single daffodil on George Eliot's grave today 💛

What a wonderful day at the V&A / National Art Library talking about Dickens's Compostional Process and ways of engaging wide audiences with his material archive. @dickensnotes.bsky.social is on Bluesky now too 😀

A slide of imperative verbs (addressed to himself? Or to the narrative?) gleaned from Dickens’s memoranda and notes as part of www.dickensnotes.com project and a session with the manuscripts themselves in the V&A National Art Library. Thanks to Anna Gibson and Adam Grener for a great workshop!

Reading people. Body language. Knowing how to connect with people totally unlike you and with different backgrounds and beliefs. Defusing tense situations. Gaining trust. High endurance, pain tolerance, and work ethic. Reaction time. Prioritizing order of execution. Anticipating people’s needs. Tons

My general feeling is that every summary tool shortcuts the library shelf. In grad school there were few things I adored more than finding a book on the shelf bc I inevitably found six or seven other books on proximate shelves that I didn’t even know I needed! Process is the point!

You’d think that teaching and writing about books wouldn’t be that high risk a profession… and yet!!

Pretty much every winter Olympic sport--including curling--feels like a death sport to me

By cancelling the Climate Emergency Response Fund, the government was telling us there was nothing to see here. The past week has shown they could not have been more wrong. We need a government that takes climate change seriously because it's only going to get worse. #nzpol

I used to teach an autobiography of an AI engineer in my robots in literature class where he supposed that all medieval monks could imagine as progress would be a bigger pen and parchment, but we know that the monks were conceiving of worlds insane enough to melt your eyeballs out of your head

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case. "My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

I’d just like to remind everyone that the first iRex ferry would have just entered service had the coalition not cancelled them purely out of spite for the opposition, Wellington and the South Island.

Not sure why this dross, dated Dec 1, seems to be circulating now (and why it didn't cross my feed a month ago), but wow what a terrible essay. A few comments, in a short 🧵>> bigthink.com/the-present/...

It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

When I went to college a hundred years ago (2000-4), my school was actively recruiting humanities majors, w scholarships etc. Institutions incentivize areas of study in order to grow them. And they underfund them intentionally to strangle them. It’s not a random natural phenomenon.

My love for em dashes is as old as the hills and as mighty as my inability to make a transition between thoughts literally any other way and I will be damned if I let the clankers take that from me

In the Great Expectations country last Sunday, how’s this for a Dickensian scene @dickensfellowhq.bsky.social

For my book I thought a lot about this position, which really does rest on a presumption, nurtured by first world, usually male perspectives that have been shaped by habituation to empowerment, that for something to count as victory it has to be total & complete; anything else is “failure.” +

some days you just feel so lucky — this was one of them — i can’t believe i got the chance to share new work with such a generous, thoughtful audience — the very best version of academia — the whole conference was warm and sincere, a testament the kind of community-building nikki does 🤎

“But the most absurd & preposterous of all… was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled ‘A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’” —Charles Mackay (1814–1889) on the South Sea Bubble, in Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

Adjuncts, indie scholars, publishers, journal eds: please spread the word about this and help me do recon! It's so hard w/ social media being so fragmented to learn about all the great lit studies articles and books pub'd this year by contingent/indie folx. I know there's lots! Deadline: end of Nov.

This - the Wheatley Census - has been at the center of my research life for the last year (and a half, honestly)! Proud to finally share the first iteration of it publicly. Take a look. Poke around. And send me your info about copies you work with!

One of the biggest issues with the synthetic text extruding machines is that we have well-formed linguistic output with no accountability. Solution: OpenAI should be accountable for everything that comes out of ChatGPT, period. (And likewise for Google with Gemini, etc.)

Scholarship opportunity for MA with the wonderful @nikkihessell.bsky.social

We have MA scholarships available for theses on 18th-century/Romantic poetry and/or settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty in poetry and other literary forms ... details here! www.wgtn.ac.nz/scholarships...

I loved writing this for The Spinoff about Jane Austen’s terrible parents thespinoff.co.nz/books/25-10-...

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

cornell alums sign and share and fight and then some docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Now do Book It!

Luxon himself handed me the Prime Minister's science prize last year. Let me say this in plain English: he's an idiot for running a govt who budgeted more for AI than for the Marsden fund. any journo reading this can quote me on it #nzpol

Collaborate, share & organize

Did you publish a book in 2025/2024? Are you attending NAVSA this November? Do you want to celebrate your book? If so, fill out this form: docs.google.com/forms/d/1tJH...

There’s an enormous amount of stuff in this book I’d like to highlight, but start with: “What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.”

for real and for true, the RISE OF CELEBRITY AUTHORSHIP is out!! The code CUP20 will get you 20% through the Columbia University Press website; let me know if you are dying to read it but need a presentation copy from the author, who is very excited about it------!! cup.columbia.edu/book/the-ris...

SMASH IT!

just the hugest shout-out to the site against-a-i.com/short-readin..., with a list of teachable readings that I could pull from for my class this semester thanks to the team putting it together, led by @annakornbluh.bsky.social. What a service <3

Teaching with Dickens’s working notes or about his compositional process? Consider submitting materials to the Dickens Notes Project!

@annagk.bsky.social and I are welcoming short pedagogy articles/approaches that use Dickens's Working Notes, or that center compositional process or serial form in some way. If you teach Dickens, check out the dickensnotes.com platform!

Today we have a beautiful example of a Kármán Vortex street to the west of the North Island. This cloud pattern is generated downstream of Taranaki Maunga when wind, cloud and stability conditions are just right. To learn more: blog.metservice.com/K%C3%A1rm%C3...

Accessible and expanding archive of resources tailored for teachers who are trying to explain and engender AI skepticism, create AI-free classrooms and curricula, & think with other scholars and educators who are doing the same.

continue to collect best e.g.s of assignable articles, especially shorter than these great ones! will compile, along with assignment prompts, this week

I have taken the resources that were in the budget and which you were probably saving for higher education Forgive me they were needed to feed the AI bubble and to dismantle the humanities

👀

in case anybody wants this or any other UCP books, I just saw you can get 75% off all ebooks from the press til August 17th w code EBOOOK75— I think it works out to around $8.75 press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Did you publish your first book in Victorian studies in 2024? If so, submit it for consideration for the Rudikoff Prize. More information here: nvsa.org/rudikoff-pri...

🚨Digitization Alert!🚨 We’re excited to announce that we have digitized poetry, notebooks, and unpublished manuscripts by W.B. Yeats. These materials live in the Boston College Collection of Yeats Family Papers and we are delighted to make them more accessible!

This might be the only/best opportunity to promote my book, which argues this is kind of what 19th realism is about: ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...