Protect your heart from breaking by padding it with soft cheese.

what a goddamn amazing project

Love this. I taught the introduction to this book to my intro to lit students using both the authors’ WCW example and my own example of a single preposition in Leonard Cohen’s song “Suzanne,” as articulated on @foxydigitalis.bsky.social’s “Songs of Our Lives” podcast.

Read this fantastic roundtable that @andyhines.bsky.social put together featuring faves Vineeta Singh, Annie McClanahan, Dan Nemser, and Rana Jaleel. The possibility of the university lives!

CALL FOR PITCHES @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not. Details below!

Well, I went ahead and wrote it. An attempt to work through the discomfort people feel with AI agents on social media by reframing it as an aesthetic problem.

I should get in on this easy money

“If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?” God this is bleak

I don't see how self-publishing world survives GenAI. It's going to be an absurd increase in slop books with no reason to expect any increase in paying readers. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/b...

Updated this post so it now includes not only a Power Ranking for US writers via the NEA, major prizes, and NYT bestsellers, but also a Power Ranking that drops the NEA, which brings major writers to the top of the list—a list that looks for those who marry sales + prestige: Updike, Roth, Morrison

My big takeaway from Tooze on Klein: a toss-off comment in the final minutes dismissing (implicitly) Arrighi. Doesn't buy the model of hegemonic transfer that goes back through the Dutch and Genoese. That, and his recommendation of Ryan Ruby's Context Collapse.

Used Claude Code to analyze three datasets from @post45data.bsky.social together: NEA literature winners; NYT bestsellers; major prize winners. Made a power list of the 51 writers (out of ~7000) who hit all three open.substack.com/pub/sinykin/...

The best part of Mansfield Park is when Fanny leaves well-to-do Mansfield Park, goes home, looks at her poor, working-class family, and declares them "dirty and gross" and "under-bred"

i downloaded claude code. it is insane.

By the way, for those of you not in MN: Homan’s strategy was to withdraw some agents, so it felt like we were in the denouement of the crisis, and then escalate hard against observers. They’re being incredibly aggressive with observers now. National media may not want to check out just yet

My book is now available for pre-order!

I hope Dems begin to see that moderate or progressive, AIPAC is not our friend. They endorse January 6th insurrectionists. Yet if you so much as suggest the US uphold its own Leahy laws, no matter your record, they will work against you.

For MTC, a reading group reflects on Tsai's WALKER, the literature & legacy of the flâneur, and why thinking needs straying. "After metaphysics, the monk becomes the aesthete; the empty space left behind by the death of God is filled up by art, literature, and, of course, Tsai Ming-Liang’s cinema."

this was a privilege and joy -- thank you to Vincent and Central State! I've developed a set of workshops and talks on close reading, and I'm always happy to have more informal conversations too. If you'd like me to zoom into a class, reading group, etc., I'd love to (no honorarium necessary)

So grateful to @johannawinant.bsky.social for joining our faculty for a brilliant conversation about CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, coedited with @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social The book is a true achievement and invaluable resource for the teaching of literature. @princetonupress.bsky.social

And how many missed opportunities because women are (rightly) warned away from certain prestigious people and places. I can say from my own career and observations of friends’ careers that this happens frequently but is rarely discussed.

Started mucking around with data this morning. Made a couple interesting charts from data about all the writers who ever got an NEA grant, with data from Xander Manshel + team. Decided I’d write it up for my first post. substack.com/home/post/p-...

This is the real story. People’s careers were interrupted or destroyed but institutions of Arts & Humanities persist 1/3

Trump proposed slashing the NEA and NEH to $0. The House proposed ~40% cut. The Senate proposed keeping the budget the same as last year. In the final budget, the Senate won. Of course, the NEA and NEH have been largely retooled as propaganda outfits.

In our new Comparative Literature issue: Yael Segalovitz examines 4 recent books on close reading, asking how they converge on a bold though often implicit premise: that close reading operates through the bodily and cognitive training of the reader. muse.jhu.edu/journal/128

So it looks as though you can access my new book already if you’re subscribed to OUP. Here’s the link :) 🎉✨ academic.oup.com/book/62228?s...

A fucking cartoon villain

Publishing expert @alicektg.bsky.social takes the pulse of Australia's literary festivals & their challenges – cancellations, culture wars, climate change and new hate speech laws – as Adelaide announces Constellations: Not Writers Week. @aunz.theconversation.com theconversation.com/what-is-the-...

"In struggle we rediscover the good life, a life where thought and deed and will are united in one" thepointmag.com/politics/liv...

for those following AI & labour news, I was just reading about the Washington Post and: "The layoffs come as Will Lewis, the Post’s publisher and CEO, continues to push a new strategy centered on subscriptions, events, and heavier use of AI."

If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.

A reminder that DLC+ is hosting a very serious mini-conference on slop and nostalgia 👀 call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/01/...

It's going to be such a fun day reading and thinking together!

Comrade @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social has already boosted this excellent podcast episode on slop and fascist aesthetics but let me do so as well: open.spotify.com/episode/5Xxf...

I’m also really happy to be zooming into Central State University and Northern Michigan University to talk close reading with faculty and students there! (if you would like a zoom visit—especially if you are at an institution without a lot of resources—please don’t hesitate to be in touch!)

Know it sounds a little silly to say but this is actually one step to ending (cooling off?) the crisis of the humanities! 16 million HS English classes daily. Yes—structural changes, too, but changing public ed is a structural change.

"a great-books model at the undergraduate level is, in fact, so consonant with Freire’s radical critique that it represents a far better path forward for a left-wing vision of education than virtually anything else currently on offer in the US" thepointmag.com/examined-lif...

If you're thinking seriously about slop (and we should) consider applying for this virtual mini-conference hosted by the great @dlcplus.org on SLOP call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/01/...

Oulipo constraint: write a novel with AI suggestions on, running ahead of the text in faint projections, and turn away, reject, deny every single one.

the Washington Post effectively blew up its arts section today, dismissing its books, TV, music, and theater critics, features writers, and several editors. (I'm also guessing the vacant film critic position will stay that way.) Just an insane loss of talent and a huge self-inflicted wound.

High school teachers and college teachers unite!

I had a great conversation with @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social & @johannawinant.bsky.social on the what/why/how of close reading. There’s much to be gained by creating connective tissue between literary studies & secondary English, so I’m excited to share this episode! open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...

I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

100% - we'll be asking *why they like slop & *how do they use it + from there we can be skeptical & parse the culture industry dynamics of desire you describe so well. In the end tho, I'm a Stuart Hall moderate - I do think we can *partly trust what people say about themselves, "they're not dupes"

Thanks Dan & yes I agree - in a longer version we're doing, we have more nuance (this paper is more contrarian) - we account for slop as optimizing for virality, attention etc. That said it's partly an empirical question, which we're testing now. I think we underestimate the human appetite for slop.

Slopologia?

Yes: let's assert our expertise as humanists in assessing slop as a new aesthetic category. But: I'm surprised this (fascinating!) essay (by many I love!) argues that slop is demand-driven w/o detailing the platform economy Big Tech context in which slop must produce clicks. Much demand is coerced.

After 20 years, I've been laid off at The Washington Post. substack.com/home/post/p-...

For so long Amazon has had a monopoly on selling self-published books. Good to see that @bookshop.org is ready to compete in the space! www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

Incredible. They destroyed a great newspaper because they hated the people who actually paid for it and read it so much that they'd rather scrap the paper if they couldn't get Tucker Carlson's audience bsky.app/profile/maxt...