Paul Klee ~ Polyphonic Setting for White, 1930 #PaulKlee #Expressionism #ModernArt

Yes

yep, i kind of think you can use supreme court reform as a vehicle through which to do a large, and necessary, expansion of the entire federal judiciary

The lesson of January 6th is that it does absolutely no good to prosecute the the violent foot soldiers if you're not going to prosecute the leaders and hold them accountable for their sedition under the full force of the law.

To me, the Computational Cultural Studies Ph.D at CMU looks like a thoughtful, appropriately cautious experiment. Coursework remains fundamentally literary and historical. Two (2) computational courses and a practicum have been added. The question is, why didn't more places try this ten years ago?

I was moved to see George Pérez so well represented in the New York Public Library exhibit on Puerto Ricans in comics — particularly so by this comic he created back when we worked in the Marvel Bullpen together. May he be remembered always!

HEY PUBLISHERS: pay attention to this entire thread; and recognize that a HUGE part of the problem is assigning comics projects to editors with no comics knowledge or experience. Editing comics is a discrete discipline, and when you don't recognize that, you fuck both creators and yourself over.

If you've read Grandville you really owe it to yourself to read this absolute belter. Thank you @bryan-talbot.bsky.social for another glorious tale.

This has moved out of the sciences and become a massive problem in all fields. I now have to teach my English grad students about the warning signs for the predatory journals that keep cropping up in their research. But this is far from the only problem in academic publishing. 1/

American artist Paulina Peavy (1901-1999) incorporated geometric linework in many of her works that resembles string connections: www.vaultofculture.com/vault/nst/20...

An obsessive collection of objects occupies a full wall in Everything is Illuminated (dir. Liev Schreiber, 2005), while a pinboard appears under the opening credits: www.vaultofculture.com/vault/nst/20...

Happy birthday to the one and only Charles Addams.

Grok is being used to remove clothes from random peoples' photos. Journalists think they got the chatbot to 'apologize'. What are you doing? An LLM cannot apologize. It doesn't know what is happening. A journalist doing this is a form of AI psychosis. Full ep here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT9l...

In Dec 2025, I published a short comment on whether the emergence of AI has been as revolutionary as other moments of innovation in our species' history (e.g., emergence of technology or agriculture). On balance, current evidence suggests to me that it isn't. www.isita-org.com/jass/Content...

+ Physical comics

“No one teaches the Western canon anymore!” “Look, Plato’s Symposium is right here on my syllabus!” “Whoa, whoa, whoa—not that!”

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

The President does not get to raise and spend his own separate money. This is Constitution 101 stuff, guys.

"No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law"

Trump & RFK Jr.'s coterie of bootlicking doctors are real pieces of shit, we argue in the British Medical Journal, essentially. Link: www.bmj.com/content/392/...

Reposting for any later-in-the-day folks who might be interested

I wrote a kind of January 6 piece for 2026: newrepublic.com/article/2049...

my hot take is that I don't think it's this website specifically that's toxic. the Circumstances are toxic and nobody really knows what to do about it so they come online and scream. and if I may offer an alternative: actually going outside and screaming feels better.

i think american life would improve significantly and quickly if society was more encouraging of people to have Hobbies. the most perfect and serene state of mind that exists is when one is Doing one's Little Things

Since it’s now Jan 6, I will describe a piece I’ve been wanting to write, but just haven’t been able to bring myself to, about how we have been imagining the storming of our government, up to the specifics of invading the Capitol, such as in The Division 2 (2018): youtu.be/mS4AUzl4NYk?...

William Blake's depiction of the Circle of Traitors in Hell from Dante's Inferno, 1827 www.artic.edu/artworks/233...

Five years ago today, I was slated to teach theories of play in a course called "The Performance of Politics." Instead, we sat and watched rioters storm the Capitol. A year later, I published "The Deep, Dark Play of the US Capitol Riots." I still stand by its conclusions. doi.org/10.1080/1352...

my 75yo mother told me last night that she’s planning to delete Instagram and Facebook because she’s sick of not being able to tell what’s AI and what’s not, and I genuinely don’t think tech companies have reckoned with this kind of move as an actual possibility

Fumi Yanagimoto, 2024 Woodblock print

Today marks the beginning of "Lesser Cold" #小寒 in the lunisolar #microseason for the chilliest period of the year (小寒大寒，滴水成冰). More precisely, we are in Lesser Cold's first pentad, "When Wild Geese Fly Northward" #雁北鄉. [Detail from 芦雁図 Reeds and Geese, 鉄舟徳済 Tesshū Tokusai, 1343 @metmuseum.org]

Very excited about this first online sighting of ENGLISH MAJORS AT WORK: CAREER AND LIFE PATHWAYS: www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/english-majo...

This was created by the Public Broadcastic Act of 1967 and needs congressional approval to be disolved. What they're doing is illegal. Half of Congress is fine with this and the other half is too weak and cowardly to do or say anything.

My other takeaway is that what makes Tokyo so picturesque and livable is the fact that there’s no on-street parking. It’s really that simple.

Starting in earnest on the Marvelman/Miracleman project: Marvelman Family #1 (1956), Marvelman Special #1 (1984), Miracleman #1 (1985), Miracleman #1 (2014), Miracleman Omnibus (2022). #Marvelman

🐰SHARE THIS POST🐰 Reminder! TRUE NORTH (this giant book about #AlphaFlight) is now available worldwide on Amazon! But because I detest Amazon, I’m donating 25% of what I make until the end of January to charity. If this gets 100 shares, that goes up to 30%. amzn.to/4pkPDFK

A classic conspiracist and walls appear in Supernatural s02e12 (CW, 2007), with a brief additional map in a separate scene: www.vaultofculture.com/vault/nst/20...

University of Florida Critical Theory Reading Group Conference The State of the Unions Keynotes: Sianne Ngai, Anna Kornbluh -How have unions+ labor itself, been the subject of - or been eliminated from - literary studies, literary texts, pop culture? call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/12/...

The first two hours this morning

JOB ALERT! 3-year postdoc at @girtoncollege.bsky.social - research anything you like in History, Archaeology or Anthropology in a wonderful, welcoming scholarly community. PLEASE SHARE! Closes 12 January www.girton.cam.ac.uk/job-vacancie...

here's the syllabus for my "queer Shakespeare" course. I organized it into units on queer identity—Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans*, & Queer—to engage with & challenge scholarly arguments that these identities are anachronistic & irrelevant to the plays: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I appreciate Cameron's whole thread here on student use of genAI. I really wish more folks would listen to what teachers and college profs are witnessing and take it seriously.

The Drowned Cathedral, 1929 #escher #mcescher

american political philosophy in the 21st century —

I feel very strongly that someone should hire me to illustrate a fantasy ttrpg

Final Fantasy VI (1994)

I have come to think that many readers/viewers/commentators can no longer distinguish representational elements or the different between representation and presentation, as @gwillow.me notes here. Since metaphor and meaning hinge on such, it’s a problem…

In Celtic mythology, a white stag is a herald of profound change. In Arthurian legends he symbolizes the eternal quest for spiritual knowledge. In Narnia, the stag grants wishes to those that catch him. art by Sebastian Meyer