it’s an important moment for arguing in favor of habits of mind, modes of learning that are worth teaching and if caring—about details, students, art—is not central to that discussion, what are we doing

I didn’t get the wording down precisely, so I won’t quote it, but one of the things that hit hard in the room: Reactionaries waging culture wars against the humanities have a more accurate account of our power than we do. And our humility is not admirable, but an abdication of responsibility.

If I could offer students one bit of…advice: be brutally traditional about what is printed on your degree. If you are first-gen or in any way non traditional, this goes double. Let rich kids get degrees in AI. You get something called “English”.

Darkly humorous that I had to click through an ad for the LA Times’s collaboration with Perplexity’s AI browser to read this review.

Today I'm doing a talk about Women and the (early) Gothic and it might be time for a list! So here are ten early women writers of the Gothic to give an idea of the range of things that women were creating in the period!

let’s have a conference

wowwww this is incredibly beautiful. tagging some friends who will love this: @ladyofsardines.bsky.social @heymrsbond.com @marcusluther.bsky.social therumpus.net/2025/10/02/h...

I’m shilling CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY hard because I’m so proud of it —specifically because it, like every close reading, is the product of a community and an offering to a community. @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I collaborated with each other and also 22 brilliant contributors.

🫡

“It’s a ‘driveway with a basketball hoop,’ Michael. How much could it cost?”

Say it often, say it loud: "Overall, research has not supported the common-sense presumption that digital approaches to schooling are better than non-digital alternatives. At the broadest level, widespread computer use in education has been found to be associated with lower student achievement."

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

I’m starting a new AI consulting company called It’s Not Going To Work, LLC. Here’s how it works. You give me $100,000, I tell you “It’s not going to work”(TM), you save $1M+ in wasted contracts, lots of wasted effort, and embarrassment. It’s a good deal. Try it out.

I think this is also true of LLMs

Patricia A. Matthew explores class, leisure, and the historical context of Pride and Prejudice. lithub.com/what-pride-a...

No way of knowing for sure, but I think I once disqualified myself from consideration for a TT job at a SLAC because I asked about opportunities to teach/mentor students in the joint English major/ed degree. Whole tone of conversation soured. Anyways I work in K12 ed now.

So good that I am reposting even though the high in Atlanta on Wednesday is 88

You’ll be shocked to hear that their recommendation is not limiting the circumstances in which AI is deployed, but rather accepting the inevitability it will occasionally have catastrophic effects.

Major new piece from David Ben-Merre (Buffalo State) and Manu Chander @profchander.bsky.social (Georgetown), in epilogue of David's excellent new book "O: Apostrophic Ghosts and the Disappearing Acts of Lyric Poetry."

I don't use feedback on my writing from an LLM because it can't read and I write for readers. When students say they find LLM feedback "helpful" what are we signaling about what's important about their writing? Helpful for what goal? Helpful how? What values are being reinforced?

If you're in or near Atlanta, or *super juiced* 😜 about close reading and love to travel, come to Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century: A Symposium at Emory University on Friday, November 7. And hear from these superstars...

I just wanted y’all to know that “abstinence-only AI” is an agitprop term. That’s all.

This articulates something I’ve been feeling about even the most well-meaning and careful LLM integrations into classrooms—don’t we want our students to learn to interact with each other?!

I'm thinking of teaching a class on "The Work of Art in the Age of Slop" and am wondering if anyone has ideas abut what to include?

I curate the history series at public media's journal Current. We're looking for pieces on the history of NPR & PBS, educational, community, and affiliate stations. We accept academic articles repurposed for wide readership. Plus, we pay. Please circulate! current.org/series/rewind/

Different level but same here. I forget these are different platforms & all of that history is now gone. But I did all the things - flipped classrooms, in-class cellphone surveys, test design, meta cognition blogging. I learned Omeka, GitHub, Libre, wikis etc etc And here we all are.

I point this out for clarity. I also have a long-term interest in how my crafting of ideas is sometimes confused for the very serious idea being crafted. So to be clear: AI is political attack on labor with few limited cases for social value and an absolute ecological disaster.

The unbundling of teaching and research will be - in fact, has already been - disastrous for students.

Counterpoint: There is has never been a more urgent time to write a book. Technofascism is, among other things, an attempt to capture and enclose literature and literacy. Print is a rent strike.

Love the way that Studio Ghibli parents just roll with the imposition of the supernatural. “Sosuke, Ponyo, life is mysterious and amazing. But we have work to do.”

A national survey of high school English teachers finds that the list of most taught texts "nearly replicated" the list from the late 1980s: "There is a greater difference in the texts on the top 10 list from 1964 to 1989 (25 years) compared to the difference between 1989 and 2024 (35 years)."

If you work in higher ed, you need to get your folks together and end the use of course evals or at least bar their consideration in evaluation, promotion, and hiring. This needed to happen yesterday because they don't measure learning, they measure instructor gender, but now it's a snitch pool.

You can now, at last, pre-order CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY directly from Princeton UP. It's at the printer and is likely to arrive in September, though the official pub date is October 21. Can also preview TOC and intro at this link press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

I think we need to make a strong distinction between “slop” (which, fine, is a simulacra aesthetics of smoothing settings on various corporate platforms) & what I call (null)formation:

when it comes to discussions of whether or why to assign literature in k12, a lot of people throw around the term “critical thinking” kind of recklessly, it’s important to be much more precise but also pleasure alone is a good and important reason to read poems in school

You know who interviewed Hulk Hogan in 1989? Barbara Johnson. She was at home. He was in a limo, on a presumably giant car phone, in LA. She listed this interview in her selected pubs alongside her better known work. As printed, the interview is interrupted by one with Gayatri Spivak.

A lot of you had questions so I wrote about what I think happened here! Behold: wiczipedia.substack.com/p/i-got-trap...

The format has become passé at this point but my dream Belinda adaptation was always full period setting and costumes, but with to-the-camera reality tv style confessionals.

Plenty of admin/execs seem to see LLMs as emotional labor machines.

*INDIANA JONES AND THE ADJUNCT POOL*

If *you* have dealt with AI in your workplace—if your boss is forcing it on you or your team, if it's causing your freelance work to dry up, if a manager is threatening to replace you with it, or even if it's made your life wonderful!—I want to hear about it. Send stories to [email protected].

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Ok, I keep thinking about this opening from the "Will AI revolutionize reading?!" New Yorker piece from the other day. Feel free to ignore what will be an inevitably rambling thread on the topic of reading bsky.app/profile/phdh... 1/🧵

Carly Rae Jepsen released 'E•MO•TION' 10 years ago today. A look back at an instant classic:

This article is going to turn me into the Joker. Literary style is not a puzzle you solve to get a little information treat 😩😩😩

I’ve been meaning to sub to flaminghydra for a minute, but this teaser finally got me to click through.