"Acquiring aretē does not necessarily make you a good person in the Christian-inflected way we tend to think about that phrase today. Rather, aretē is an achievement of character that allows you to reach the goods intrinsic to practices"

My book has a cover! I told the press I had a thing for the design of computer books from the 1970s and I was so excited they took that seriously. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

DM if you'd like a PDF

Gato in Candler Park in Atlanta. Small space, open kitchen, when I first moved to the city I lived nearby and would sit at the bar and chat with the nerds who worked there about books. Nicholas, the chef, made brilliant Mexican.

For the @ajc.com, I wrote about how close reading cultivates the virtues that promote eudaimonia, or human flourishing, or the good life. That's me in the picture at the front of the room. www.ajc.com/opinion/2026...

"More New Yorkers are borrowing books from the New York Public Library today than 15 years ago; borrowing is up 27 percent since 2010." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/o...

Electricians love a good ohmlet.

This rules. Absolutely the funniest possible outcome. The president of the United States filling in as the headliner of a concert because Milli Vanilli canceled.

everyone assumed gas prices would be what caused ole trumpo to flame out but everything is so stupid and backwards that it was actually losing a sign on the kennedy center and bret michaels pulling out of a concert

Bluesky Lit Crit pals, some inspiration please! Most interesting scenes set in book-shops or in circulating libraries in #18thc and #19thc British literature?

Yeah this is basically where I'm at. If I was in Maine I would rank basically everyone else above him in the primary and (unfortunately!) vote for him in the general.

ICYMI

i don't think anyone should have been allowed to use "hauntology" after derrida. i don't think derrida should have been allowed to use it either.

Surprising: frontier models (Claude, ChatGPT, Deepseek V4) produce the most predictable text of any local AI model or human text I've ever tested. Not surprising: Finnegans Wake is off the charts, by far least predictable—Shannon & Lydia Liu proved right—and Hemingway the most predictable human.

I would be remiss not to point out that "Tricking Milli Vanilli into performing a concert for a dictator" is LITERALLY a storyline from the 1990s 'Super Mario Bros 3' cartoon 🙃

NEW EXAMPLE FOR FONT LESSON JUST DROPPED

The Bluey episode "Sleepytime" is a masterpiece of modern children's television

One of the weirdest conversations I've had recently. Had to cut that at one point he asked me if WIRED runs all my writing through an AI detector. www.wired.com/story/future...

It's a sociopolitical mystery as to why so many college professors dislike the political party whose platform includes the plank "fuck you woke gay commies, we're going to obliterate your profession"

Iran deal is buffering… buffering… buffering…

A thing we’re seeing with the encroachment of AI on services like Google search is a highly counterintuitive displacement of the list—an information genre honed over millennia—by discursive prose. In the distinction popularized long ago by Lev Manovich, narrative is triumphing over database.

today i learned there are more than five senses

Turning @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and @johannawinant.bsky.social 's book into an assignment for my Jane Austen class!

I'm all in on Counting Crows. Plus I get to post this again avidly.org/2015/10/13/y...

a battle for the ages

I have a traffic citation in the City of Atlanta (lapsed registration) impossible to pay. Online, I need a 10-digit case number, but all the numbers on the ticket are 8- or 9-digit. I call, but the button to pay just loops to the main menu. Asking for a person it sez they're all busy and hangs up.

on the other hand, if you know of a strange little thing coming out in 2026/27, and you want a venue for a review, please pitch me here:

The New York Times on book coverage: let's find the books with the most money behind them, the most industry hype, the greatest likelihood to saturate the culture without our help, and give them a little extra boost

So delighted to announce: kluge, the new @pipadam.bsky.social! (And the most breathtaking novel I’ve read in yonks…)

on a periodic unsubscribe kick. every time an email comes in i don't want, instead of just deleting, i scroll down and unsubscribe. been long since the last one. all these fuckers who demanded my email to let me into this or that. feels so good.

Percolating on my fall theory course & would love to hear: what single essay (or chapter of a book) makes theory (interpreted however you like) or intellectual / aesthetic infrastructures concrete in ways that have stuck with you & / or you really admire? Example: Barbara Johnson, “Muteness Envy.”

Students want constraints to focus their will. We all do. It's why I've never had a smartphone. This is another reason I like this essay. Education ought to be about cultivating the will to will what one wants, which requires constraint—not customer service scispace.com/pdf/1-social...

I think like 7 of these 19 are from indies, which is really pretty good for a list like this

Excited to head to Denmark next week for the Narrative conference, where I'll be talking about "The High School Canon & Its Genres"

New Substack Essay: Blue Period-- on being the target of cruelty between women, and on making a life in art as a woman outside of the clinic and the asylum as aspirational gazes: avmarraccini.substack.com/p/blue-period

The Kirby Puckett Bar (1994-1994): Minnesota Twins' legendary outfielder, Kirby Puckett, was honored with his own candy bar--a milk chocolate bar filled with caramel and crispy rice. It was marketed as "a bundle of energy".

“Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year…Citing data that shows the risk of pedestrian fatality is cut in half by reducing a car’s speed from 40 to 30km/hr, city officials imposed the lower limit in most of Helsinki’s residential areas and city center in 2021.”

Thanks! And let me add these two: www.umasspress.com/978162534905... www.bloomsbury.com/us/what-read...

Just wanted to reup this; this is a great book on an important topic & it anticipates 2 terrific forthcoming 2026 books f/ @aarthivadde.bsky.social (We the Platform, Columbia UP) + @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social (Content Machines, Duke UP) on digital platforms + reading + writing that I'm excited for

"i was cancelled by greece"

how do we know pigs in shit are actually happy

I get frustrated when ppl want to simplify things by “these kinds of publishers” or whatever and not account for two other very different industries: printers and paper mills. They are key to any publisher’s decision

do students rawdog coursedog?

My university's new catalog software is called "coursedog"

Boston! See you tonight at Harvard Bookstore with Shaul Magid, 7pm This is the last US stop of my tour

A lot of you are waiting anxiously for particular episodes. Rest assured, all Vandal Live events are still forthcoming. Here is a very tentative order for forthcoming episodes. But much depends on how much mixing and editing labor is required, so subject to change.

UC Berkeley Law creates new AI policy that bans AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit" or exams because "thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)." That's what I'm talking about.

My epitaph, probably

"Make yourself a spreadsheet and folder of .txt files" is how so many projects start. I'm delighted that this style guide exists to point students to -- so many of the little gotchas that I try to remember to mention, and several I often forget about!

Or, if you are working with #MuseumDocumentation, of course you know all this already; but your colleagues who provide you with a lovingly-crafted Excel spreadsheet may not: share it with them!