lindsay thomas
@lindsaythomas.net
academic and aspiring person who likes winter. contemporary lit, digital stuff. i’ve written about sci fi, national security and fiction, the humanities, bunkers, and chatbots. now writing about novels and how long they are. https://lindsaythomas.net
Friends, my book—No Place for Home: Terror and Race in Literature After 9/11—has a cover! I’m so pleased with what Rachel Moeller and the design team at @uminnpress.bsky.social came up with! The book will be out in Spring 2027 and that I’ll post a pre-order link once it’s available! 1/2
I don’t live in Milwaukee but some dear friends do and for the past 3 years I have participated with them in Riverwest 24, which happened this past weekend. It’s so much more than a 24-hour bike ride, tho it’s also that. It’s a neighborhood celebration full of fun & parties & activities & food
Sounds like an Onion article but sadly elite administrative impunity is the norm in higher education
Inside Higher Ed @insidehighered.com · 2mo agoCornell Graduate Banned After President Hit Him With Car https://bit.ly/4viG6Cj
Another grim day for libraries. But I was in one today, doing some more or less boring research about paperbacks, when I ran across a postcard written by someone interned at Manzanar War Relocation Center to an editor at Modern Library in May 1944 asking for some information.
It continues to break my brain (and soul) that nothing has happened. Nothing! NOTHING
Miriam Posner@miriamposner.com · 2mo agowww.theringer.com/2026/05/22/n... jesus THANK YOU
It has been a hellacious year but a really nice thing about being DGS is you get to hood some people and shake some hands and announce some names and cheer on the accomplishments of many amazing students
UPDATE: Despite a growing demand across Cornell's campus for President Kotlikoff's resignation, the Board of Trustees concluded their investigation and cleared Kotlikoff of any wrongdoing. Students for a Democratic Cornell are demanding an independent investigation.
More Perfect University@mpuniversity.bsky.social · 3mo agoCornell President Michael Kotlikoff struck student protesters with his car. This is why.
For those keeping score at home, in the last few years we’ve learned that a university president can lose their job for arguably questionable citation practices in their early work, but not for intentionally hitting students with their car. I wonder if there were any other salient differences 🤔
Dan Hirschman@asociologist.bsky.social · 3mo agoCornell just released this statement from its committee of Trustees investigating the incident where the President ran over a student's foot with his car. The statement extols the President and blames the students.
Every time I get asked about trust in higher ed, I will now be obligated to bring this up. Wheen we talk about impunity from consequences, it includes things like this.
Dan Hirschman@asociologist.bsky.social · 3mo agoCornell just released this statement from its committee of Trustees investigating the incident where the President ran over a student's foot with his car. The statement extols the President and blames the students.
The president of Cornell hit some students with his car, lied about what happened, and cast himself as the victim. Cornell's trustees, palpably aghast at the idea that a powerful man could be held accountable for his actions, have issued an official statement saying fuck the students
Dan Hirschman@asociologist.bsky.social · 3mo agoCornell just released this statement from its committee of Trustees investigating the incident where the President ran over a student's foot with his car. The statement extols the President and blames the students.
We just received the most simultaneously banal and disgusting email about this, which, of course, blames the students and praises our president for his magnanimity in choosing not to punish them. 🤮
lindsay thomas@lindsaythomas.net · 3mo agoIt should not be shocking to me given everything but nevertheless what I find somewhat shocking despite myself is that a university president can run students over with a car and then just….nothing much happens
It should not be shocking to me given everything but nevertheless what I find somewhat shocking despite myself is that a university president can run students over with a car and then just….nothing much happens
For the Boston Review, I wrote about Somaliland and Israel, the consequences of imagining political freedom as a struggle for national sovereignty, and what growing up in and alongside Somaliland had meant for my political education.
Sovereignty’s End and Beginning
In Somaliland, the pursuit of statehood has come with a bitter irony.
bostonreview.net
One advantage of being jet lagged in Switzerland waiting for a train is scrolling Bluesky and seeing which of you freaks are posting between 1 and 4 am American™️ time
This man is so embarrassing and pathetic
Dan Hirschman@asociologist.bsky.social · 3mo ago“Video footage obtained by The Sun shows Students for a Democratic Cornell members Aiden Vallecillo ’26 and Hudson Athas ’27 being struck by the car. In the video, no person can be seen touching the vehicle before it drove into Vallecillo and Athas.” www.cornellsun.com/article/2026...
“Video footage obtained by The Sun shows Students for a Democratic Cornell members Aiden Vallecillo ’26 and Hudson Athas ’27 being struck by the car. In the video, no person can be seen touching the vehicle before it drove into Vallecillo and Athas.” www.cornellsun.com/article/2026...
Kotlikoff Drives Into Student and Recent Grad Following ‘Harassment’
President Michael Kotlikoff backed his car into a student and drove over the foot of a recent graduate after what he called a "harassment and intimidation incident" in a Friday email blast to the...
cornellsun.com
This movie is both totally bonkers and a coherent and smart analysis of the violence and death-cult-like aspects of American society. And of the murderous fiends in charge. And of how solidarity is the only way to defeat them. And it was made in 1991!
lindsay thomas@lindsaythomas.net · 5mo agoDid you all know that The People Under the Stairs existed this whole time and no one told me?? Wes Craven’s magnum opus
Did you all know that The People Under the Stairs existed this whole time and no one told me?? Wes Craven’s magnum opus
One of the things keeping me afloat is that today I teach one of my favorite essays in recent years, Ted Underwood’s “Why Literary Time is Measured in Minutes” alongside Yauney et al’s “update” from a year later, after teaching Genette last week. The little formalist in me is so happy
Brief but forceful interview here from the front lines of the war against knowledge and thought: www.austinchronicle.com/news/ut-head...
UT Head of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Speaks Out • The Austin Chronicle
On Monday, the Chronicle spoke with Lisa Moore, who has served since 2023 as the chair of UT-Austin’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department – a department that is now being collapsed with ...
austinchronicle.com
If DH is dead, we are having a hell of a funeral at ACH this summer! Abstracts are due soon, on the conference theme of borders, emergency and emergence, and technology's role in responding to our present moment. ACH is affordable and online!
ACH@ach.bsky.social · 6mo agoProposals for ACH 2026 (June 24-26) are due in just under a week on February 23rd! Read cfp and submit at: buff.ly/kFUXOgB
The Board unexpectedly postponed the this year’s tenure decisions. “I was shocked and sick at heart to learn that four of my colleagues who did everything asked of them, and who should have been celebrating their achievement, are now in an indefinite limbo without any clear explanation as to why.”
Dozens exit faculty meeting, cite frustrations over tenure postponement - The Muhlenberg Weekly
After an unusual start to the Feb. 13 faculty meeting, with the President’s remarks moved to the end of the agenda, roughly 30 minutes into the meeting, Associate Professor of Psychology Connie Wofle ...
muhlenbergweekly.com
@kmcdono.bsky.social @danielwilson.bsky.social and I have a new OA article out: eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A... It’s about the fragmented landscape of historical data, and what we can do about it to improve discoverability, sustainability and reuse.
Show Me the Data: New Practices for Historical Sources | Transactions of the Royal Historical Society | Cambridge Core
Show Me the Data: New Practices for Historical Sources
eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com
I found this piece generative. As someone who initially hit the job market during the brief period in which you could get a job in DH, is co-editing a Debates in DH volume, trying to build support for “DH” on my campus, & co-teaching a class with Matt called “Books as Data,” I have thoughts!
Dan Sinykin@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 6mo agoMatt Wilkens on the end of DH: "The steady state of DH, which I once believed was to be fully subsumed within the humanities, now looks much more likely to involve the diffusion of humanistic knowledge into disciplines...constitutively quantitative and computational" academic.oup.com/alh/article-...
Easiest dunk in the world but that Atlantic piece about the Mellon is reactionary garbage. It is also laughable in its inaccuracy. Oh yes, the Mellon has a “stranglehold” on humanities research! No one can publish anything without running it by the Mellon! That is how it works!
It would be embarrassing under any circumstances to spend a year on this reactionary horseshit, but to have spent the year in which graduate students were sent to concentration camps for op-eds and the federal govt launched a no hold barred attack on academic freedom is just beyond
Nathan Kalman-Lamb@nkalamb.bsky.social · 6mo agoThe Atlantic is indistinguishable from Compact.
