I was really hoping UpScrolled would have something close to the old Twitter/Bluesky architecture….

Prof. Evan Mwangi went through a harrowing experience at the hands of the Kenyan police but his response is so telling of the unfathomable narcissism of a certain kind of Kenyan diasporic intellectual

Somehow, without meaning to, I became an Eliot Weinberger completist

tapping the sign

I think it’s hilarious that the Chronicle of Higher Education’s version of the New York Times' “we return to this Ohio diner to find out what real America thinks” is… Michael Clune.

I was excited to read this article but it's kind of a nothingburger.

A perverse performative: an utterance ostensibly meant to redress an injury that in fact backhandedly reinflicts the injury. Examples: "Affirmative action for white people"; "socialism for the rich"; "corporate welfare”; “vice signaling."

Those who can’t periodize, psychologize

You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to the Crooked Timber-Matthew Yglesias folie à deux

Once again struck by the truly singular Palestinian resistance—a fact devastatingly brought home by the lack of strategic vision, tactical bumbling, and endogenous rot of much of what passes for state-led opposition to NATO terror and impunity.

1. The notion that evil characters are miserable has always struck me as sentimental cope, though I admit that the Trump regime’s legion of demons does lend some plausibility to the notion.

The political unconscious at work here is a view of the weather— in the century of the sixth mass extinction—as just is.

"While my analysis joins a growing body of work criticizing capitalism on the grounds of unfreedom, it departs from the republican framework that underpins many contemporary arguments in this vein."

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take credit for killing his own institutions.

I was about to say “Biden erasure” but I think “Biden amnesia” captures the macro and micro scales of denial at work here.

This is awful. Solidarity with @workshops4gaza.bsky.social

Maybe it’s just as well that Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These has a title and an Oprah book club imprimatur that makes you roll your eyes because then the gut punch it packs hits you exactly right.

We should have told our students that reading Victorian novels is great preparation for posting—you never quite know if the person in your mentions is a precocious 16 yr old, an 80 yr old undergoing their ‘second childhood,’ or a profligate grad student awaiting their fortune.

Probably one of the most jaw-dropping discoveries I’ve ever made about my university is that three/four weeks into the semester (when presumably students have had a chance to buy assigned books), they remove all the books from the shelves.

I wasn’t expecting to run into age gap discourse in Bleak House, tbh.

Yes, it's the form that's algorithmically legible--rinse and repeat.

You’d think the death of the author/writer/artist and the rise of the “content creator” translates into a cultural emphasis of content over form. Quite the contrary. It’s all form now, no actual content.

Dorfman and Mattelart have an interesting bit about the ideological functions of the “Uncle” in the Disney universe that makes me wonder about its contemporary uses now

Historian comrades, shouldn’t you by now have come up with two different words to distinguish radical, empirically-robust and theoretically sophisticated forms of “revisionism” from reactionary, conspiracy-addled forms of “revisionism”?

Translation: White supremacy and its silly justifications is finding new followers. Discussion: Losers tell themselves they won at birth.

It is not the atavism of this iteration of herrenvolk race science that startles me, but the way it’s percolated into common sense. I think I first noticed it on X but is now just an ambient feature of popular discourse, even among subalterns. I mean, phrenology, really?

We have ample examples of thinkers who are cited but not read. Are there examples of thinkers who are read but not cited? And why that is the case?

"That the white man is always-already a victim of job discrimination, even before he is born, is nevertheless the plain reality, accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all." — Louis Althusser

Watching Boulderians blow through intersections with non-functioning traffic lights really drives home that we are so utterly cooked.

Ressentiment as a psychological wage of whiteness is crazy-making for its recipients in large part because it's always already inflationary.

"Like every reactionary little magazine, Jacobin has been endowed with a weak Messianic power—The Dig." — Walter Benjamin

Inviting students to reflect on vernacular logics of racial capitalism baked like second nature in how they see the world—for example, the notion of the self as a brand; or borders as natural ways of determining moral worth—has been far more useful to them than decades of teaching logical fallacies.

Neither professional, nor managerial, nor, alas, a class.

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.