I would kick a puppy into the run for a real NYC bakery chocolate babka right now.

Never mind the jobs you had, tell me five classes you took in college: Southern Law Southern Music Southern Women's Memoir The Southern Renascence Southen Architecture I double majored in English and Southern Studies, so I wrote papers on Elvis, Hurston, and shotgun shacks. It was awesome.

Our faculty assembly just voted to prioritize merit raises over COLA raises, because the tenure track "fuck you, got mine" mentality has worked so well for us in the last decade.

Cartoon Self Synthesis: 50% Daria and 50% Jane.

The local iteration of this: "Is Louisville the South?" Students always say no. No matter how much evidence I lay out, they really don't want the city to be southern.

People are criticizing knitters making red/Norwegian-style hats in support of Minnesota anti-ICE protests as "performative." Do these people think the Black Panthers wore uniforms because they had sartorial decision fatigue? #knitting #knitsky

Yeats--always Yeats: "We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died?"

If you're a cop, you've got to have the murder sex to interrupt the banality of the domestic violence.

The public never learned which Kentucky National Guard trooper killed David McAtee.

The January 2026 Polar Vortex: draw me like one of your French girls

Flashbacks to 1990s women's magazines and cabbage soup mono-meal diets. When economic catastrophe meets 2020s retro-skinny, Vogue steps in....

"Are you prepared for the snowstorm?" Bitches, I lived in Central Pennsylvania. I once carried an amp half a mile through knee-high snow to hear my friend's band play in a basement at 4am. Somehow, I'll manage this snow-pocalypse in my warm house with my snuggly cats and a fridge full of beer.

Ken Burns has a lot to answer for.

This may be a controversial stance, but: women named Mia are overrepresented in romance novels.

I heard someone IRL use the word "unalive" to refer to a murder--as in, the murderer "unalived" the murder victim. Remember when we thought the internet was going to make people smarter?

This is true. At the same time, I have an extensive family tree with custom tags that include "crime," "evil," and "murder." There's a Quebecois brothel madam locally famous for rejoicing at a gallows as a man was hung for stealing. It's okay if you have shitty ancestors. The future is now.

Take a break from your doomscrolling for this. It's mandatory viewing.

The time to hoard more Scandinavian emotional support yarn is now. #knitsky #knitting

I think voting is incredibly important. This is why me and my friends have raised $1 million for voting rights. I think if the ONLY THING you are talking about right now is people voting, you have lost the plot.

It's gotten to the point that walking into the street and screaming "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" over and over and over again seems like a rational thing to do.

ADHD is TFW you're mid-sentence with your brain racing through 10 different options for how to end it, all of which seem relevant (thanks, pattern recognition). Words seem to go nowhere, but they're going in very particular directions. It's not inattention. It's competing hyperattentions.

I am a southern studies professor with 25 years of study and research under my belt, so I say this with some authority: sriracha shouldn't come within a mile of a plate of chicken and waffles. It just ain't right.

There are so many problems with the idea of $3 meals, one of which is that executive functioning is not an unlimited resource.

It's fun teaching a grad seminar bc grad students are smart, curious, and bring their own weird intellectual hyperfixations to class discussion. It sucks teaching a grad seminar bc some asshole assigned too much reading.

This is a wonderful thread.

I forgot what it's like to come home after teaching a grad seminar for three hours, loathing the sound of your own voice, and not being able to turn your brain off. As Mark E. Smith would say, I'm totally wired.

Another image that sums up the protest.

Students act like I'm a puppy kicker when I ask them to print off a reading and bring it to class.

I don't give a fuck whether or not the woman murdered by ICE was a US citizen, and you shouldn't either.

The discourse over the last couple of days has been big accounts talking about other big accounts, and I could not be more bored. "power users" pffft, okay, whatever

People who think Bluesky is toxic weren't part of late 1990s message board wars, and it shows.

The eternal conundrum: do I teach the Time Machine or War of the Worlds this semester? Cannibals or tentacles? Giant crabs or Martian kudzu? The horrors of reunion with one's wife or the heat death of the universe? I love HG Wells.

I'm looking for readings about tech billionaire accelerationism for my eco-catastrophe class this semester. I'm not having much luck finding longer essays or chapters. Any recs?

A great thread on writing. We love to see it.

I'm teaching an English grad class for the first time since the ascendancy of AI plagiarism. I have a firm "no AI" policy that undergraduates routinely ignore. What are y'all seeing in your grad classes in terms of AI plagiarism lately? How widespread is it? Any strategies for minimizing it?

People who are afraid that students can't take bluebook exams because of issues with handwriting are revealing their own technophilia and screen addiction.

Petition to throw the entire Clinton family into a volcano.

I am already dreading going back to campus in the spring, as I've dreaded going back to campus every semester since ChatGPT was released. I can't overstate how much AI has stolen from me as a teacher.

When I started grad school in 2003, we were told that we had a 50/50 shot of getting a tenure-track job. When I graduated in 2009, we were told, "basically, you're fucked. Publish more. Uh, good luck."

I've been teaching for over 20 years. Most of my students have been good or downright great. I've also seen some weird shit. When I see faculty rhapsodizing about teaching and idealizing students, I'm like "okay, but surely you've seen a lot of weird shit too, right?"

I thought I would work in bed, now I am a bed.

I'm writing an abstract for a conference for a paper I haven't written yet. I'm not sure if the idea is smart or shit. Am I going to kill it? Or am I going to panic the week before the conference because I need to make it work? Smart or shit? 😬

Après vous, le déluge.

there’s a monster in my closet halp

There will be widespread celebrations, but I think at least one MAGA true believer is going to kill people, probably in a mass shooting.

Some excellent niche content, as we think about Rob Reiner's work today: a meticulous breakdown of When Harry Met Sally as told through its knitwear costuming. #knitsky #knitting

The last few episodes of Breaking Bad are basically Jesse torture porn. From Andrea's death onward, the showmakers seem more interested in vicarious sadism and abjection than his character. El Camino draws it out more, basically turning him into Reek from Game of Thrones.

In Breaking Bad, Walter tells Skyler, "I am the one who knocks!" and people applaud, except...he doesn't. Jesse does. Todd does. It's like the elevator scene in Mad Men when Don tells Ginsberg, "I don't think of you at all." Badass, right? But it's a lie: Don can't stop thinking about Ginsberg.

This is clown shit. Who could possibly take this seriously? Who thought this was clever enough to put on the cover? Clowns, all the way down.

On the bright side, Gen Z is going to get to see its first oil war!