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.

I'm blocking anyone who earnestly uses the word "tankie."

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.

I've asked for recs for gentle TV in the past, so now I'm offering one up myself: Resident Alien on Netflix. I say this as a person who hates sentimentality: it's wholesome, cute, and unconventionally funny. It has a lot of well-written women characters. Also, Alan Tudyk is a gem.

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.

"I've got to give them a hand" liberals, please stop fellating the Indiana GOP for a moment and look at this map.

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!

"other people aren't accountable to the limits of your imagination" I want to embroider this on a pillow

Sometimes I'll spend an hour on Wikitree or Wikipedia writing paragraphs about historical figures who enslaved indigenous and Black people, but whose activities as enslavers are not well known. It's a small way of undercutting the triumphalism of white histories and genealogy.

TFW you're watching a cute little sitcom about an alien that crashed in Colorado and then, wait a minute, is that Tommy Pico holding an umbilical cord?!

I'm having trouble finding a suitable picture of myself for my faculty profile. Do you think this picture of an Elvis Presley planter would work instead?

I started writing in games with enormous hesitation: I was an untenured faculty member during GG & all the attacks like it. I have watched colleagues lose their jobs. I took notes as Dorothy taught junior colleagues how to protect themselves. Not a day I write in public do I not imagine worst-cases.

I took 2 years of semester-long weekly pedagogical seminars when I was a grad student, including individual teaching freshman comp I, teaching freshman comp II, teaching grant writing, and teaching lit. None of those classes covered material that would've helped me as a TA in a situation like this.

As someone who has had to sit down with admin with highlighted printouts, annotated screenshots, and, in one case, a fucking PowerPoint, to defend myself against bad-faith complaints, including being racist and sexist against white men: Yeah, I want to talk about instructional design under fascism.

This is a transparent and targeted attack on a trans instructor, who did nothing wrong and who recently won an award for her teaching. It's still important for instructors to discuss course materials and the realities of teaching in the Trump era.

I wrote a book about the erosion of Democratic norms right before the pandemic. The one with the red cover has a bonus chapter from 2021 about Zoom Town halls. You you can get it here as a stocking stuffer. www.upress.umn.edu/978151790856...

Syllabus policies and rubrics are now legal documents. I hate this so much.

People are arguing that it shouldn't need to be said that college-level work must be analytical, well-reasoned, use empirical evidence, that the bible isn't evidence, etc., in a psychology class. The assumed norms of ten years ago no longer apply. It all needs to be said, over and over.

Some people don't understand that assignment guidelines and rubrics have increasingly become defensive documents for faculty, particularly faculty from marginalized groups, in the last decade. I'm not talking about grade justification. I'm talking about protecting yourself from shitty students.

The thing about this OU essay is also that it shows why especially WoC profs’ syllabi and rubrics are usually very detailed. So you don’t have students challenging their grades because they didn’t cite any sources and believe that they know more about this than you, older white male colleague? OK 🙃.

Filing bad-faith grievances should be treated as violations of college honor codes, which almost universally specify that lying to faculty and staff is prohibited.

This is a holiday meal for someone who counts calories. The mashed potatoes need butter and milk. The macaroni needs cheese. The veggies look steamed, no oil. The portions of potatoes and stuffing are small. No gravy in sight. This is Thanksgiving diet culture.

This is the sorority girl equivalent of "old man shakes fist at cloud." She clearly didn't read the article, and she doesn't understand it, so she can't write a coherent response to it. She's claiming victimhood, but if anything, her instructors were overly patient bc she's an evangelical bully.

Series finales are hard. I've been thinking about shows with great finales and came up with The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Justified. The Sopranos and MM finales get talked about a lot, but Justified's is truly a thing of beauty. "We dug coal together." Pitch perfect. 👏👏👏

More hottakes from 2022, I finished Better Call Saul, and I'm squarely in the camp that thinks it's better than BB. The last few episodes felt like a slog, though--the black and white flash forwards somehow seemed like they were both too slow and too fast.

Obviously, prestige TV isn't going to churn out 22 episodes per year like it's the 1990s. But Stranger Things has put out 38 in 9 years. House of the Dragon, 18 in 4 years. With all those resources, these shows can't put out a single short season per year? Nope, sorry, I've lost interest, byeeeeee

Knitting was love at first stitch for me, but it came with some serious sticker shock when I saw how much yarn costs and how much yarn it takes to knit a garment. "DIY" ≠ cheap or affordable.

My greatest research skill is unquenchable ADHD. My biggest writing problem is also unquenchable ADHD.

Autumn is a lie. Bright leaves, sweater weather, gourd-flavored lattes last for two weeks. Then it's five months of brown grass, gray skies, coats, rain, snow, and freakishly dry air. I don't know why humans chose to live north of the Georgia-Tennessee border, but it was clearly a mistake.

White supremacy promises the white man that no matter how poor and exploited he is, he'll always be better than a black man. American exceptionalism promises white Americans that no matter how racist they might be, they'll always be less racist than white southerners.

Reason bajillion for why I left Twitter: I went viral for a sentimental post with a picture of a note from my dad, addressed to his kids, that we found in his beekeeping equipment a decade after he died. I got dick pics in my DMs.

I don't object to the idea that "the South" has a racist past and present. I object to essentialism that levels its people into a homogenous mass of bigots and to exceptionalism that demarcates particular forms of hate as regional, and therefore atypical for--rather than emblematic of--the nation.

Yup, Mary Shelley and Polidori were the only ones who finished their stories, adding Frankenstein and sexy vampires to the long list of things people invented while trying to get away from Lord Byron.

My first year on the job, an established professor from a fancy university groped me under a table at a bar during group drinks at a conference. No one seemed to notice. When the group split to go back to our respective rooms, he told a mutual friend that he was offended I didn't hug him goodbye.

You'd think Trump getting elected twice would dent the myth of southern exceptionalism, but at least once a month, I wake up to find "fuck the South" is the day's political discourse. I saw someone saying we should pay Black and queer southerners money to move away from the region. Great plan, yo.

As a queer Kentuckian, I am honestly so fucking sick of hearing “fuck the South” from liberals and progressives. It’s a shit take and incredibly essentializing about one of the country’s most diverse and gerrymandered regions. Ppl need to get their hearts right

Remember when we used to post about trivial things on social media? Like, I started watching Better Call Saul. I am pleased to announce that it's good, and suggest people might want to try watching this poor little underdog of a show.

I don't know who Olivia Nuzzi is, and you can't make me learn.

Today's personal Everest is saving the adult grackle that somehow got caught in our attic, and which hasn't yet found the windows we opened for it.

I’m thinking about all of the pushback and anger I’ve encountered in academia when I’ve tried to talk about gendered violence and harassment. I’ve spent decades being I treated like I’m prudish, paranoid, and overreaching for calling out male behavior. This stuff is legitimately triggering.

For a while now, I’ve been saying that my biggest regret in life is that I didn’t major in a foreign language and move abroad.

Me: ADHD isn't stigmatized like it used to be. British documentarians: People with ADHD, like one-testicled micro-penised genocidal maniac Adolf Hitler... www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

Dems released three gross emails, so the GOP thought they'd counter by "flooding the zone" with 20,000 pages of even more incriminating emails. On the one hand, the enemy is stupid. On the other hand, their stupid strategies have shielded them for at least a decade.