"The insight behind this merging model is that the old divide between STEM and the humanities is no longer tenable. The future belongs to those who can move fluently between technical systems and human consequences. The challenge to such a model is institutional" www.chronicle.com/article/the-...

The horse op-ed is an instant classic. I can't tell you how much joy this piece gives me. It should be taught in every introductory writing class in no small part because the horse arguments are so compelling. "I have noticed that human children get to eat cake. But I am bigger than the children."

i knew it

The Right is selling a vision of classical education that promises to build character and nurture wonder. Liberals are stuck aiming for higher test scores and employability. Public education defenders need our own inspiring take on the meaning of school.

What if we just went back to reading a bunch of books and thinking about them together, and that was the class? With syllabi no longer than three pages.

you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like

Love seeing the fantabulous Ben Lerner being accused of “autofiction.” Just kidding. :) But also, seriously— this is a great piece by Kevin, and autofiction isn’t as new or novel as we like to think. www.vulture.com/article/ben-...

I am writing a talk in which I begin working out a positive philosophy of humanistic education for the left aiming at social freedom and human flourishing through gentleness (ethics), the ability to give an account of oneself (epistemology), and the cultivation of sensibility (aesthetics)

LYRIC LOGIC is out in the world now!

remember this fucking horseshit the next time our political leaders tell us that we can't afford healthcare, paid family leave, disability services, parks and recreation, et al. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04...

My new innovative product, ChatVOST, replaces all provosts employed by American colleges and universities with a single proprietary chatbot

New Have You Heard: we talk to four current and former teachers about what blue states keep getting wrong about public education. @johndownesangus.bsky.social, @jaustinedu.bsky.social, @annieabrams.bsky.social and Nora De La Cour on why they have the blue state blues soundcloud.com/haveyouheard...

what next? what, are we gonna provide *roads* for the wealthy too? gonna have health inspectors keep contaminants out of their groceries? are we just gonna have gutters and sewer systems around rich people's homes?

"Like today, he made reference to Robert Musil's THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES and I had no idea what he was referring to."

Coming round on dissertation submission time of year. As my department's DGS, I drafted a brief document with guidance for how to write the abstract. Thought I'd share it for anyone to use or share with your grad students. Happy to send a PDF if you DM me your email.

Beginning to think the 20th century is never coming back.

What an illuminating set of essays. It's cold comfort knowing that none of us writers are making a living off of what we'd most like to be doing.

like six months from now some journalists will be like "we are now publishing this 20,000 word series on a decade of war crimes and atrocities having pieced the evidence from 1,000,000,000,000 pages of documents that would have been impossible to sort without, uh, machine.. pattern recognition..."

Coming soon to Portuguese and Brazilian bookshops…

I can't believe the "New Yorker" REJECTED this cartoon!

yeesh

People in the publishing industry are weirdly quiet about money. But as Wes Enzinna points out, every literary career is underwritten by some sort of capital, be it from a wealthy family member, a fellowship, or a dubious side gig.

The ADL's Mamdani Monitor site has awarded a “positive” rating to just one administration official: Jessica Tisch, the billionaire police commissioner, whose immediate and extended family are stalwarts of the city’s Jewish establishment. jewishcurrents.org/the-adls-mam...

Reupping my 2014 review of The Martian, which is about how Weir’s novels want to be libertarian propaganda (life as coding) but keep running up against the notions of the common good and collective labor necessary for their premises to make sense.

Up today in my graduate seminar: can we, should we, *how* should we close read computationally generated and synthetic text. I will say I raised an eyebrow that a volume carrying the title that it does contains no examples from this category, which fills the 400-page anthology also pictured.

"criticizing AI use in journalism or other creative industries is classist" NO IT IS NOT there is a class that benefits enormously from cognitive surrender, epistemic warfare, and the enclosure of all hitherto produced culture and it is NOT THE WORKING CLASS

so, so excited about this book

It's a watershed year for lit +internet studies with these four books. Parnell's last October, the other three this coming fall. If you study contemporary lit, you should very seriously think about pitching a review essay on this cohort.

This is a genuinely transformative book. It's long overdue for lit scholars to take the internet seriously. Vadde gives us the conceptual apparatus—articulating logics of platforms, Creative Commons, Web 2.0—to do so. Get to it.

We the Platform is available for preorder with the discount code CUP20 if you order directly from the press! cup.columbia.edu/book/we-the-... A thread on the argument below:

This semester, instead of a take-home assignment I gave a "close reading test" which was basically just the students developing a close reading of a poem on their own for two hours in a silent classroom with guided instructions (based on resources from @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and +

A history of the top marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans: 1940: 81% 1950: 84% 1960: 91% 1970: 72% 1980: 70% 1990: 28% 2000: 40% 2010: 35% For 50 years, corporate backed politicians in Congress have slashed taxes to line the pockets of their wealthy donors.

this, sadly, is why many faculty go into admin

There’s a big contingent of people on this site (because there’s a small contingent of these people in the world, overrepresented here) who think they can force people into positions they don’t hold by aggressive misinterpretation and therefore beat them, and it sucks.

This stuff's a real bummer. Can't be on X, and this stuff sucks this place dry.

FYI: I am going to stop summarizing Supreme Court decisions on here as they come down. One comment has been plucked out of context of all my reporting, misread, and used as the basis of a mean-spirited pile-on. I am not going to subject myself to this. If this was your goal, then congratulations.

I have experienced similar pile-ons when my summary of a court's holding was mistaken for my personal view on the matter. This insistence on stripping a post of context then imputing bad faith is making BlueSky unusable for legal reporting. Today's incident shows that the problem is getting worse.

yay

April, man. All the university things converge. Student writing. Honors theses. Exams. Big lectures. Annual reporting. Time to take a deep breath and remember my writing will still be there waiting for me in May.

Yes, this is real.

Writers-- scrutinize all incoming requests, offers, etc. People are even getting bogus PEN festival appearance offers that seem legit. Someone is still sending emails pretending to be me and my agent offering editing services. This is the new normal.

Mark Levin has read my latest piece and is not happy that I described him as a "nasal-voiced" "sycophant." www.mediamatters.org/us-iran-rela...

private equity is sucking the life out of everything around us

So, @ehayo1on9.bsky.social & I have been receiving a wave of questions about a passage from Canvas's terms of use that we quoted in this essay from January. We did get a few questions about it then, but this surge coming months later makes me think somebody is doing some damage control. 1/

This is a really important thread on the Canvas/Instructure terms of service, which were quoted in a piece @mattseybold.bsky.social and I wrote, and then were removed from the web three days after the piece was published.

www.facebook.com/reel/1447117... A Zionist Israeli soldier trashes a Palestinian grocery store. ​The elderly Palestinian shopkeeper watches helplessly

The death penalty but it only applies to one ethnic group in the seperate courts you’ve set up to try them in www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/w...

Kennedy's interest in meat—he has stated that he eats a "carnivore" diet...—is so larded with symbolism and minimally marbled with facts that it deserves special attention defector.com/rfk-jr-s-off...

The Israeli official and convicted terrorist who just yesterday declared his support for a military unit that assaulted a CNN crew & killed a 78-year-old Palestinian-American is now today drinking champagne to celebrate a new law to execute Palestinians.

TRIGGER WARNING, RFK jr's FACE SUPERIMPOSED ON CUTS OF MEAT: I wrote about the current iteration of weird Republican meat fixation for @brandyjensen.bsky.social at @defector.com The result? "RFK Jr.'s Offal Advice:" defector.com/rfk-jr-s-off...