I'm sorry I don't find "You shouldn't do subtext anymore because people are stupid" to be a particularly compelling argument

The goal of the Vanderbilt report is: provide ideological cover to the existing plan to defund the history and English departments and replace them with right-wing civic centers by recycling old, discredited culture war lies harpers.org/archive/2026...

That horrific Vanderbilt report is addressed not to the humanities faculty whom it criticizes but rather administrators. It’s not interested in debating interpretive methods; rather the report authors want to police/defund us out of existence & are addressing those who have the power to do so.

If I have any grievance about food to air, it is only this: WHY MUST IT ALL HAVE MAYO IN/ON? Once, we could get sandwiches with just butter, and burgers with sauces that were not mayonnaise-based! Once, this was a land of plenty. But no longer.

Also not allergic, just a hater. Really gross texture. And it has crept in as the default sandwich spread everywhere in my adulthood, when it used to not be. I don't know if it's cheaper or more shelf-stable or what but I haaate it. And they often put SO MUCH in.

My cartoon n this weeks @newyorker.com

The Strange Horizons Annual Fund Drive to keep us publishing in 2027 is finally here! You can find the fund drive at the link ⬇️ www.backerkit.com/c/projects/s... Some changes have arrived this time around though. Read the thread to learn more.

It’s the annual Strange Horizons fund drive! Donate to keep an important mag going and to unlock our special issue. Reviews-wise, *already* unlocked is @akankshya.bsky.social on Bora Chung. Still to come: @notquitehydepark.bsky.social on @adamroberts.bsky.social and March-Russell on Spufford …

yah the knicks game was alright i guess but have y'all seen this moth

"She’d meant to bake a simple cursed cake for her boss. Necessary for the recipe: a tiny piece of her flesh..." love this from @bleakhousing.bsky.social at @electricliterature.com : electricliterature.com/ball-jar-dem...

It is morally bad and ableist to intentionally conflate accessibility with simplistic writing.

An intriguing take on ways into reading more (and one that is not unrelated to my experience with my students, who read more if I give them reason to think the reading will be actually interesting)

My column today for @insidehighered.com criticizes the new report on the decline of the #humanities and all its flaws. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Put simply, as the podcast discusses, established writers come with more context than debut writers, and how that is handled can alter the shape of a review a lot. And even with a neophilic field, most books aren't first books.

It's not entirely a surprise to me that the Critical Friends episode about established writers has attracted less discourse than the one about debut writers, but it's probably a topic I worry about more.

I found it! The algorithm brought it back to me

The internet also brought us the instapoets, such as Atticus! "But Nick, he's terrible!" Yes, so terrible that people drive hours to see him, get his aphorisms tattooed on their bodies, integrate his nonsense ("love her but leave her wild") into their wedding vows etc. Nightmarish!

in practice, for a while poets did get paid by teaching. now with adjunctification and the right wing attack on humanities, this is also less and less plausible for everyone except a dwindling rump.

“Teenagers consume porn,” a truly shocking development unprecedented at any point in human history. Anyhow, *dons Ethicist Hat* PORN IS GOOD, ACTUALLY.

Genuinely wild that I, a homosexual who loves disco music and rhinestones, am more comfortable in my masculinity than half of the heterosexual men in mainstream punditry.

If you let them ban porn, they will call you pornographic when they ban you.

Live in BCS #458 "The Voice and Her Knife" @anamariacurtis.bsky.social "rich and sweet with the barest hint of salt. It is not the flavor that she savors. She can feel the burst of energy from it immediately, feel her mind sharpening with every bite." www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-...

The stuff going around about how conservative art isn’t good/doesn’t exist is interesting because what it means, which is true, is that the American conservative wing 2026 is completely incapable of making good art. There are several reasons for this but they boil down to the absence of vision 1/3

Actually we should just give citizenship to every undocumented person in the United States who wants it. Walking over an imaginary line isn't some great moral atrocity. Making people live in the shadows as a permanent underclass absolutely IS.

19. An artbook! A poetry collection? A poetry artbook! Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman (who both drew the art and wrote the text). Very unusual and meta. Surprisingly sensual. Also one for the asemic writing fans! (it is me! I am an asemic writing fan) www.wavepoetry.com/products/pla...

this is (I hope obviously) neither to excuse the pitcher or QB or whatever of the past era nor the harassment / other fuckery they got away with. but it just isn't true, as a description of the moral sociology here, that the mainstream position was to valorize the vices / confuse them with virtue

Fanny is pretty much the only protagonist that things ONLY happen to, and that's really fascinating for me because it points to the larger forces that the other women tend to over power through liberal humanism.

It is BUG FUCK CRAZY to insist that human beings can no longer do something we were doing regularly three years ago. www.wired.com/story/future...

I would ask "what has prompted you to say this?" Since on the one hand it's *completely fine* if a video game is just entertaining, in the same way its completely fine if a board game or a bouncy ball or a toy train (or a novel or a poem) is just entertaining. On the other, a game can Say Things

jesus this is a poem

I couldn't help but notice that one of the series mentioned in the article (though with no specifics about what if any modernization was actually done to the *texts* of the novels) was Ann M. Martin's *The Baby-sitter's Club* which has been having a recent reprint run and I think it's a particularly

If I'm not worried about it getting too hot and deflating, a fluff salad! I found a stellar recipe for cranberry fluff salad a while ago. Otherwise I have lots of fun cookie and bar recipes for sweet or could do a cheese ball for savory

Oh it's this guy! The ostensible video games scholar whose every popular-audience output reads like it was written by someone who both has never played a video game and has a personal vendetta against the form! Maybe his scholarly work is better; I don't know, I haven't read it, but I'm suspicious.

yes, we can all agree that the Odyssey represents far-right values such as *checks notes* anyone who refuses hospitality to a traveler from a foreign land is a literal monster, especially if they refuse to host someone who is endangered while sailing far away from home in the Mediterranean sea.

two fairly useful heuristics: 1) if someone is talking about cutting income taxes it is not For You 2) if someone is talking about cutting payroll taxes they are trying to shred the safety net

The language is some nonsense though. Here's basically the climax line. The grove releases a breath like stitching through an already closed wound. Oh yeah, THAT kind of breath. Glad you clarified.

Obviously the person I am quote-posting knows how voluminous scholarship on Morrison is already already, but my academic library search returned 280 books in "Subject: Morrison, Toni"! Including at least one that is specifically on Morrison's language, like that's in the title of the book!

Third and most importantly, many more ppl would do PhDs if (1) higher ed were accessible, (2) not tied to specific life pathways (i.e. BA to MA to PhD within a certain time frame), and (3) if academia and what academics do were valued socially and financially in society.

I'm losing my mind over this AI is really highlighting the schism in values between the half of humanity that thinks things should mean something, and the half that just wants to be regarded as cool without actually putting in the work to be cool

I'm actually gonna go even farther with this social criticism I think this all comes back to men being pissed off that now they actually have to try, put in effort, when it comes to attracting wives In this essay (post thread lol) I will--

And rather than like, rolling up their sleeves and getting to work, men have, mostly, been content to just fucking whine about it. They (along with the help of the mainstream media) try to paint women as too demanding, telling women they should lower the bar so it's easier for men to hop over.

This is absolutely true! And I saw it among my male peers (and some of their fathers) in high school a decade ago and I'm sure it's been going on much longer! I strongly suspect this is also related to the "peaked in high school" phenomenon, since high school sports was the last time

And this is literally what AI is. It's a way to lower the bar. Want to pretend you're an artist? Just use AI. Or how about pretending to be a physicist? (Remember that billionaire that was doing "vibe physics" and claimed he was making quantum mechanics discoveries 🙄)

Stymied by the non-existence of hyperlinks, or simply writing a person's name into a paragraph.

You lived it. You have the physical and emotional memories of what it took to create it, including and especially the sacrifices. You didn't just generate text. You, a person, thought and wrote. When someone steals your writing, they're claiming all of that for themselves.

I have been thinking about this a lot because of a project at work about creative writing and AI (more to come soon). It's driven home, in a new way, how much it matters in writing, art, and single-author no-RA fields like history that what you produce is of you. Your labor is an extension of you.