A striking thing about theory in the academic humanities is that it is always theorizing the last war.

Everyone deserves that one professor from a SLAC who writes the most glowing letters of rec a person will ever get in their lifetime.

A conference on "Fredric Jameson and the Future of Critical Theory” keynoted by Denning, Gaines, Mbembe, Moi, and Spivak says much about critical theory at Duke, yes, but its as telling about the nostalgia of institutional critical/continental theory call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/10/...

Why are all keynotes underwhelming? Is it something inherent in the genre?

This ep does double duty as the afterword for Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth, a forthcoming collection from @upittpress.bsky.social, edited by Scott Sundvall, @caddiealford.bsky.social, & @rhetlab.bsky.social. Plus it’s the perfect companion for your travels to NCA 2025! #teamrhetoric

New ep of the Rhetoricity podcast! Super excited for this one: a roundtable on the “post-truth” world we are (or are we?) living in. Panelists include @jamesrball.com, @omediochieng.bsky.social, @rhetrickery.bsky.social, Barb Biesecker, & Robin Reames. rhetoricity.libsyn.com/rhetoric-bef... #NCA2025

Hard to believe, but there was a time such a thing as a useable search function existed

Pete Buttigieg promises "that our first gay first family might actually be a straight one.” lareviewofbooks.org/blog/essays/...

USians grasping around for words to describe the Epstein predatory network (“elites," “bipartisan,” “class solidarity”) really is a reminder of the almost complete illegibility of “the social”—as an analytic for grasping totality—in U.S. discourse.

It worries me that technical psychoanalytic language—e.g. psychosis, perversion, hysteria— often have vulgarized valences in popular discourse because we really do need these analytic concepts to come to terms with Zionism in Israel, Germany, and the United States www.fr.de/kultur/gesel...

Practicing breathing exercises as I listen to absolutely brilliant thinkers get interviewed by people completely out of their depth.

Second coming peeps, how’s the width of that gyre coming along?

Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about what we should expect from the Trump regime omediochieng.substack.com/p/fascisms-p...

Few things as symptomatic of how social democrats keep pining for the Keynesian order of post-war America than their hysterical(!!!) championing of an electoral politics that is supposed to transform "hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”

The present is a coalition of Facebook boomers, reddit moderators, Nazi bots on X, and bluesky libs collectively chanting, “Is it real?” at AI slop the day after the last data center has dried up all the fresh water in the world.

It is so interesting to me that we are living in an era when seemingly everything is irony-pilled, trolling abounds, deep fakes are everywhere and that somehow this has only created the most incredibly literalist reading publics in the world.

Finding a way of steering a student from vernacular gateways to fascism—a Joe Rogan podcast enthusiast; or a student on a Yuval Harari tear; or one who has been socialized in the ambient manosphere of Hillsong worship songs—is surely one of the most vexing pedagogical riddles.

One of the greatest pleasures in life must surely be re-rereading a text when you are finally, blessedly, ready for it.

You'd think this would be the golden age of left moralist writers in the vein of Paul Goodman, James Baldwin, and Robert Coles but I think we won't see as much of the genre precisely because we're in the twilight of self-described "left-liberals."

If there is going to be an undercommons as the university crumbles, a huge task will be transforming the curdled ressentiment of post-academic cranks into something resembling a critical autodidacticism.

Freud wrote that when we dream, our dreams are very interesting to us and boring to everyone else. In the racial capitalocene, our lives are very real to us but unreal to everyone else.

Harper's "The Goon Squad" belongs to the same genre as CHE's deep dive into the inside politics of Pomona University's English department www.chronicle.com/podcast/coll...

Grimly amused by the contradictions of social democracy, at once dependent on the frontier for the largesse it seeks to distribute and attached to whiteness as the marrow of the social.

Writing a column for the New York Times and shaking my head so the readers know that I disagree with its support for genocide.

This reminds me of Brillat-Savarin’s question to Adam and Eve: “who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?”

I wouldn’t characterize Jamelle Bouie's silence over Israel’s genocidal campaign as an absolute silence, but I would characterize it as a general silence.

5 year old me didn't know that Artax sinking into the Swamp of Sadness was all the preparation I needed for life in the racial capitalocene.

Each generation of political theorists must, out of relative disciplinary solipsism, discover rhetoric, metabolize it, and compulsively reinvent its tropological taxonomy.

There is not a single population in the world more weird about aging than USians.

The atrophy of liberal institutions has taken a precipitous turn in the racial capitalocene, but we have the Nobel Foundation to thank for reminding us that liberalism has always been morally grotesque www.thetimes.com/world/latin-...

Tired: Imperial boomerang Wired: Habeas viscus boomerang

In a spirited discussion of Afropessimism in my grad class today, it occurred to me that some critical theories are born with a parallax view, some achieve a parallax view, and some have a parallax view thrust upon them.

It is a sign of the times that the Black bourgeoisie (Danielle Allen, Van Jones, Hakeem Jeffries) who have long taken the hysterical performance of neurosis as the most bankable career path to power and wealth are now confirmed psychotics therenovator.substack.com/p/why-im-exc...

We should never, ever forgive Israel. www.nbcnews.com/news/world/a...

mmmhh… How is AI, deepfakes, and the incorrigible lying by the ruling class transforming ocularcentrism?

Literally nobody: Me, thinking about Expressivism: “I can fix him.”

Academic colleagues planning on inviting their Israeli friends for visiting professor sinecures ought to start by reading this incisive letter by Alireza Doostdar, "Are Palestinian Scholars Our Colleagues? Boycott and the Material Limits of Friendship.” savageminds.org/2016/05/12/a...

Ross Douthat in the pages of NLR, Michael Clune chopping it up in Ordinary Unhappiness, a magazine called Jacobin rending its garments for Charlie Kirk…. Forget “morbid symptoms,” it's a full-blown death rattle.

Listening to Michael Clune being interviewed in Ordinary Unhappiness and its dawning on me that that Marx's utopian lines in the German Ideology have come true, only for fascists www.patreon.com/posts/episod...

Sometimes it is too much to bear, but then some radical scholar and writer has borne this before, someone is bearing it now as well. We are never truly alone and I think the academy is a great place to forget that.

Perversion is the modality in which nihilism is lived.

Professional Myrmidon Class (PMC)

Tapping this sign as I watch what’s happening to the Corbyn/Sultana Party

My local coffee shop was playing Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler” and this postcolonial African is indignant at such a brazen act of cultural appropriation.

Last March, I and other editors at Guernica resigned over the publication of an essay by an Israeli writer about treading the line of empathy. The ensuing criticism—'condemn even empathy?'—pushed my ex-colleague and I to re-interrogate the piece's shortcomings. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Defeat the police spectrejournal.com/defeat-the-p...

The thing about electoralism in the United States is that it can’t even manage to fail better. It’s always just the same sordid, abject, preemptive capitulation

The Great "I Kept My Mouth Shut While Democrats Sponsored Genocide in '23-'24 But Now That My Israeli Colleague Has Posted A Self-Exculpatory Anti-Netanyahu Post, I Will Repost It On Facebook" Show