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Absolutely terrible, terrible news. Trinity University has announced that Trinity University Press will close at the end of the fiscal year--described by one author as a "South Texas outlet for stories and culture" for which there is no replacement frankly. Awful. www.tpr.org/arts-culture...

working from home today, so i got to waltz with my wife in the kitchen

tfw you realize that that merry person was so merry because they were on painkillers, and that they're not so merry now because they're trying to get off

Dutch vocab word of the day: garage door spring

Younger people won't believe this, but during the Second World War, Disney put out cartoons about how it was your patriotic duty to stand up to fascists, even noting that we'd each have to take a financial hit if we wanted to win that struggle. No, really!

Great post by @laurenshof.online. This stood out as an incredibly succinct summarization of what has been going on in the culture and why even using Kirk’s own words gets people pilloried. connectedplaces.online/blueskyism-p...

"In his wise & gracefully written new book, [Erard] highlights the human talent for connection that undergirds language from its beginnings, through its apex, and into its decline." @juliesedivy.bsky.social reviews @michaelerard.bsky.social's "Bye Bye I Love You" for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social:

another future of last words: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

some thoughts about last words TO the dying, not FROM michaelerard.com/blog/last-wo...

Fun article about “outsider” scientists and their breakthroughs. “Academia filters most funding, publishing, and hiring decisions through senior insiders, which favors ideas within existing paradigms.” worksinprogress.co/issue/why-sc...

Thanks to @iancushing.bsky.social, I can now call my approach to first and last words in Bye Bye I Love You a "follow the thing" methodology. Much appreciated!

new article published open access in Reading Research Quarterly 💫 Follow the word gap: the social life of a deficit concept doi.org/10.1002/rrq.... i trace how deficit ideologies associated with the 'word gap' get reproduced - and rejected - in teacher education and schools.

I'm interested to read Harris's memoir through a language de-socialization lens, and maybe that other book about Biden's cognitive decline. How do they use Biden's language to diagnose and measure his decline, and manage his declining agency and capacity through language?

“If history is long, we are not long. We will all die. The question, as always, is how do we conduct ourselves in the days we have?” —-Josh Marshall using eulogy values as motivation for political action, unlike David Brooks, who wields them to kick people who are already down

Daily reminder that there is no single story, which is the single story, and even if there was it‘s untellable, this story. Meanwhile, racket theory will get you pretty far

do not let this shit, along with the ai-powered voice assistant shit and the networked floor-sweeping robot, into your house.

Czech Republic awaits last words of former leader as recorded at his bedside by his son. They’ve been sealed for two decades edition.cnn.com/2025/09/17/e...

A friend reading Bye Bye I Love You said it’s very interested in the world, and that’s a good thing. “Most books are only interested in other books.” I think I know what that means (makes me think of Cartarescu’s excoriation of literature in Solenoid) and I’ll take the compliment

All this for a historically unpopular president.

Czech Republic awaits last words of former leader as recorded at his bedside by his son. They’ve been sealed for two decades edition.cnn.com/2025/09/17/e...

I need a week by myself at a cottage to catch up on all the PDFs I’ve emailed myself to read

Interrogating the foundations from which good science can flow, allows scholars to see that we all have much in common despite important differences. So I wrote this to capture key elements of *all* (social) science - journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

📰 new paper! lnkd.in/dYdrvZAz, by @irenebalboni.bsky.social , Alessandra Rampinini, @olgakepinska.bsky.social, @berthele.bsky.social, @nargolestani.bsky.social, @nccrlanguage.bsky.social showing the importance of multimodal approaches for uncovering brain-behaviour relationships

ICYMI, here's the LARB review of Bye Bye I Love You: "The one word my brother mustered in response to all this was: 'Love.' He repeated it again and again. 'Love. Love. Love.' His friend sent it back to him: 'Love. Yeah, love.' lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-...

Some polling data: Those with favorable views of Donald Trump are the MOST LIKELY to support political violence, and Christian nationalists also most likely. They are radicalized extremists.

The 1st episode of the new pod-miniseries I'm hosting at @issuesinst.bsky.social is out now! I talk with spec-fic writer & anthropologist of tech @boriscrito.bsky.social about the slow disaster of data centers, the rapid disasters of hurricanes in the Caribbean, & the ways we envision the future:

Why does Western Paleolithic cave art strongly prefer animal side views and often use abbreviations? Our new paper in Topics in Cognitive Science challenges long-held assumptions about these artistic choices using cognitive science experiments. A thread 1/n onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Introducing COYOTE: A worker-owned Bay Area media collective. Our stories will be public for the first two weeks. Read ‘em and subscribe! www.coyotemedia.org

i wonder what they made of this at the @hypestudies.bsky.social conference last week

We're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing. As has the lack of urgency/silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.

FFS do not give Jeff Bezos and his Der Steurmer vanity project any of your money.

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

the school has an in-person parent meeting (no hybrid option), the after school program has a parent info meeting (for the first time; no hybrid option), so i think in this part of the world we have left pandemic-inspired nihilism behind us.

💙New paper!💙 How is knowledge transmitted across generations in a foraging society? With @danielredhead.bsky.social we found: In BaYaka foragers, long-term skills pass in smaller, sparser networks, while short-term food info circulates broadly & reciprocally academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

yes!

Tfw you realize you have to consult your Kenneth Burke but it’s in storage in America

Back in February, a political theorist on here posited a model of three political game models that I've referred to a lot because I find really useful: 1. technocracy 2. pluralism 3. friends/enemies But the Kirk shooting shows, again, that there's a 4th political game:

1. Been thinking a lot about Judith Butler’s notion of “grievability” with respect to Charlie Kirk, Gaza, Melissa Hortman and others. It’s a way of thinking about whose lives are socially recognized as valuable and, therefore, whose deaths are publicly mourned.

one of the most moving accounts I’ve ever read

The markings that supposedly expressed “transgender ideology” were………..a series of arrows.

I updated my blog post about writing the narrative CV, if you're someone who writes them or teaches people to write them: www.michaelerard.com/blog/how-to-...

England’s farmland is becoming the dumping ground for industrial waste. The rules are outdated. The oversight is broken. And the public is only just being told. 6/ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Texas Book Festival line-up announced! I'll see y'all there. texasbookfestival.org/festival/202...

Engraved bullets, again. Well, there goes my planned writing day tomorrow

“The bullets were engraved with transgender ideology” y’all. Y’all. Y’all. Be serious.

The last words news feed is full of Charlie Kirk's last words, reportedly "Counting or not counting gang violence?" www.snopes.com/fact-check/c...