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...

It looks like the jury has finished deliberating, they are handing over the verdict and, well, all they wrote here is “Fuck Zuck”?

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...

And remember, folks, by “poor people” they mean you.

On our small, regional campus, the poli-sci prof received a threatening note under his door about “leftwing indoctrination”. I saw it. Thanks to our student reporter, I now know that, coincidentally, members of Turning Point were on campus that day. 🤔 insiderupg.com/2026/02/12/t...

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....

Lol. Yes, Jesus, famously broad minded. Like if Epstein was riding a camel, and Jesus was holding a needle …

(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-...

I am now involved in no less than three class action lawsuits related to data breaches. The lesson I take from this is that digital capitalism sucks in all the usual ways that capitalism sucks, but also in other ways.

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.

Listen until they make a Richard Pryor biopic there is no movie about where I’m from, but there is this funny scene in The End of the Tour where David Foster Wallace is driving down Veterans Parkway in nearby Bloomington and all you can see are the signs of endless food chains.

“Importance: High”

It’s beautiful 🥹 and it’s available for preorder!! https://bookshop.org/p/books/skin-contact-elisa-faison/a02ec31b1a2753d7?ean=9781538776018&next=t&

If you assess a data viz by the ratio of ink to information, this one gets it.

Thrilled to announce my new book (electronic version out now, print next month) — it proposes a new value theory grounded in the longue durée of literary institutions, 1800–present.

Woohoo! I just started it. Game changer for the classroom. Congrats to Dan and @johannawinant.bsky.social

Is it too much to ask for an exhaustive infographic of every crime, abuse of power, and other corrupt actions on a day-by-day basis, color coded by severity, and tagged with numbers linked to a numerical list of accomplices and stooges so that we are fully prepared on the day of reckoning?!

What did people think about Eddington? I have some criticisms but mostly liked it. It’s quiet condemnation of Silicon Valley is especially smart. The film starts and ends with the building of a data center that <seems> to have little to do with the plot but is actually essential.

This will definitely not lead to more lonely incels with raging misogyny

I’m very happy for László Krasznahorkai and the Nobel win, but look at this interview bit - did he steal it from Nic Cage’s monologue in Moonstruck? Same vibe.

Damning. Time spent fixing AI language or trying to figure out if information is accurate: “The study estimates that workslop causes businesses $186 per month, per employee, or $9 million per year for a 10,000-person company.” finance.yahoo.com/news/9-milli...

‘the human centipede of content’ is the most succinct, brilliant, and horrifying description of AI yet. AI is not the future, it is the past returned as shit.

I made a lil game inspired by the Wordle universe. It's called Versedle (pronounced Verse-a-dle). You guess who wrote famous lines of literature. As my parents can attest, it's hard! I made them an Easy Mode, but it's still kinda hard. Maybe you'll like it! ▶️ 📚: melaniewalsh.github.io/versedle/

Baby’s got a pub date! And some juicy catalog copy. MIDDLEMEN coming your way on April 26! (Cover reveal soon!)

Thesis: Unlike Inherent Vice, One Battle After Another is not ‘based on Pynchon’ (a formal claim that characters and plot points get remediated by film) but PYNCHONIAN (a stylistic claim that Anderson is actually moving his auteur brand toward the sensibility of Pynchon’s novels

I can confirm that scientifically this is a first, because from 2014-2016 I watched an episode of Wild Kratts every day that said sperm whale/squid battles in the deep sea have never been seen by humans.

Hey thanks to @lithub.com.web.brid.gy for including my recent piece on translated bestsellers in their daily roundup of “the best of the literary internet”! Check it out: lithub.com/lit-hub-dail...

Judith Butler was decisive to my own intellectual development when they were at Hopkins. Watching the UC facilitate their persecution by dipshit wreckers in the Trump administration is enraging. Butler, in all their thorniness and range, epitomizes the centrality of the fight for academic freedom.

New at PB: Jed Kudrick & @sdileonardi.bsky.social scour bestseller data to unpack trending translation in the US, despite the low national average of translations published each year.

I thought this was a pretty cool fact when I discovered it. I mean 80 weeks is hella long for a book to be consecrated by U.S. popular culture as relevant (average bestseller lasts 1 week). Even for English language writers, this is like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones big.

I’m on page xi ofTaking Back Control by Wolfgang Steeck and I’m already into it/asking questions: “The nation-state is the only social site - the only institutionalized polity - that is potentially available for democratisation in opposition to capitalist distributional justice”

A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it. New at PB: Jed Kudrick & @sdileonardi.bsky.social ask how such a renaissance went unnoticed?

Saw Noah Wyle at school drop off.