Sharing this cos this beautiful, affecting essay is a gift...of the best kind

Via Mark Heller

The 60 Minutes episode about CECOT was not only worth running, it was an exceptionally powerful work of journalism that made clear the US government has embraced torture. You can read the transcript here: www.thenation.com/article/soci...

"Handsome! Nobody can call such an under-sized man handsome. He is not five foot nine. I should not wonder if he was not more than five foot eight. I think he is an ill-looking fellow." — Jane Austen, on the height discourse

Simply the best thing anyone has written about this film, and one of my favorite pieces of writing we have published. Worth your while!

my wife's friend's partner just broke up with her + cut off contact, but his mail was still going to her house. he's tall, mid-40s, preschool teacher, self-pitying, bad boundaries, moved in with her, didn't pay rent, rarely paid for meals. she opened a curious piece of mail today and learned...

favorite fiction i read this year: Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal Mark Haber, Lesser Ruins Michael Chabon, Yiddish Policeman’s Union Andrew Lipstein, Something Rotten Olivia Manning, School for Love Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy Percival Everett, James

“there are only 7 full-time book critics left in the US: three at NYT ( Jacobs, Garner, Szalai), 2 at WaPo(Rothfeld, Charles), 1 each at WSJ (Sacks), NY mag (Chu), Slate (Miller) more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living” worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...

my toddler just began pretending to read stories in books. the only one she tells is "once upon a time, me and daddy were hanging out." we turn the page and i ask, "then what?" and she says, "once upon a time, me and daddy were hanging out." and so on.

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Culture Industries co-editor @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social recommends Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya.

writing is the hard hard of syllabus composing

bari weiss is in hot water, fielding accusations of both malice and incompetence, but it’s not too late for her to clear this whole thing up by sitting down for an honest, straightforward interview with isaac chotiner.

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

Our 2025 Editors’ Picks are here! Print/Screen editor Leah Price recommends “Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century” by @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and Johanna Winant.

Checking on D. Graham Burnett "Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, & systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button" www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

#Booksky: books on the history of bookstores & bookselling pls! Focus is on Ctl & Eastern Europe 1800-1939 but curious about all/any. I've got Brophy's Print Markets & Political Dissent. Not looking for books on libraries, publishing, magazines. Just bookstores & bookselling, inc distro.

Anddddd unsurprisingly, I am already immediately flagging portions for undergraduate teaching usage. If folks who teach literary studies aren't aware of Close Reading for the 21st Century, do yourself a favor and pick it up, if for pedagogical reasons alone...

What better way to spend what is probably the last weekend before we welcome our new baby than finally digging into Close Reading for the 21st Century edited by @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and @johannawinant.bsky.social!

It would perhaps surprise no one that I was raised with public radio as the background noise to my daily existence, so it was a singular delight getting to go on NPR to talk about Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol omny.fm/shows/in-the...

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

And then when I hit "submit" my screen filled with digital confetti. It was so shocking I didn't manage to get a screengrab. In sum: the EdTech publishing grift now gamifies my administrative submission. We are all winners here.

Universities are increasingly jumping on the "one price course materials" scam in which students all pay the same fee and have access to digital versions of their reading. Maybe this is a good idea in a world where the biochem text is $250. I hate it for specific reasons. >

Well I made a list of books I couldn't forget this year... and left a few off (which means I will open the new year with another list! like a dog! ) nevertheless I'm leaving this here for those who love books and living like dawgs in the mind of Kafka! www.alinastefanescuwriter.com/blog/2025/12...

one of these three books is mine (with @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social), one is my current obsession, and so obviously I just ordered the third

For Public Picks, our co–EIC @njdames.bsky.social recommends Peter Brooks's “Henry James Comes Home,” Solvej Balle's “On the Calculation of Volume III,” & @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social & @johannawinant.bsky.social's “Close Reading for the 21st Century.”

C'mon, MacKenzie Scott, drop that $$$ for our nonprofit small press book distributor, we're all waiting....

This has been the worst year for pub/distributor order fulfillment since 2020. Did everyone lay off their warehouse workers? What is going on? Would love to know!

Back when I was writing regularly about baseball, circa 2012, I crunched the numbers & the likelihood of becoming a tenure-track professor in one of the MLA disciplines was almost precisely the same as getting from a college baseball team to a MLB roster. Nothing has gotten easier since then.

the most beautiful view in the world

i am happiest facing a blinking cursor

NYC! February 20! We're going to launch Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century with contributors, friends, and me!

Tickled to see Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century mentioned twice here. I’ll be hosting the NYC launch on February 20. Save the date and stay tuned for details!

Fun list, this. Sinykin on Guillory a special treat.

For Lit Hub, I rounded up the best book *reviews* of the year. This time, I focused on great openers. Criticism is literature! lithub.com/the-10-best-...

PB editors @megancummins.bsky.social, @njdames.bsky.social, Marlene L. Daut, @taoleighgoffe.bsky.social, Frank Guridy, Tara K. Menon, Leah Price, @becquer.bsky.social, @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social, Abigail Struhl, and Stephanie Wong share their fave books of 2025.

it's incredibly lovely to see that CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY is on the year-end list for @publicbooks.bsky.social not once but TWICE!! thank you to @njdames.bsky.social and @leahprice.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy!! and among such amazing books!!! www.publicbooks.org/public-picks...

Wrote about my admiration for Sarah Chihaya's BIBLIOPHOBIA for this year's Public Picks, a sort of "Best of" list, at Public Books. Amazing to see CLOSE READING FOR THE 21C on there from both Nick Dames and Leah Price, scholars whose writing I love very much ❤️ www.publicbooks.org/public-picks...

Some of my favorite books of 2025, including criticism by A. S. Hamrah and the diaries of Helen Garner, for @commonweal.bsky.social www.commonwealmagazine.org/books-domest...

Honored to be on this list with some of the true greats—Patricia Lockwood, Parul Sehgal, Namwali Serpell—for my review of John Guillory's ON CLOSE READING in The Nation lithub.com/the-10-best-...

Overall, the usage of "reading" in literary studies articles in 2010s (74/1000 words) is 2x what it was in 1920s (34/1000). Within "reading", the use of "[adjective] reading" in the 2010s is 1.4x in the 2010s (310 "reading"'s) what it was in 1920s (220). Within "[adjective] reading" = quoted plot.

The first time I tasted a cotton candy grape I sort of gave up on human beings.

All the centers they’re cutting add up to less than $7 million in spending. UNC athletics budget is $185.4 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year.

well well well if it isn’t the blowjob brothers

to play the wapo crossword i have to sit through an ad and this time the ad said that images of starving kids out of gaza are fake and that israel is providing 3000 calories per person per day, jesus fucking christ

What a time to decide to learn less about the world. dailytarheel.com/article/univ...

Most of all, we hope this tool can spark renewed conversations about book data challenges, especially related to Works and reconciliation. These questions often seem boring and abstract… but they’re actually really important! We hope this tool can help make these issues more clear and concrete.

Here's a great example of BookReconciler in action by @thisismattmiller.com. He took PEN America’s banned book data and enhanced it with descriptions, subjects, covers, & persistent IDs. This makes it easier to understand banned book trends and fight back. thisismattmiller.com/post/book-ba...

This project has been supported by the @post45data.bsky.social. It was initially funded by an NEH grant led by @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and me. Then our NEH got cancelled. But we persisted! Matt, Dan, and I have been working on this project for years at this point.

The BookReconciler project—with @thisismattmiller.com and @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social—was accepted at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. If you're attending, you can catch Matt's presentation tomorrow at 8am Central: event65692c7b4e76f09.sched.com/event/2CdM7/... #JCDL2025