St. John's University's president says that he can't bear the burden of dealing with unions, so he's not going to recognize our unions anymore. We've been a unionized faculty since 1970. On Wed 2/25, we're rallying to say Hands Off St. John's Faculty. Join us! bit.ly/HandsOffSJU225 @aaup.org

The snow on the garage light makes the lights look like Marge Simpson

Tomorrow in teaching, plus Justin Torres’s Blackouts. #TheNovelanstheArchive

The named local ice creams after the Blizzard of ‘78. Wonder what this will get.

We have snow dunes in the backyard

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." ~ Virginia Woolf

Occasionally reminded that Georgia added a “post tenure review” process bc they were so certain that professors became deadweight once they had job security, and all the outcomes have proven JUST THE OPPOSITE! People work harder and in more complex ways when they feel secure in their employment.

He yelled it. There was no apology. (A conditional statement is not an apology.) They chose to keep it in the broadcast. They edited out Free Palestine.

Deliveristas ending their shift and about to head home over the Williamsburg Bridge, though the blizzard. One of them, Salvador,tells me he’s happy for the cutoff by the city. “This is more dangerous than last snowstorm, harder to move in,” he tells me in Spanish.

Looked outside to see if the snow started and spotted this little guy in the front yard.

One of his most recent appearances was in the music video for Bad Bunny's "NuevaYol." www.inquirer.com/obituaries/o...

This week in teaching

My mom sent me a new shirt

New on Intervenxions—Tijuana Ayisyen: The Haitian Diaspora in Film “Absent from [the discourse] are Black migrants, particularly considering the mass displacement of Haitians.” By Michael Anthony Turcios www.latinxproject.nyu.edu/intervenxion...

Horrifyingly familiar. It is clear to me now that being soulless & cruel is, for millions of people, their default factory setting. Only imposing strong laws, unbending norms, & personal consequences will hold their worse impulses in check. And then we risk becoming monsters ourselves.

The fallout from the CJNG El Mencho raid is fast and furious. Checking in with folks down there, sounds like Guadalajara and other cities are virtually under siege, everyone’s hunkering down at home until they get more clarity as to what’s going on.

I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.

Favorite line from this week's Drag Race was Mia Starr explaining her bad performance by saying "I am a product of the Florida educational system. I was a child left behind."

This one hits hard.

I love the hater pope

The New England mania for bread and milk before a storm is something I’ll never get used to.

Forgive me the self-plug, but I taught a grad sem last fall with Close Reading for the 21C that served as a survey of literary criticism and an intro to method that some students thought would be a good required intro sem

Next Friday at 2 PM, we'll be discussing LATINX METHODS AND THE POLITICS OF PRAXIS in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania @casadefauxdobe.bsky.social

Trying to do promotional videos.

This article, in the new issue of @aaup.org’s magazine *Academe*, should be required reading for all university employees everywhere, especially administrators. +

Bolsonaro in prison, Yeon sentenced to prison, Andrew arrested on his birthday...and America still holding on to a 34 count felon as President.

DOCTOR Rümeysa Öztürk has earned her PhD!!

CFP: Panel sponsored by the MLA's Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum on The Hernandez Brothers: Page by Page for the 2027 conference in Los Angeles. Deadline for abstracts: 3/16.

Today’s arrival— looking forward to digging into this

good morning

Today’s arrival— looking forward to digging into this

Six months ago today, scholar and teacher Ricardo Ortiz suddenly passed away. New at PB: Maia Gil’Adí (@maiagiladi.bsky.social) remembers his life.

Public libraries are actually existing examples of the world we want. We should not have to fight for them under a democratic socialist mayor. @nycplan.org is organizing a response. Tell Mamdani to make good on his commitment to baseline funding for libraries! nycplan.org

Maxing.

Dale Jacobs’ book “On Comics and Grief” was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, a publishing unit of the Association of College and Research Libraries. Jacobs offers an innovative, emotionally affecting approach to comics scholarship that's accessible to both fans & scholars. 1/8

CFP: Panel sponsored by the MLA's Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum on The Hernandez Brothers: Page by Page for the 2027 conference in Los Angeles. Deadline for abstracts: 3/16.

Last summer, @maiagiladi.bsky.social received a set of questions from Ricardo Ortiz, in preparation for an interview about her first book, “Doom Patterns.” Ricardo passed away before their conversation. Gil’Adí turns his questions into a commemoration of his life.

Against Archival Erasure: a conversation on Caribbean women and the archive. 2/27 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” - 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas. Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children. www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

“We’re not a perfect people. Yet, we are called to a perfect mission. Our mission to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to house the homeless, to teach the illiterate, to provide jobs for the jobless, and to choose the human race over the nuclear race.” Jessie Jackson REST IN PEACE

Against Archival Erasure: a conversation on Caribbean women and the archive. 2/27 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Rhode Island shoreline on this morning’s commute

after watching Wuthering Heights, had to explain to my partner what the rest of the novel was about, to which he replied "what?!" also had to show the "I am Heathcliff" clip from the William Wyler adaptation, with Merle Oberon as Cathy.

The prolific, pioneering filmmaker made dozens of documentaries and chronicled the inner workings of institutions. His 1967 film, Titicut Follies, revealed appalling conditions at a prison facility. n.pr/4rYs8nG

RIP Frederick Wiseman (1930—2026)

Matt Wilkens on the end of DH: "The steady state of DH, which I once believed was to be fully subsumed within the humanities, now looks much more likely to involve the diffusion of humanistic knowledge into disciplines...constitutively quantitative and computational" academic.oup.com/alh/article-...

A child dying of cancer spent her final days fighting to free her wrongfully detained father from ICE custody.   This comes just weeks after a mother from Maryland was denied the right to be at her son’s side as he died from cancer.   Not one dime for this cruelty. www.cbsnews.com/amp/chicago/...

With matter-of-fact precision, Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir powerfully chronicles the shock of discovering her husband’s crimes and the rallying cry that followed. “It seeks a proper transfer of shame from sex-crime victims to their perpetrators, and the perpetrators’ enablers,” our book critic writes.

James Scorer’s “Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century: Transgressing the Frame” received an Honorable Mention for the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society. Scorer marks the post-2005 period as the dawn of a significant era of growth & transformation. 1/7