It's here! I hosted a symposium on close reading at Emory in November. Matt Seybold recorded it for his podcast, American Vandal, and the first of three episodes is out today. Catch me, @johannawinant.bsky.social, @becimay.bsky.social, @bakaari.bsky.social + more podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

that’s right sports fans it’s time to fire up my famous “game day” sous vide ribs! They will be ready in ~36h

Very moved by this nuanced and thoughtful review of WRITING AGAINST REFORM by @natewolff.bsky.social (free to read in English at: journals.openedition.org/transatlanti... ) "this critique (of sentimentalism) needed an extra dash of dialectics." 💙💙💙How can you not love this scholar?💙💙💙

My review of @zibrak.bsky.social 's WRITING AGAINST REFORM is up at Transatlantica (revue le plus chic! 🇫🇷)! An honor to think with a book this smart, which taught me a lot and pushed me to articulate some—I hope!—productive tensions or disagreements: journals.openedition.org/transatlanti...

it is always a damp, drizzly Month of Dick in my soul

My 2026 resolution is to take things more personally. I learned this by reading Moby-Dick.

I'm 30 pages from the end of MCTEAGUE and I've never been so stressed in my fucking life

As I said on the other app, so again here: Thank you, friend, for this encouraging blurb, and let us hope the book lives up to your high praise! #grateful

Honored to blurb @rafaelwalker.bsky.social ‘s brilliant and gorgeous new book — alongside the incomparable Jen Fleissner no less!

Really not looking forward to difficult convos with the family over Thanksgiving. Sorry grandpa, whales are fish!

The MA Antisemitism Commission has approved its final report conflating Judaism with Zionism. We respond: "The Commission has done more to fuel rising authoritarianism and antisemitism than to create the conditions that promote Jewish safety" www.concernedjewishfaculty.org/commission-s...

I do not have a riverboat license. Still. But this paper was really good.

In which I give @mattseybold.bsky.social a pop quiz for his river boat license AND deal with a rude heckler, my nemesis @jeffreyinsko.bsky.social, while talking about Twain's Puddn’head Wilson via Malm's Fossil Capital.

American Studies and a variety of other programs under under threat at the University of Nottingham. Lend your voice to the petition.

Help save American Studies at the University of Nottingham: c.org/Hk65TVQ7f5

me when I see your aurora borealis pics

hey nerds! Any recommended critical/theoretical reading on digression—its pleasures, frustrations, etc. Whether in literature (e.g. Tristram Shandy), film or tv, video games ("side quests"), etc.? Other fun examples welcome too. (My favs are "Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and whale facts obvs 🐳)

ummm it was actually Walt Whitman who first called a NYC ferry the friendship express

this is also the phrase I used to start my Émile Zola reading marathon

so happy for but also jealous of NYC right now! Sounds like the zohran election parties were LIT

This makes me happy to no end—not least because I've had the pleasure of explaining to my mom how I'm known among Whitman scholars.

bluesky introduces new “backhanded likes” and “pity likes” beta

Pleased to announce it was crotch comparison day in Whitman class. #pedagogy #crotch @genoways.bsky.social

I'm so excited Dan, Johanna, & Emory have made it possible for me to record the entirety of their book launch symposium next month as an arc in the "Vandal Live" series. Symposia are, in my opinion, the very best of academic programming, & everybody should have the good fortune of partaking.

Everybody's talking about the vaguely mystical masturbatory subculture where doomed young men find self-destructive community.

💯 build a cabin, build a chair, hoe beans, grow some beans, manufacture pencils, repair an axe handle, make a fishing rod, fish, philosophize about fishing, think about not fishing, get into a passive aggressive emotional standoff with a loon, wait I forgot what I was listing.

Also, New Zealand Tom was *right there*

Thanks to everyone who tagged me on this. I am in touch with NZ officials. I have called for an urgent inquiry into the real possibility that this is the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them.

“Shakespeare’s” plays were authored by Sir Francis Bacon, as revealed to me in a complex cypher contained within the plays.

RIP Thoreau you would've loved zillow

This was such a treat to be with @mattseybold.bsky.social @aprilanson.bsky.social @jeffreyinsko.bsky.social @jlb.bsky.social @natewolff.bsky.social( & others not on here?) to think through the knots of energy, aesthetics, politics & the hell we inhabit. Thanks Matt, Jeff, & Joe for having us.

Lots of options but let's go classic on this one and say that time we shitposted so hard they put it in a peer reviewed journal and then that issue won a prize 🐳

This project would not have happened were it not for Nate's book.

A real honor to nearly bookend (with a late cameo following earlier more substantive appearances!) this amazing series. The depth and breadth of Matt's work here is truly awe inspiring. (And good morning to my brother in late-alphabetical sorting, Yanis Varoufakis.)

A landing page for the completed “A Tale of Today” series in which (crossing fingers) all the links to episode bibliographies work.

👉 👈 What if we kissed in a bar brawl ☺️ setting in motion a fundamental tension or conflict about cycles of violence and how hard it is to break them 🤭

Who said it, Emily Brontë or Werner Herzog?

just gonna have to keep saying, in company of so many others: we are jewish faculty against the astroturf antisemitism persecution of jewish faculty by our own universities, by online hate groups, and by the regime www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Let me add: Work wife

Nate, this is a poem!

reminder:

Leading to Ahab’s famous reply, “I came here to chew bubblegum and kick one fish’s ass, and I’m all out of bubblegum”

[new Isaac Chotiner interview]

pretty sad AI flubbed this gimme

"The Commission’s co-chairs seem insistent on becoming the patrons of one particular faction of MA Jews—not only providing a platform for them to dominate a different faction but also empowering them to use their access as “court Jews” to destroy the right to free expression in our state."

again just a gentle reminder that Melville intended this to be read in Pee-wee Herman's "I know you are but what am I?" voice

Genuinely great thread. Also this is how Matt Seybold's seductive baritone on the "American Vandal" podcast radicalized me into a Keynesian