Having seen the Joyce Carol Oates very bad, not good tweet about romance and AI, I can't help thinking about the way that romance has been treated as a punching bag for so long and always by people who are completely unwilling to engage with the genre and know little about it.

Opinion: Ivy League leaders argue colleges need more AI, not less. This essay makes the countercase: Students can use AI well only if they first learn to think, read, and write without it.https://chroni.cl/4hatesu

Opinion | The Ivy League’s Surrender to AI Is Insane

When college leaders drink the corporate Kool-Aid, the liberal arts die.

chroni.cl

Nooooo! Is this week cursed???

The New York Times@nytimes.com · last mo.

Breaking News: Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist whose work caused a stir in the 1960s, while her “Infinity Room” installations drew crowds in recent decades, has died at 97.

Back to school day!!

Profs looking for intro readings on AI! I've done a bunch of digging this summer. Here are some teaching recs. Basic explainers for early undergrad classes: Duarte et. al, "What is AI?" lincolncenter.asu.edu/ai-ethics-wo... Zewe, "Explained: Generative AI" news.mit.edu/2023/explain...

My university has discontinued its use of Perusall and its breaking my heart. I loved how well-designed it was, that it incentivized reading, and how I got to have comment conversations with students in larger classes. It's been "replaced" with Harmonize, but it's not even close to the same.

Hi all! I'm trying to collect examples of romance and/or romance-adjacent games, book projects, comics, etc. that would have be affected by the Kickstarter, Patreon, Itch.io, or Steam adult content bans. Does anyone know any specific creators or projects which were at risk or were directly affected?

Watched The Odyssey. Was deeply underwhelmed.

TWC / SCMS Fan and Audience Studies group graduate student essay contest journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/tw...

I wrote about what's happening to the web now that everything is A.I. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/t...

How Google’s A.I. Search Is Imperiling the Open Web (Gift Article)

As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Some website operators are crying foul.

nytimes.com

This week's Fansplaining longread explores the steady rise of K-pop communities in Kenya, Nigeria, and other regions of Africa—even as the industry and broader global fandom pass them by. A joyous piece with fantastic reporting from @tabbykibugiwriter.bsky.social! fansplaining.com/african-k-po...

African K-Pop Fans Are Building Their Own Spaces

While the K-pop industry largely ignores them, fans in Kenya and Nigeria create K-pop communities for themselves.

fansplaining.com

From the Archives: More than half of faculty members surveyed said they are less satisfied with their jobs now than they were five years before. Same for 46 percent of staff and 38 percent of administrators. Why are academic workers feeling overworked and stressed? https://chroni.cl/4yzM8B8

Higher Education Is Exhausted

Some don’t see a future in a sector battling for its very existence.

chronicle.com

I'm so glad to share the CFP for the Eleventh conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. Link to the full CFP  www.iaspr.org/conferences/... Please share with your cool academic circles! #popularromancestudies #romance #CFP #AcademicSky @iaspr.bsky.social

They always say that you’ll hate your book project by the end. But these warnings do not adequately convey how much you will haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate your book project by the end.

"A survey by the campus AAUP chapter... found that a majority feared retaliation for what they teach and believed administrators’ commitment to academic freedom and due process had declined over the previous three years."

Chronicle of Higher Education@chronicle.com · 4mo ago

Professors at Auburn University were told to sign a form attesting that they didn't teach "divisive concepts" about race and gender. Chaos ensued. https://chroni.cl/4dSKy4Y

“accelerated programs can condition students to write in a particular format that scores well on an AP exam but isn’t what many professors are looking for. It can cut into the time teachers would otherwise spend on different forms of reading and writing”

Why the Boundary Between High School and College Is Crumbling

Pushing students to and through higher ed seemed like a good idea, but it’s had an effect on how they learn.

chronicle.com

ANNOUNCEMENT: The workers of Dark Horse Comics @darkhorse.com are forming a union. Please read our mission statement below. 👇 #DHWU

This article is clearly some flavor of rage bait, but (after I stopped sighing at the tone and the contradictions in the argument) it did make me think. www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/dear-... So as one of those lazy, technologically-impaired, boring professors, here's some thoughts. 🧵

Dear educators, Gen Z here. Could you please teach us like it’s 2026?

Learning has changed drastically in the past five years, but teaching practices haven’t caught up. From your students’ perspective, here’s how to adapt

timeshighereducation.com

THIS!! It’s also skewed by the fact that so many of the pedagogy conversations are coming from first-year writing and rhet/comp teaching environments. We need to talk about what AI sensitive pedagogy looks like in other disciplines.

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln.bsky.social · 5mo ago

AI in academia conversation is completely warped by how only professors platformed to write about it are tenured at elite schools. What works in a 12-person Princeton classroom has basically no relationship to your average college's 40 person online class taught by an underpaid adjunct...

Does anyone else go stir crazy when the semester ends? Like, I want to relax for a week and take a break, but I genuinely don’t know what to do with myself. I’m bored! I feel like one solution is to travel, but it’s expensive. (The fact that it’s already 100 degrees outside probably doesn’t help.)

“The complexities of classroom pedagogy are less like engineering, where every design tweak can in principle optimize performance for everyone, and more like policymaking in a diverse society, where every choice distributes benefits and burdens differently. Some students gain more, others less…”

“Win-Win” Pedagogy Is Impossible (opinion)

Teaching choices—about a laptop ban, for instance—involve trade-offs, and that’s OK.

insidehighered.com

"There are currently only three fanfics on the Archive of Our Own written in Swahili." In our latest, @soila.bsky.social writes about the dominance of English in fandom and especially fic, including the perspectives of fellow fans in Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi. Read or listen to an audio version:

The Elation and Anxiety of Reading Fic in Your Native Tongue

For fans in Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, “uncringing” non-English fanfiction is an endeavor in decolonialism.

fansplaining.com

“last year, the country spent more money building A.I. infrastructure than single-family homes. We built 10 times as many data centers as the next biggest builder (Germany). We invested more than 20 times as much money into A.I. as the world’s next biggest investor (China).”

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 5mo ago

Major players in the A.I. arms race have panicked that their fellow founders weren’t taking existential fears about the technology seriously enough. “They seem to have worried less about the risk of political backlash from actual humans,” David Wallace-Wells writes.

The estate management machine.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · 5mo ago

The new biopic about Michael Jackson was the result of a yearslong effort to resurrect the reputation of the king of pop, despite the accusations of sexual abuse that have surrounded him for decades. On "The Daily," our reporter discusses the new playbook for rewriting the past.

The new biopic about Michael Jackson was the result of a yearslong effort to resurrect the reputation of the king of pop, despite the accusations of sexual abuse that have surrounded him for decades. On "The Daily," our reporter discusses the new playbook for rewriting the past.

The Resurrection of Michael Jackson

Can “Michael“ help restore the king of pop’s image? His estate is banking on it.

nyti.ms

"The humanities are not a luxury. They are how a democracy understands itself." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/a...

DOGE’s Termination of Humanities Grants Is Ruled Unconstitutional

nytimes.com

I know Canvas must be back, because the “can you bump up my grade?” emails have begun to appear.

Between the Canvas outage and the court win in the NEH grant case, it really feels like a day for @literaturegeek.bsky.social print of @megsmith.bsky.social quote. #DHmakes

I am collecting “ideal” and “failed” romance novels from Janice Radway’s 1984 Reading the Romance. How much have preferences in #romancebks changed in the last 40+ years? We’ll see if I find out! substack.com/home/post/p-...

Collecting the Romance from Janice Radway's Reading the Romance

Building My Romance Novel Collection

substack.com