that's my colleague, that's us "austerity—the blighting redirection of every dime toward ultra-elite profit+cascadingly away from literally anything else we need unions more urgently inside this moment of accelerated dismantling than at any other time since the 50s" lithub.com/how-austerit...

How Austerity is Killing Higher Ed (and What We Can Do About It)

Recently, at the end of a particularly bruising year, another professor and I found ourselves loitering together, draped in our bright and preposterous academic regalia, amid a long line of similar…

lithub.com

I say this as an intellectual historian of 17th- & 18th-century Europe who teaches the Enlightenment and has taught (and loved!) Great Books courses. Familiarity with a canon gives a shared frame of reference! It can be vital to understanding many things! It remains limited, changeable and relative!

and, finally, this: a fixed canon can only be the corpse of a dead tradition; not in spite but *because* of my interests, I can hardly endorse such a thing.

there are many good reasons to study particular traditions in which particular canons play outsized roles. All of these reasons are more specific and more delimited than “reading books” or “knowing history.” Every canon is constructed (over and over again) relative to a specific purpose or question

it’s about engaging a “canon” of philosophical and literary works in roughly the same way that a “this is what they took from us” twitter meme is about engaging a “canon” of early Nintendo games or whatever. Signing on to it to promote “reading” is like signing on to MAGA to promote “women’s sports”

the right-wing position on the Western Canon is not coherent and is not meant to be; it’s not about reading and thinking with a body of writing but about stabilizing an onanistic image of The West. The same project that demands reverence for Plato to build the image bans reading Plato to maintain it

The lefty humanities professors on this website are yelling “we need to get the kids reading Shakespeare and Homer” and yet the far right says that they need to take over the university because it’s abandoned Shakespeare and Homer, which makes me think the right’s claim is a pretext for something.

And finally please look at Devin’s ( @devingarofalo.bsky.social) amazing quote here, and how it got these superb student journalists to look up a few of the stats — such as that full professors at GU make someting like 4-5x our adjunct colleagues— which now appear in GU’s paper of record. / end 💖💥🙏

And Victoria Chen, a now-PhD-student who copyedited the book as a senior, was able to describe the poverty of instrumental thought & explain the alternatives Johnson’s work helps model— positions rarely articulated in student publications,+ 💖💥

Because it turns out —so we got to say in a newspaper—that the material conditions for knowing and thinking shape what it is possible to know and think. +

Thanks so much to student journalist Brendan Fijol, who allowed what was supposed to be a fluff piece on a new faculty book to instead highlight the catastrophic state of academic labor at GU & beyond, and the coordinated attacks on thought since 2020. + @devingarofalo.bsky.social

English Professor Coedits Book Celebrating Literary Critic, Intellectual Freedom

A new book coedited by Georgetown University English professor Nathan Hensley addresses freedom of thought amid a period of falling appreciation for academics.

thehoya.com

Some of the analytical framing in this study is questionable (I don't buy the "power"/"aesthetics"/"identity" categorization), but the finding that there has been a massive contraction in humanistic knowledge is significant: a consequences of under-funding and poor academic employment chances.

Chronicle of Higher Education@chronicle.com · last wk.

Humanities dissertations have fallen by 49 percent since 2015, compared with a drop of 4.5 percent in the social sciences, according to a new analysis of nearly 445,000 dissertations in these two fields over 65 years. Explore the data: https://chroni.cl/4yxUZ4S

The main thing that this study shows is that because of underfunding and underinvestment in the humanities, we as a society have less and less research knowledge about culture and history. That's a significant finding. academysciencesletters.org/wp-content/u...

The idea in here that business schools inherently train people to devalue labor reminds me that the same critique was made when the first business schools in America were started, which I mention here: www.elizabethspiers.com/the-anti-int...

The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites

I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for Th...

elizabethspiers.com

Today, @electricliterature.com's "The Commuter" brought me these two brilliant poems by James Allen Hall @jamesallenhall.bsky.social, so what I'm saying is you should subscribe. electricliterature.com/category/lit...

Creative Writing at NEIU@neiu-cw.bsky.social · 2w ago

next up, the frankly way funnier project where i attempted to summarize redwall books from memory:

The Aardwyrm's Nest

The rules of this series: I cannot reread any of the books or access any summaries. I will not be checking character names, but if I do remember them I am allowed to check the spelling just for coh…

maldamarlys.com

Memento Morlys 🍉@aardwyrm.bsky.social · 3w ago

moving some old blog posts off my shitty old site so i can finally nuke it, so as i shuffle them to my slightly less embarrassing new one, here they are. beginning with my not-very-long-lived "disorganized thoughts on women writing early sci fi" series:

We saw a huge uptick in backers since this quoted post. Thanks to everyone who backed and shared! We've still got about $4800 to go with 3 days left. Please do still share the quoted post if you haven't already. bit.ly/LS-NM-26

Lightspeed Magazine@lightspeedmagazine.com · 3w ago

According to Kickstarter tracking service, Kicktraq, the LIGHTSPEED + NIGHTMARE campaign is trending toward only reaching 94% of our goal. So WE STILL NEED YOUR HELP. If you love SF, fantasy, and horror short fiction, please consider backing today and sharing this post. bit.ly/LS-NM-26

There is no such thing as “African” literature. African writers write a multitude of genres from different geographies, perspectives, disciplines, motivations & in different languages. The problem is the “African literature” shelf that expects it to be only one thing folukeafrica.com/what-makes-a...

Africa Is Not a Genre: Breaking Free From the Shelf Labelled “Africa”

‘African’ is a problematic identity marker at best, but not a literary genre.

folukeafrica.com

Four days to go! Nerve wracking! Please help the folks at @lightspeedmagazine.com sleep at night.

Lightspeed Magazine@lightspeedmagazine.com · 3w ago

According to Kickstarter tracking service, Kicktraq, the LIGHTSPEED + NIGHTMARE campaign is trending toward only reaching 94% of our goal. So WE STILL NEED YOUR HELP. If you love SF, fantasy, and horror short fiction, please consider backing today and sharing this post. bit.ly/LS-NM-26

We've now surpassed 75% of our funding goal! In addition to subscriptions, we've got t-shirts, mugs, signed books, stuff from the magazine archives... We're still about $12,000 away from our $50,000 target with 7 days remaining, so please consider backing if you haven't already. bit.ly/LS-NM-26

This kickstarter still has a ways to go and just 6 days left on it. Let’s help get Lightspeed and Nightmare funded! Chip in if you can, share either way.

Lightspeed Magazine@lightspeedmagazine.com · 2mo ago

The 2026 LIGHTSPEED + NIGHTMARE Kickstarter is NOW LIVE! Check out our star-studded lineup of authors & peruse our rewards: subscriptions, signed books, rare magazine collectibles, t-shirts, mugs, and other fun stuff. Thank you in advance if you're able to offer your support.💖 bit.ly/LS-NM-26

Speaking in literary historian: This is what we see in periods of artistic efflorescence. Yes, there are sui generis artists who thrive regardless of discourse community. But groups of artists & innovative movements rely on venues for discussion, argument, manifestos, denunciations, celebrations!

A valuable short thread on why thoughtful critical discourse is essential for creating a landscape in which certain types of writing can thrive (and maybe even be possible at all).

Vajra Chandrasekera@vajra.me · 3w ago

IKR I'd absorbed it long before I started writing books myself, that the kind of books I wanted to read would simply never be discoverable via ratings-based bookish platforms—they represent a mode of collective reading out of scope for these apps

I also don't want to teach a canon assembled at gun point.

Do we teach what we teach because it is preparation for some general 21st-century future? Or do we teach it because this is the knowledge that work in our various fields of study has yielded, which includes, but is not exhausted by, knowledge of the methods and sources and so on that will make more?

I’m also hesitant to make “preparation for the 21st century” into a criterion of curricular critique, in part because proleptic appeals to future “relevance” are easily co-opted by instrumentalist agendas. For some, the only “preparation” humanities offer is skill in generating searches or prompts.

I don’t think teaching a canon is bad, and studying intellectual traditions as historical phenomena is important to understanding culture, past and present. What’s bad is teaching a specific canon as if it’s above history and somehow universal. The frame matters, as does what’s available beyond it.

This award in particular means a lot to everyone at SH - it’s so specifically directed towards the goal that underpins everything the magazine does. By which I mean: shucks. 💜

The Ignyte Awards@theignyteawards.bsky.social · 4w ago

Finally, the #2026IgnyteAwards Community Award recognizes Outstanding Efforts in Service of Inclusion and Equitable Practice in Genre Congratulations @strangehorizons.bsky.social who also won the inaugural award in this category in 2020.

This, 100%. (And I didn't go to Williams but did go to a different tiny elite liberal arts school!). The sort of model of assessing learning the article advocates for is simply not viable in most contexts. And, done correctly, writing is just as iterative and generative a process as conversation!

Lincoln Michel@thelincoln.bsky.social · 4w ago

My main thought with this article is really need AI takes from outside elite liberal arts schools bubble. “Just have in-depth searching conversations w/ your handful of students and then give each 45 min oral exams!” This has no relevance to most professors or students at most schools in the country

This is a great essay! And I have to admit, while I am much too young to have been present for McKuen's heyday,I read *Come to Me in Silence* in high school courtesy of my local library and I thought it was hot garbage! But even then I thought there was something compelling about his role in culture

Kyle Marquis@moochava.bsky.social · last mo.

This reminds me of a *fantastic* Slate article by Dan Kois on '70s superstar poet and contemporary nonentity Rod McKuen. Just an amazing article.