A very interesting and thought-provoking piece! Personally I would root cosmic horror/weird fiction more firmly in Blackwood & Machen than in Lovecraft, emphasizing the epistemology and uncertainty aspects over the parts about decentering the human. The inhuman stuff was already done thoroughly by…

Secret tricks to get much better results out of the very dreadful 'Google search' these days, plus other search engines for specific things. Statospherically useful for researchers. open.substack.com/pub/cardcata...

What do real Americans think of Trump’s ongoing offensive in Iran? We gathered responses from three LLMs designed to simulate farmers sipping coffee in a small-town Iowa diner. Their reactions might surprise you.

DIG UP VAL KILMER’S BONES AND MAKE THEM DANCE FOR MY ENTERTAINMENT

My review of @snarlsdickens.bsky.social 's The Ecological Plot is now free to read on the BSLS website. After his talk at @greenhouseuis.net I was excited to read it and was not disappointed! It's the kind of writing style I want to emulate www.bsls.ac.uk/2026/03/macn...

Reading All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell and I am not exaggerating when I say this is the best nonfiction book about death that I’ve read since This Republic of Suffering by Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust. And one thing that jumps out at me from both books is that death is women’s work

Here is my best Habermas story. I am grad student waiting in LONG line for Habermas talk. There is a tall man waiting in front of me. Line moves so we are eventually visible to organizers, a woman looks over & makes horrified face. Runs out: "Prof Habermas! You don't have to wait in line!"

It was the last day of Add/Drop. I was trying to flee a class on Milton after I realized its “celebrated” prof was, in fact, his own biggest celebrator. Intro to Linguistics counted toward the English major. The program head let me into her course, and it was so eye-opening I wished I was a major.

Speaking of which, I'm reporting an article for publication about how HS teachers are handling the instruction of writing conventions in English classes in the current era. Any teachers in the building should feel free to send a chat my way if interested in sharing thoughts...

It just struck me, I threw a boomerang earlier

“Why is there no ‘Victims of Capitalism Day?!” “Oh sweetie! Every day is Victims of Capitalism Day.”

Reskeeting because this pic of a robotic grouse is amazing

We need voting in the “Love is Blind” style. We make a decision based on what they say and how it aligns with our goals and values. We spend some honeymoon time with them in Cabo. Then we see how they act in reality before we make our final decision and actually commit

I love the way Ray Bradbury stories are all like “The year is 2162. Technologies have advanced beyond your wildest dreams. Human beings travel daily between the planets. And all those people are smoking a fuck ton of cigarettes.”

Can’t wait to spend all the daylight we saved

Co-wrote an essay with Steven Gimbel on "Jokes, Puns, and Philosophy" featuring an overview of syntactical / semantic / pragmatic approaches to humor! Carnap, Gödel, and Derrida together at last: philpapers.org/rec/MARJPA-5 #philsky

I love the way Ray Bradbury stories are all like “The year is 2162. Technologies have advanced beyond your wildest dreams. Human beings travel daily between the planets. And all those people are smoking a fuck ton of cigarettes.”

Look, no one even reads my skeets. Do you think I write in hopes of being read? You don’t know me very well, do you

Test print! There are some things that need to be adjusted, but it's so cool to hold it! 🪶🎨

move slow and repair things

One worked as an IT director (kind of amazing given it was the ‘50s and ‘60s, but no rugged old-school cred there). The other worked a lot of jobs a lot of places, but his most consistent position was high school athletics coach. (He was a baseball and football player at WVU, they tell me.)

There are lots of easy ways to make literary fiction more appealing to men! For example, literary fiction could: 1) Take off its glasses and let its hair down to reveal its natural beauty 2) Try to show a more genuine interest in football and Ancient Rome 3) Get really into craft beer 4) Smile more

There are lots of easy ways to make literary fiction more appealing to men! For example, literary fiction could: 1) Take off its glasses and let its hair down to reveal its natural beauty 2) Try to show a more genuine interest in football and Ancient Rome 3) Get really into craft beer 4) Smile more

I do not like this gen AI I do not like what it implies I do not want it in my art I do not think it makes you smart I do not want it in my games I do not like its goals and aims I do not want it in my books I do not like the way it looks I do not like it, I don't care I do not want it anywhere

Love Is Blind is a show about how much better, more honest, and more interesting people are when they spend time introspecting and being open with each other…and how quickly they become shitty again when they’re thrown back into the daily routines that leave us no time for these things

Exclusive: a closer look at my writing process

“Please—call me Patsy.”

Not once does this “journalist” mention the obvious: that the aliens themselves probably made this bet in order to ensure that, once revealed, they have a little cash to throw around

My interpretation of grammar is that it’s about relationships. A semi-colon, for example, posits a specific kind of relationship between two ideas. It feels increasingly relevant that grammar is something our tools have overwhelmingly mechanized to the point that students barely consider it.

It took eighteen months, but it looks like my book got its first* bitterly negative review today! Please join me in celebrating this milestone! *Well, the first one I can see a good portion of. There are some paywalled reviews that don’t give big enough snippets for me to get the general flavor…

The worst is when you see a news story you want to read and it turns out to be video. It’s like being excited to try a new restaurant and discovering they won’t let you cut up and eat the food yourself—you’ve got to sit and wait while they spoonfeed you bites for an hour. Torturous and infantilizing

Neat-o! Starlings have changed since they got here (the US). 🧪

Feeling smug today about never having published anything* with LARB *because they never got back to my pitch

what a neat book!!

Thank you for contributing to the volume! And for the dog photo! 😄 PS Folks can save 20% off with code MLA20 (or 30% off as an MLA member): www.mla.org/Publications...

It would be so cool and sexy to go into a bookstore and discover a spinning rack of novellas. All sorts of Neon Hemlock and Psychopomp and TorDotCom pleasures and more on a rack that goes whizz whizz whizz

Today is the official publication day of *Teaching with Science Writing in the Humanities Classroom* from @modernlanguage.bsky.social! I’m very happy to have an essay in here on helping students close read field guides as a form of environmental lit. You should check it out! (NB: dog not included)

Calling all Thomas Hardy scholars - I bought a book for an obscure Algernon Blackwood story only to discover that it appears to be inscribed by Hardy. Can anyone confirm? And who is Caroline (‘Sammy’)? 🧐

How can we best learn about the world? A new paper by SFI's Marina Dubova (@mdubova.bsky.social) and coauthors applies the scientific method to itself, finding that some common strategies that scientists consider gold standards for designing experiments could perform worse than random choice.

some of you are looksmaxxing when you need to be booksmaxxing

Me walking to the library: Yeah i'm a total litpilled bookcel. I'm basically going read mode and i'm giving librarycore vibes.

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/...

Beg to differ! This 1850 report is from the height of the sanitary panic in Britain, which led to severe overestimation of the dangers of corpse smells/contamination. It sounds cool but doesn’t align closely w/ modern germ theories of disease. (Live people are far more dangerous than most corpses!)

This is blackout poetry to me