Happy birthday to my beloved Henry Thoreau! A good day to get your laundry done and commit a little civil disobedience. He was a prophet of our nerve-jangling, mind-numbing attention economy, and he tried to craft new disciplines of attention to repair his soul. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Thoreau's Axe

How nineteenth-century “disciplines of attention” anticipated the contemporary concern with mindfulness and being “spiritual but not religious”

press.princeton.edu

Humanities writing is dead, long live humanities writing. clereviewofbooks.com/nonfiction-a...

Nonfiction at the End of the Humanities: On Sarah Mesle’s “Reasons and Feelings” and Alia Hanna Habib’s “Take It from Me” - Cleveland Review of Books

Throughout, Mesle asks questions I have lost sleep over and ones I did not think to wonder about. Because of how good and important these questions are, I was frustrated at times by a lack of clear an...

clereviewofbooks.com

This looks good.

Next week! What an honor to give this series of lectures named in honor of Barbara Packer, one of the all-time great scholars of the Transcendentalists.

Coming soon! I wrote the Foreword to the new edition of Lauren Berlant’s first book, The Anatomy of National Fantasy. Dig the killer new cover design, where Liberty is in a scaffold that looks a lot like a cage.

My essay in this latest issue of Theory&Event offers a new reading of Eichmann in Jerusalem — and the surrounding furor over Arendt’s read of the event — as symptomatic of the til now unnoted context of the McCarthyite moment to which Arendt was subtly responding in her book /1

In the new October, Josh Kline writes about how New York's real estate industry is killing its art world. No working artist can afford an apartment, much less a big studio to make ambitious work. direct.mit.edu/octo/article...

🚨NEW: Last year, the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. increased again. The driving factor? President Trump’s deportation agenda. Our annual report, The Whole Pie, gives the big picture of mass incarceration. Here are some key takeaways 🧵

New & Notable: A new take on a familiar classic: The lost Albini mixes of this Fugazi milestone are now available, with proceeds going to Letters Charity.

Albini Sessions (Benefit for Letters Charity), by Fugazi

12 track album

fugazi.bandcamp.com

Coming soon from Princeton UP: new editions of 2 Jameson classics. The Prison-House of Language, Foreword by Paul North & me. Marxism & Form, Foreword by Sianne Ngai. The great early books where Jameson worked out his thinking about theory & form. Get some! press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

The Prison-House of Language

A groundbreaking critical introduction to Structuralism and Russian Formalism by the acclaimed literary theorist

press.princeton.edu

Sentimentality is an underrated fash affect

Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege is available as a free download. "Here’s urban geography as it looks like through the eye of a Predator at 25,000 feet. A fundamental and very scary report from the global red zone." - Mike Davis

Cities Under Siege

Cities are the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, Cities Under Siege traces the spread of political viol...

versobooks.com

Just watched the video of what looks to be another ICE murder in Minneapolis and thinking again of the incredible bravery of these protestors, facing out of control armed paramilitaries with only whistles and phone cameras.

M. Gessen, gift link: The soviet secret police too "were ruled by quotas... Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works. The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive"

Opinion | State Terror Has Arrived

nytimes.com

Happy to have been part of this forum at @immanentframe.bsky.social on Latour, science, trads, punks, and the feeling of (being) discipline(d)! I focused on how leftism has increasingly been cast as the politics of "you can't" while "conservativism" has taken on the mantle of "do what thou wilt."

Devoted to the church of Fugazi

What a weird format! I’m writing this essay on an airplane currently flying over the North Sea, and it’s hard not to feel like an overeager seatmate muscling my way...

tif.ssrc.org

This book was incredible!!! Riveting, brilliant, funny, moving, relatable, all of it. I have rarely read a non-fiction book so fast and happily. Cannot recommend it enough to my humanist friends

“This represents saving higher education, saving public research and the standing up of faculty and staff and students”—AAUP, one of the parties that brought the case against the Trump administration

AAUP chapter @UT Austin@utaustinaaup.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Judge Orders Trump Not to Threaten University of California’s Funding www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/u...

"This section defines REASONS AND FEELINGS itself quite brilliantly: it’s a book working to avail itself of a different style of the “guide to writing” genre to attempt to know the world differently." Jon Hoel on Sarah Mesle, for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/10/28/w...

World Building - The Massachusetts Review

A Review of Reasons and Feelings by Sarah Mesle (University of Chicago Press) Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now is a new contribution to the University of Chicago Pres...

massreview.org

This book is officially out today. I feel pretty confident that everyone in my feed (academic and not) could use it — I certainly got a lot from reading it in process, and, also, hearing Sarah say these things to me live and in person over a period of many years. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

🚨🚨🚨 And THREE stood up! Penn has joined MIT & Brown in rejecting Trump’s loyalty oath compact. When we join together and fight back, WE WIN! No amount of federal bribery is worth surrendering the freedom to question, explore, and dissent. LET’S GO! #DefendHigherEd @aaup-penn.bsky.social

Penn rejects White House proposal for special funding treatment

With the decision, Penn becomes the third university to decline the offer.

thedp.com

Adding in some other LK pieces into the thread. A recent short interview with TYR bsky.app/profile/yale...

The Yale Review@yalereview.bsky.social · 10mo ago

László Krasznahorkai has won the Nobel Prize in Literature! Read his interview with Hari Kunzru in The Yale Reviewon apocalypse, art, and the urgency of the present—and his short story “An Angel Passed Above Us,” also published in TYR. yalereview.org/article/l%C3...

Good morning! If you'd like to read smart things instead of all the stupid things, the new ELH is out, with essays from The English Institute. New work by Quashie, Post, Orlemanski, Yousef, CW Smith, Tongson, and yours truly, introduced by Fleissner and Enelow. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

"Models of Ideological Analysis" by Fredric Jameson, Opening Lecture of 1977 Institute on Culture & Society (audio) theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/models-of-...

"Models of Ideological Analysis" by Fredric Jameson

Listen now | Opening Lecture of 1977 Institute On Culture & Society

theamericanvandal.substack.com

We're launching a new Tidewater Initiative at JHU. Our research group on working waterfronts and coastal infrastructures includes a new student research lab, courses, programming partnerships with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, and more in the works. sites.krieger.jhu.edu/tidewater/

Home | The Tidewater Initiative

We are a multidisciplinary research group devoted to study, stewardship, and stories of working waterfronts, coastal infrastructures, and oceans under conditions of globalization and environmental ins...

sites.krieger.jhu.edu

So happy with how this came out.

The Jameson Tapes, Side B

with Isabel Bartholomew, Anna Kornbluh, Caleb Smith, Robert Tally, & Fredric Jameson

theamericanvandal.substack.com

AND NOW the 2nd part! theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-jameso...

The Jameson Tapes, Side B

with Isabel Bartholomew, Anna Kornbluh, Caleb Smith, Robert Tally, & Fredric Jameson

theamericanvandal.substack.com

Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · last yr.

NEW! 1st of 2 installments contextualizing Jameson's lectures at the 1977 Institute On Culture & Society, discusses "Marxism & Historicism," historicizing the lectures, recovering them, the commodity as its own ideology, long arc of Jameson's influence theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-jameso...

NEW! 1st of 2 installments contextualizing Jameson's lectures at the 1977 Institute On Culture & Society, discusses "Marxism & Historicism," historicizing the lectures, recovering them, the commodity as its own ideology, long arc of Jameson's influence theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-jameso...

The Jameson Tapes, Side A

with Isabel Bartholomew, Anna Kornbluh, Caleb Smith, Robert Tally, & Fredric Jameson

theamericanvandal.substack.com

Honored to be among the folks talking about Jameson on the new American Vandal podcast episode! theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-jameso...

The Jameson Tapes, Side A

with Isabel Bartholomew, Anna Kornbluh, Caleb Smith, Robert Tally, & Fredric Jameson

theamericanvandal.substack.com

Good to join The American Vandal for this conversation about Jameson, ideology, and methods of literary analysis!

Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · last yr.

👇 🫵 👉 🎧 👍 🫶

A good, searching conversation with the hospitable August Baker of Philosophy Podcasts philosophypodcasts.org/thoreau2

PhilosophyPodcasts.Org: Caleb Smith. Distraction and discipline.

Caleb Smith Thoreau's axe: Distraction and discipline in American culture   Today, we’re driven to distraction, our attention overwhelmed by the many demands upon it—most of which emanate from ou...

philosophypodcasts.org