New at PB: English professor Ben Parker asks: How good is ChatGPT at writing, really?

Imagine this kind of student organizing against Ed Tech / AI. “I lost out on learning! Relationships! Oh and all of my personal data, too!” www.bbc.com/news/article...

Joan Scott on why the attack on gender studies by powerful patriarchal men is not a coincidence, but an attempt to silence critique and analysis of their abusive behavior. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I don’t expect it to happen, but having unlawfully arrested and branded hundreds of your citizens ‘terrorists’ should really be a resigning matter for the Prime Minister in any free society.

"Only two English words rhyme with culture, and these, as it happens, are sepulture and vulture. We don’t yet call museums or galleries or even universities culture-sepultures, but I hear a lot, lately, about culture-vultures (man must rhyme)." Raymond Williams

CALL FOR PITCHES @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not. Details below!

Overjoyed to have my first article published in Textual Practice today on life-writing, network infrastructures, and formal experimentation in work by Kathy Acker and Joanna Walsh. It’s open access too! Read here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

'A consultation run by the City of London Corporation and published on Thursday found that nearly 90% of respondents backed trans-inclusive access to the ponds' 💪🏳️‍⚧️❤️

I hate to tap the sign but again: this is all made to make in-person education and access to knowledge transfer a preserve of the elite. Human education for the few, bots for the many.

Another turn on the Genre Turn (and a review of Jeremy Rosen’s excellent Genre Bending). www.chronicle.com/article/is-l...

“In my writing, I want to display a self that disintegrates. I can prop that up with theory, but something must compel me in the first place.” —Robert Glück buff.ly/hw5gXxh

wow - honoured to be here

Overjoyed to have my first article published in Textual Practice today on life-writing, network infrastructures, and formal experimentation in work by Kathy Acker and Joanna Walsh. It’s open access too! Read here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

what a shocking turn of events who could’ve seen this coming

Still plenty of time to submit an abstract for the BACLS New Work in Contemporary Literary Studies graduate conference at The University of Leeds on May 20th for PGRs and ECRs! Please share widely call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/11/... @bacls.bsky.social @maxrshirley.bsky.social

‘“I can’t pay my rent with prestige,” one sign said. Another was a mock-up of the cover of Great Expectations, with “Great” crossed out and replaced by “Reasonable”.’ Anna Aslanyan on the strike at the British Library, new on the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

Anagrams by Kevin Killian

differences 36.2–3 is out now — edited by Sarah Dowling and Claire Grandy, "Lyric beyond Containment" features essays from Jacques Khalip, David Marriott, Andrea Brady, Amy De'Ath, Whitney DeVos, Jan Mieszkowski, Ren Ellis Neyra, Susan Briante, more: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

This headline is the end of civilization.

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

It's official: 400 redundancies and a campus closure. At-risk staff will get a letter next week. Absolutely no serious consideration of any of the union's counterproposals. Please share widely.

TODAY on the Small Press Takeover podcast, listen to Cole Swensen read at a special edition of the series, in collaboration with the Material Poetics Symposium🧡 open.spotify.com/episode/466i...

wrote an article for @thebookseller.com outlining to the industry why small presses are the lifeforce & future of book production. Pls share esp w people who may not know what small press publishers do! www.thebookseller.com/comment/dont...

To ensure the future of our paywall-free writing, educational workshops, and staff and operations, we’re challenging ourselves to raise $100,000. All gifts are matched through Dec. 31; donate at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/donate/?utm_source=bsky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mgfd25&utm_id=mgfd25

‘Just one of either depopulation in the North or climate change in the South could be enough to drive mass migration. Anyone who thinks the 21st century will not see the biggest global movement of peoples in history has not been paying attention.’ David Runciman: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Paolo Virno 1952-2025

YEARBOOK OF ENGLISH STUDIES 55 has just been published. In addition to many fine chapters, it has a kind of call-to-arms for English studies in the UK, full of thoughts and suggestions about ‘What to Do for English Now’: it’s fully open access here muse.jhu.edu/article/970710.

The programme has been finalised for our one day symposium, Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form, taking place in November. Keynotes from Cole Swensen and Jeanne Heuving! To check the schedule and sign up to attend, see here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/material-p...

New online: The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) collection is now available on LSE Digital Library! We’ve digitised and published the GLF Diaries and the GLF newspaper Come Together. Further series from the archives will be added as digitisation continues. 1/2 digital.library.lse.ac.uk/collections/...

pro writing tip: always start the day by addressing a minor administrative task so that you’re in a bad mood when you begin your actual work

'Sticking Together in Tough Times' with Dean Spade 6 Oct 6-8pm Discussing the kinds of bold, rule-breaking, risk-taking resistance that people are taking up to care for each other and save lives right now. www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of...

This is grim & dangerous over reach. This is a government that have lost the moral argument & are still selling arms to Israel. Now further cracking down on dissent. Absolutely the opposite of what they should be doing - so of course this is what the Labour Government choose.

The programme has been finalised for our one day symposium, Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form, taking place in November. Keynotes from Cole Swensen and Jeanne Heuving! To check the schedule and sign up to attend, see here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/material-p...

It's the end of The Best American Poetry. I wrote about the forty-year anthology project, poetry’s place in Big Five publishing, and editor David Lehman's culture wars vision of American verse. defector.com/good-riddanc...

This year's @smallpublishers.bsky.social cards, designed (as always) by @uniformbooks.bsky.social, and featuring the work of Erica Van Horn (the subject of this year's exhibition). Fri 24 / Sat 25 October, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. 11am-7pm, admission free, all welcome.

Academia dot edu licensing agreement says it can use your likeness and voice and publications in any manner they want, world wide.

‘Stein​ can seem so monolithic that it takes a long time to realise how vulnerable her writing is, and one expression of this is the way her sentences refuse to obey our usual priorities.’ Adam Thirlwell on Gertrude Stein, online early from the next issue: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"It is time to resist the injustice that now threatens to be normalized by those who capitulate, sometimes in advance, to powers that are clearly willing to destroy the basic principles that protect the university’s independence against external manipulations." www.chronicle.com/article/when...

Several people asked for the text of this after the talk version appeared in the "Cruel Futurism" episode. Happy to oblige.

CFP - Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form (London, 5 November 2025) The symposium takes up poetic practice today, including embodied mark-makings, archival poetics, manuscript and archival practice, form and experiment. See here for more: call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/...

pls RT, modernists - CFP now out for 'Weird Modernisms', the collaborative conference between @modernistudies.bsky.social and @moderniststudies.bsky.social ! July 2026, Loughborough University. www.moderniststudies.org/conference/M...

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

In 2026, the MSA Conference will look a bit different-- weird, even! That's because we're having a joint conference with BAMS @modernistudies.bsky.social in Loughborough, UK from July 1- 4, 2026. The CFP will be out soon! But in the meantime, please save the date.

Rather than understanding failure as something to overcome, in "Living On After Failure," Irving Goh dwells with failure and all of its negative affects to consider new ways of living beyond the failure/success binary. Read the intro for free now: buff.ly/IG8shfa

Happy Monday to anyone who wants a PDF copy of Stanley Cavell's Tanner Lecture, "On the Uncanniness of the Ordinary". drive.google.com/file/d/1dfhb...