Jonas reading the paper. Years ago I read The Fur Person by May Sarton & when a cat was looking out the window, she called it “reading the paper” & I’ve always thought that was adorable

My first Nancy strip, for New Year’s Day 2026❣️

Just making sure that 2025 is definitely over

Want more of this drama? I go for the vituperative critics of sociology of literature in this newly published review of Gisèle Sapiro's Sociology of Literature (tr. Ben Libman + @mbedecarre.bsky.social) in NOVEL, which anyone can read here: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/57trx...

Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as NYC's first Muslim mayor on a Qur'an from the personal collection of the great Afro-Boricua intellectual Arturo Schomburg—as well as Qur'ans owned by Mamdani's grandparents. www.nypl.org/press/schomb...

Statement Re: OU Discrimination Investigation Today, my client, Mel Curth, submitted her appeal of the University's Institutional Equity Office finding that she engaged in arbitrary and capricious grading of a student's assignment in violation of that student's religious liberty.

I wasn’t sure they were going to publish this. So good for them.

‘This Is Our Time’: Cornelius Eady to Honor Mamdani With Inaugural Poem www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/n...

Donkeys are adorable.

‘This Is Our Time’: Cornelius Eady to Honor Mamdani With Inaugural Poem www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/n...

It's good she's doing this, but what a gigantic farce and an embarrassment for our entire profession that we're forcing a graduate student to waste precious time away from her studies to battle the Republican grievance machine on her own.

Wrote about the state of sociology of literature and about Gisèle Sapiro’s The Sociology of Literature. I respond, salty, to my most vituperative critic and explain what the aesthete fears (true pleasure). My most self-indulgent piece of writing, I fear. DM 4 PDF read.dukeupress.edu/novel/articl...

Master of all she surveys

There is, for all intents and purposes, no academic freedom anymore for anyone teaching at a red state public university.

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.

Professor's pro-tip for anyone with college-age kids: Tell your kids go to class. It's really that simple. If you show up, you'll do okay. You don't have to be smart, you just have to be there. Maybe stay off your phones for 50 minutes. Just listen. You'll absorb something. I have data to prove it.

Traffic lady on Boston radio basically gave up and just said “wow guys good luck, I will pray for you!”

(It's a hell of a gown.)

It never ceases to blow my mind that so many tech, sci-fi, futurism backers ended up swinging so far right. Did they entirely miss the point of the sci-fi novels? That identity, self, personal exploration is something we can nurture and grow? It's like instead they said, "no we like the dystopia."

I highly recommend watching this segment, not just because the CBS News execs and the White House didn’t want you to, but because these men were tortured and they deserved to have their voices heard.

CBS didn't run the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, but over here at @propublica.org we've been working on the story since March, including finding out who each and every man sent to that maximum security prison was. You can see our reporting here: www.propublica.org/series/depor...

Rick Steves is an American treasure. Just all-around, one of the absolute best of us.

Trolling

*faints*

Boston University's Creative Writing Program is searching for a senior fiction writer to fill a chaired position, the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. See the job listing here:

Sarah Wasserman, assistant dean for faculty affairs, was named co-editor of the eminent Oxford Studies in American Literary History book series. The scholar of 20th- and 21st-century American literature will lead the series alongside @ericafretwell.bsky.social of the University of Albany.

Because it’s a smash and grab.

Today I remembered that there is a resource that is just a list of almost one hundred humanities PhDs who have transitioned to other careers and are available to talk about it. You can schedule an informational interview or invite them to talk to your department! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

"He took every Advanced Placement class he could, earned a scholarship to Brown and worked at Wawa over the summer to make enough money to buy a laptop, according to his two sisters."

Everything is so stupid

Book submissions for the George E. Haggerty Prize in LGBTQ+ Studies in 18th-Century Scholarship are now open—Jan 15 deadline. If you published a peer reviewed book in 2024 or 25, please submit! $500 cash prize. RT’s appreciated 🙏🏼 asecs.org/resources/ol...

Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a freshman at Brown, had a condition as a child that required brain surgery. The experience created an unshakable ambition to become a brain surgeon, his sister said. He died after being shot on campus on Saturday.

It's been a challenging term. Glad today's final Latinx Poetry class is closing with three Ada Limón poems: "The End of Poetry," "The Conditional," and "Instructions on Not Giving Up."

Each semester I go in my classroom and I try to figure out what we would use to block the doors, if it would be safe to crawl out the windows, where we could hide if there was a mass shooter in campus. It’s such an indictment of this country how we have normalized these preventable tragedies.

BREAKING: Brown University says no one is in custody, correcting earlier statement, as police respond to an active shooter on campus.

The light this morning.

Carnegie Mellon’s literature PhD is being liquidated in favor of “computation,” casualized labor, and AI. That has profound ramifications for, students, faculty, and program alums like myself. I wrote it about it (w/ Catherine Evans, a current PhD student). www.chronicle.com/article/a-co...

I will not be able to stop myself from reposting any teaching materials drawing on CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (and also zooming in to read every word and then then getting a little emotional) cc @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social

Can't say I ever expected to see a "That Font was No Angel" headline. But here we are.

New Haven Union Station

New tote bag

Coming May 19, 2026 from Amistad Books and HarperCollins THE OVERSEER CLASS: A Manifesto by Steven W. Thrasher cover art by Jamaal Barber Available for pre-order now www.harpercollins.com/products/the...

The best graphic novels of 2025. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/d...

Great title

Every so often he looks back to make sure we’re still watching.