okay, it’s time for me to accept i’m allergic to salmon and stop eating it. * forgets this immediately until next time*

“has anyone seen my apple pencil?” said i to my half unpacked apartment

new coast, new gig, same hills✨ artshumanities.berkeley.edu/news/12-new-...

i’m excited and also nervous to be returning to teaching this fall after two years off and one thing is for sure: i’m going full luddite. i think teachers and students deserve some refuge from all this slop noise to spend a few hours a weeks reading and thinking together.

CST might be only 3 hours behind EST but in my brain and in my body it’s 1 day + 3hrs behind. I don’t like it.

this essay is one of my absolute favorites we published this summer’ come for the white lotus recap, stay for the walter benjamin reference, leave with historical materialist defense of staying in board and feeling time. after all. “boredom returns as communal rhythm” mid-theory.com/2025/07/24/s...

Emily Lynell Edwards reads the proliferation of Romantasy in contemporary literature. "Romantasy does not bother with political economy any more than it bothers with indoor plumbing." mid-theory.com/2025/07/18/m...

For MTC, Daniel Fraser thinks about boredom's potential both narratologically and politically. "Boredom is a universal motor and product of social being in capitalism, yet its formal make-up contains a (negatively felt) kernel of the future." mid-theory.com/2025/07/24/s...

have you ever started your morning calling spectrum to cancel a service?! then congratulations, you have seen the ninth circle of hell.

i’ve brought so many light jackets ✈️

as someone who can barely keep up with her meager responsibilities, i’m not bothered when a publication that solicited an unpaid review with 2-month turn around then ghosts me for a full year. but i do get royally amused when they finally get back in touch and ask i respond to their edits in 4 days.

if you live in ithaca and also if you don’t, you might know my abiding love for the co-op burritos and cold brew. so, this morning when the clerk asked if i wanted to include my yearly dues in my purchase, i said yes even though in 24hrs i move out of town permanently.

"What happens to religion in the Philosophical Investigations? Is it gone, or is it everywhere?" From the latest issue of Critical Times, Hengameh Ziai on Wittgenstein, Talal Asad, and nonsense: read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...

a white guy with beach blonde hair walks up to me in front of the co-op and says, “i’m not allowed in there because i’m black. they say all welcome but clearly not all are.” i just nod in sympathetic agreement. i’m gonna miss this town.