The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting which Z library domain is the real one.

Prof. Tom Goodnight was a fine scholar and incredibly generous soul. Rest in Peace www.whiterivernow.com/2026/07/30/o...

Obituary: Dr. Gerald Thomas Goodnight

In Loving Memory of Dr. G. Thomas Goodnight With profound sadness and deep gratitude for a life exceptionally well lived, we announce the passing of Dr. G. Thomas Goodnight—beloved husband, father, sc...

whiterivernow.com

Northrop Frye was so anxious to break from the New Critics that he hit them with the pentafecta of Otherness (race, gender, class, religion, and caste). New criticism is "delicate learning"; they are a "mandarin caste"; their methods are "vaguely sacramental"; given to "ritual masonic gestures."

Not saying they were better, but once upon a time “cultural workers” had a bit of an appreciation for mediation, sublimation, and the transmutation of capital (Bourdieu).

G. Willow Wilson@gwillow.me · 2w ago

Not sure I’d shit on something that helped me sell half a million copies of my book, personally

The photos of Mitch McConnell reminds me of one of Gore Vidal’s deepest cuts, writing about Reagan in 1968

The Boghosian/Appiah ten are symptoms of an anti-intellectualism that I long struggled to make sense of in my first years of graduate school.

Characteristically good analysis by Winant that speaks to something I've been alluding to. We are going to see a lot of "populist"-oriented theoretical frameworks that carve out phenomena at meso-scales to foreclose ruthless critiques of totality.

LPE Blog@lpeblog.bsky.social · 2w ago

Today, @gabrielwinant.bsky.social explains why a clear picture of how age mediates class would reveal not gerontocracy, but capitalism and the fractionated class system it produces.

In the 1950s, some theorists repackaged Marxism in existential garb for the age of McCarthyism, e.g. Kenneth Burke. I suspect we'll have a few of those in the next decade.

The Continent is offering some of the best reporting on Africa, in my view, comparable to the best work that came from the New African in the 1980s/90s. I just wish they’d bring on board some sharp analytical columnists in the vein of New African's "Baffour's Beefs" www.thecontinent.org

The Continent | Africa

The Continent is an award-winning African newspaper, designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp.

thecontinent.org

I think we should put some respect on the epithet, “lakeside elite." There’s something far more surreal and incomprehensible about standing on the beaches of Lake Michigan and beholding its ocean-like waves than looking at the Pacific.

Just heard the news that the executive committee of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) plans to shut down the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).

Seems to me there are at least 5 overlapping currents of anti-intellectualism that have converged and are fueling the attack on scholarship/universities.

I wonder what has made the publisher so cautious....

Reading Joe Sacco, which won't be published in India. m.thewire.in/article/book...

Jim Clyburn is not a metaphor (“Vertretung”); catachresis ("elite capture"); or kolakeia (Adolph Reed's characterization of Black representational politics). He's something far worse: apophasis.

A colleague recommended SS African Mercury and I was excited to check it out but this obtuse muddle in one of its first issues doesn’t really inspire confidence

Many reasons to hate the New York Times including the fact that their website doesn’t have anchor links to allow for convenient navigation.

Mamdani was either lying when he said that he would look into whether he had the authority to arrest Netanyahu or (the obviously correct answer) he knew very well that the NYPD would not obey his orders if he authorized it.

Rod Dreher is an incomprehensibly peculiar ghoul ourtime.substack.com/p/rod-dreher...

Rod Dreher Will Not Read JD Vance's New Book

Possibly because it's about him?

ourtime.substack.com

Here's where I'd start for those of you interested in exploring the fraught questions of Otherness, defamiliarization, coevality, and self-knowledge

Every small liberal arts college has a philosopher on its faculty who has taught there for 60 years, a Religious Studies professor who is one of the leading international experts on Yūzū Nembutsu, and a poet who was awarded the MacArthur prize last year.

This made me chuckle: "Kenneth Burke's charts, hierarchies, pentads, bureaucracies have nothing to do with literature." (René Wellek)

Once you find out that middlebrow liberalism is essentially a theory of politics but not political economy, you begin to realize why they can envision only two theories of power: vulgar conspiracism or pragmatism all the way down.

David Roberts@volts.wtf · 4w ago

It has so many implications & consequences too. One is, whatever secret cabal you think is running things-- the DNC, AIPAC, globalist elites, George Soros, take your pick --you're wrong. No one is in charge. Everyone is winging it by the seat of their pants. Everyone is fumbling around in the dark.

James Currey's "Eastern African Studies" series has had an astonishingly good run, and not just for its quality but also its stylistic variety.

I am genuinely disturbed by how much this poem says almost everything one would need to know about why I turned out the way I did poetryinternationalweb.org/pi/site/poem...

I'm looking for a word to describe colleagues who always show up, get the job done efficiently, competently, and cooperatively, and are a joy to be around. But I don't like the phrase "good citizen" for obvious reasons. What word comes to mind?

Devastates me with an intensity I can’t explain to see that minstrelsy is huge among young ‘uns vying for a niche in the attention economy.

Grateful to Emma Frances Bloomfield and Leah Ceccarelli for this stringent and courageous critique of Isabela Fairclough's anti-trans keynote at the 2024 International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA) conference link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Bad Arguments, Bad Science, and Bad Consequences: A Response to an Anti-Trans Keynote - Argumentation

We argue that poorly reasoned, scientifically unsound, and materially harmful anti-trans arguments should be rejected when they are submitted to scholarly spaces. Taking as a case study Isabela Faircl...

link.springer.com

W.V.O Quine, Toni Morrison, Fredric Jameson, Judith Butler, Brian Massumi were all born in Ohio?!

The U.S. mind sees every form of assembly not directly tied to some norm-sanctioned civic activity as a “protest.”