In need of a good scare, my teens and I turned off the lights and cranked up the volume and tried out the Backrooms game for the Switch. A+ for scream factor. Just escape rooms plus jump scares

Finally got to Bolaño’s the Savage Detectives. Wow. Not as superior as 2666, but still ambitious in its stretching of the novel’s form, and has maybe one of my all time favorite endings.

Five living writers that you've read five books by each: -Kazuo Ishiguro -Colson Whitehead -Stephen Graham Jones -Thomas Pynchon -Elena Ferrante

I will not make ad hominem attacks I will not make ad hominem attacks I will not make ad hominem attacks I will not even mention the sunglasses

My life is a hamster wheel of complaining about universities outsourcing services to private, for profit companies (who make everything worse) instead of allowing the brilliant minds from within to build and maintain things that work for us.

Jessica Pressman’s bookishness meets Baudrillard’s simulacrum.

A Kalshi ad featuring Chalamet and Nickleback is my hell

I’ve been struggling with Schattenfroh by Lentz. Keep petering out around 100 pages in. Should I push through? Will the language start to stick to my brain and make meaning?

I contribute a a section on US high education. I argue that the sector should be reformed along for principles. 1. Equitable participation 2. Democratic self-governance 3. Local responsiveness / global openness 4. Cost sustainability Check it out: storage.ghost.io/c/b6/39/b639...

As our bargaining committee sits down with uni lawyers to advocate for me and lots of other workers, I’m at the Carnegie (named after a strikebreaker) admiring this representation of the Pinkerton riot of 1892

Finished Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova. It you’re unfamiliar, I highly recommend. A wholly original, brilliantly crafted, and devastatingly brutal allegory for grief and loss. Literary horror at its finest.

Here’s the essay I’d like to write: In 2022, Jordan Peale made an alien flick about the difficulty of being a Black creator of blockbusters in the shadow of Spielberg (opening scene is ET, rest of film is Jaws, starting with rodeo=beach, digestion scene=WarWorlds) In 2026, Spielberg responds. /2

If you haven’t read this yet, fix that as soon as possible: it’s a beautifully crafted response to a great album. And if you teach literature, you might want to consider using the second and third paragraphs as an example of how close reading works.

Is the character Babs Bunny from Tiny Tunes an homage to Barbara Streisand’s character in What’s Up, Doc? Has to be right?

This is exciting. The Buried Giant is my favorite of his later ‘genre turn’ novels. Klara and the Sun was ok. But I’ll still read anything by Ishiguro.

The follow up to Tender Is the Flesh, The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica (trans. Sarah Moses) hypnotized me with its first words. Came out a few hours later. Its brevity leaves you wanting more; its harrowing world makes you feverish.

If you haven’t read it yet, get yourself a copy.

Five years ago today I defended my diss on zoom and later popped a bottle of champagne with my family and a few friends (outside, social distancing)

Finished Hell House by Richard Matheson. I knew that somewhere in the mass grave of paperback pulps was the missing link bw Shirley Jackson and the Shining. Didn’t know how directly Matheson borrowed from Jackson and King from Matheson.

Finished Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts. A pretty fun, original take on the possession narrative. Also, second book I read recently that has a minor character full out named Stephen Graham Jones, which made me laugh both times. The other is the Bewitching by Moreno Garcia.

Update: Pitt is officially the #1 destination in the world for horror archives

This was my first StokerCon panel ever and it was illuminating. The dos and donts of working with influencers in the horror sphere

Just finished Hurricane Season, the English-language debut of Fernanda Melchor. If 2666 is disturbing in the way it turns mass violence into an unsaid, unseen secret, then Melchor is inversely disturbing, putting extreme depravity on full display. Reminded me too of Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone.

StokerCon is in Pittsburgh this week. I’m pumped. Going to see the pulp archives at Pitt, check out some panels on contemporary horror, and try to meet some cool people.

“What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?” -Pale Fire

Yeah ive been thinking about this. Its pretty bleak bsky.app/profile/sdil...

It is “impossible to imagine Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy, in early career, contemplating this with anything but horror” A documentary, a podcast, and a festival appearance … uh yeah, they would have turned down the money too

Last year, we won a grant to start a campus podcast and we are launching this week. Our goals were to give students paid local journalism and multimedia storytelling experiences while strengthening connections bw the uni and the local community. Share and listen! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/r...

Last year, we won a grant to start a campus podcast and we are launching this week. Our goals were to give students paid local journalism and multimedia storytelling experiences while strengthening connections bw the uni and the local community. Share and listen! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/r...

RIP Sam Keith I bought The Maxx #1 while my mom was checking out at the grocery store. I fell in love with the art immediately and still think the series is the greatest

Is my wife the only person in the world who, instead of saying “press play” or “let’s start the movie,” shouts out “Roll that beautiful bean footage!” in homage to a Bush Beans 1994 ad campaign, because it would be great for me if there were others

I swear I don’t need any cosmic signs to start a new essay or whatever, but the new Pynchon novel and the latest Epstein dump both mention Peoria, IL, my hometown, exactly once and as a punchline for pretty much the same joke, and it sure feels like someone wants me to start writing about this.

Come “poke around” our data “to find new books and authors [you’ve] never heard of!” @jamesfolta.com makes great use of the Int'l Bestsellers dataset built by @sdileonardi.bsky.social, @beccacohen.bsky.social, & @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social on @literaryhub.bsky.social. lithub.com/find-your-ne...

Agreed. It’s also fun to see someone go through some of the same steps (What is the most read novel in the dataset?) that led us to write about The Girl on the Train here: doi.org/10.1353/sdn....

(3) But the Democrat view is also bad: while it's fine for people at Princeton and Harvard to study Latin and Sanskrit, public higher education is about job training and $ ROI. There is no room for the idea that curiosity-driven inquiry is a good that should be supported by the public.

When we published international bestseller data with @post45data.bsky.social all I wanted was to make a Sankey diagram but never managed, now someone has. And it looks beautiful. Check it out! Source: substack.com/home/post/p-... public.flourish.studio/visualisatio...

Started mucking around with data this morning. Made a couple interesting charts from data about all the writers who ever got an NEA grant, with data from Xander Manshel + team. Decided I’d write it up for my first post. substack.com/home/post/p-...

We've got more than just a new website redesign this week: Here we offer a portrait of the university to come: without walls and without borders, online and free for all. Support Public Books: buff.ly/JF5zxCh

Wow, this looks fantastic. Gotta love free, open source, expert driven sharing of knowledge.

I had a blast hosting @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social last week for our first ever Digital Studies Symposium, and now the student paper has put out a sweet little write up. It definitely nails the spirit of the event. Check it out! insiderupg.com/2026/01/29/c...

lol, guilty 🙋🏽

A hard problem with literary data is navigating btwn editions of books and what the "work," or the theoretical text that unites all editions. I've been lucky to work with @thisismattmiller.com and @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, who built a tool to address this + do much more arxiv.org/abs/2512.10165

For all the important legal challenges happening with real artists and creatives, it will be wild to see what happens when users can demand seeing Mr Beast make people survive a week in the Deathstar

I started anticipating this a year ago, yet I’m still ruffled. I think the end game is an OpenAI streaming service that skips over Netflix as key competitor and goes straight at YouTube (#1 content generator). Why wait for a video to exist when you can just prompt it into existence?

“My question for Vice President Bush is why did your staff reject my question? Are you afraid of open discourse with the students?” From Freaks and Geeks, season finale

This is actually a good example of why the customer model is wrong. I wouldn't have chosen poetry writing, but UNC made me take a class. And it absolutely made me become a much better writer, with an eye to concision and an ear now trained to the rhythm of words. I'm a better historian as a result.

Ok stop joking I want this

Oh so that’s how the House of Leaves house got bigger on the inside than the outside

I don’t think it’s too early to call it for best of 2025 for me. Novel: Solenoid Film: One Battle After Another; runner up: Sinners Album: Bleeds by Wednesday TV: … the Studio, maybe?

In McEwan’s What We Can Know, set in 2125, in the future they drink acorn coffee, and the only mention of U.S. is it’s run by war lords. This leads me to speculate that the novel takes place in the universe of Butler’s Parable of the Sower.