I’ve long said that if I could just make it into the Washington Free Beacon I’ll know I’ve finally made it. freebeacon.com/energy/taxpa...

I wrote a thing.

so now we're just seizing oil tankers like it's a goddamn Fast and Furious movie?

12 years ago today we moved my wife’s 19th-century press from the garage to her new print shop.

Murphy saw a muskrat outside the back door this morning and as a result was all wound up and obsessed and a total asshole for the whole day.

Tonight we are all Hoosiers.

!!!!!

Heisman trophy pass right there

Murph got a blowout

mood

Ordering books for next semester. It was exactly 30 years ago I finished an MA with a (very bad) thesis largely about this perfect book. It's been way too long since I've taught or even read it.

kind of obsessed with this custom binding for Moby dick by Susan and Chaim Ebanks at Exeter Bookbinders

ordering books. truly empowering experience, not at all enervating.

“The irony couldn’t be starker: the… programs best equipped to study the social and ethical implications of AI were being defunded, even as the university promoted [its] use…across campus. This isn’t innovation—it’s institutional auto-cannibalism.” Again, Refuse/Resist is the only reasonable stance

Guess I won't be assigning that Canadian novel in my class next semester.

wtf northwestern?

Okay, fine. Act— act— in the living present! global.oup.com/academic/pro...

The only thing that could have made that more Michigan is Bob Seeger. Or Aretha.

Yeah, I’ll be cooking a turkey in here today.

(For fellow academics): I've said this before but if u have some good colleagues, I can't recommend a writing group enough. 4 of us meet every 3 wks, where 2 of us share some writing (it can be 2 pgs or 30), so u r only on the hook every 6 weeks. One of the greatest joys of my professional life.

in which I tell a story about Mark Twain and oil pipelines before the good part of this podcast begins, which is a great conversation with the brilliant @aprilanson.bsky.social and Alex Menrisky.

one final plug. over a thousand registered already. excited to be part of this panel. please join us.

can this be the end of Harvard now, please? Thank you.

What better way to celebrate Friday than a new blog post about the Trump administration's empty chair at an annual pipeline safety conference? thecurrentowdm.substack.com/p/empty-chai...

Hey if you're into energy, environment, pipelines, Great Lakes, Indigenous rights, or just a habitable planet, checkout this webinar about how we can start to dismantle the infrastructure that sustains fossil capitalism. It's a great panel that happens to include me. @billmckibben.bsky.social

Join Hip Hop Caucus and MMOP in Flint on Nov. 22nd! Artists and advocates will take the stage to shed light on what’s happening in Michigan and throughout the country with high utility bills and a way to fight back. RSVP for free: hhc.fyi/barz #MopUpMichigan

Once more on the actual anniversary. Toward an environmental history of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. thecurrentowdm.substack.com/p/disaster-o...

this looks great!

This magnificently deranged project is the perfect kind of argument for why the humanities matter.

I wrote a significant chunk of my first book at a Chicago Public Library, an amazing public space where people could read books and newspapers, access the internet, or just keep warm for a while on a cold day. This is appalling.

@johnubacon.bsky.social ‘s book on the Edmund Fitzgerald is pretty engaging but loses the plot @jeffreyinsko.bsky.social catches: the ship was part of a whole infrastructure of crazy, ecocidal, midcentury extraction the likes of which we seem to be returning. open.substack.com/pub/thecurre...

proof that Frederick Douglass read Moby-Dick

Every anniversary the same old story of the Edmund Fitzgerald gets rehearsed. I tried to take a few steps toward an environmental history of that wreck.

There is a certain ratio of followers to following that I simply can’t abide.

Coming up in a couple of weeks, the latest on the Line 5 fight. I'll be on the panel with some amazing folks I admire. Please register.

Murph is a chameleon

The Onion is hilarious!

hard day for Murph today what with all the asking for food constantly and so forth

This!!

Murphy does not understand the time change

I haven’t watched a baseball game in years. Batters wear a lot more protective gear than they used to.

Okay, so, here's the sort of query that used to work great at that other place, like, ten years ago: best trade nonfiction books of the past five or so years about climate/environment/energy, etc. For example Vaillant's Fire Weather, Egan's The Devil's Element. Thanks!

looking pretty autumnal here in Michigan

In light of the US Army Corps of Engineers' illegal decision to grant Enbridge its permit to reroute Line 5 in Wisconsin, it's worth revisiting this from last spring.

This is a fabulous and important essay. "In the end, generative AI might be a blip in tech history, over-promising and under-delivering until finally the cash runs out. But it seems it’s arrived just in time to shove universities over a cliff edge they’d already walked themselves up to."

Wrote a thing on the hot summer of uni AI adoption for @defector.com A huge thanks to @nathankhensley.bsky.social and @anniemcc.bsky.social. @brandyjensen.bsky.social is a legend. And anything smart in hear is thanks to hours of discussion, texting, and draft reading by @smosment.bsky.social

cool how universities have just given up entirely on the whole higher education thing

Belatedly discovering and bookmarking—and you should too. Honestly the best writing is of the “I had this thing I really needed to say for A WHILE” variety. So excited to read!

since KISS is in the news, I just want to remind everybody that in 1975 they performed at the Homecoming of the small northern Michigan town of Cadillac