I expressed my long standing fear of this to our library director who told me matter of factly that in a pinch you should just dive onto a shelf and the books will push through to the other side. Sounds like something she learned from experience??

alix e. harrow@alixeharrow.bsky.social · 20h ago

i don't like to police genre, but it's not dark academia unless somebody gets squished in one of these bad boys

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Ryland Grace of California, Scientist: Who lived Eight Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Ship on the Coast of Tau Ceti; Having been comatose, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates

Using lists of three is not an "AI tell." It's a common trait in human writing because our brains biologically want to make sure there's always one thing to marry, one thing to fuck, and one thing to murder.

Too bad there’s no other way to find papers and professional scholars aren’t *trained* to do precisely that! What can you do? 🤷🏼‍♀️

Alexandra Gallant-Lee@alexandragallant.com · 5d ago

"I just use it for research" like it's neutral, like nothing built by big tech ever had bias baked in? "It helps me find papers." Okay, but do you think there might also be a chance the plausibility generators surface papers by men more often than women, for instance?

*Bonus*: always remind yourself that thinking is part of writing. Actual typing of text is just a sliver of writing. So, shower thoughts, walking thoughts, random thoughts in the day about your project *is* writing. Text yourself those thoughts (or get a dictation app)

People who don’t collapse their boxes before putting them in the communal recycling dumpster.

Sanjay Srivastava@sanjaysrivastava.com · 6d ago

What is an extremely nerdy/obscure/specific thing you hate with a white-hot wrath?

Early fifteenth-century composer John Dunstaple’s annotations add new light to our understanding of the reception of Boethius’s treatise De institutione musica.

Junior women are more likely to succeed when they have mid-career and senior women in their departments. Go figure!

Physgal ⚛️@physgal.bsky.social · last wk.

Fascinating paper on the progression of women in academia. 👩🏻‍🔬 ⚛️ 🧪 #AcademicSky docs.iza.org/dp18477.pdf?... Here's an excerpt from the conclusion:

JM Coetzee has a wonderful essay about the meaning of the "classic" that ends as follows. Possibly one downstream effect of the defunding of the humanities is that people have forgotten the function of criticism: www.scribd.com/document/814...:

EMILY WILSON@emilyrcwilson.bsky.social · last wk.

The oddest thing about the response to this essay is people who say it’s “personal”. You can disagree about some or all of it! I may well be wrong! But it’s not “personal” to analyze a film or other work of art, even negatively. Criticism is more than “Hurray!” or “Hiss!”

Higher ed admin’s eagerness to throw away their entire value proposition must be one of the dumbest and most spiteful own goals in history.

Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · last wk.

www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

It seems like academic book reviews have also veered towards “only say positive things” which is ultimately not that helpful. We can respect each other’s work and also be prepared to offer meaningful critiques in the spirit of moving the conversation forward.

Saeed Jones@theferocity.bsky.social · last wk.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’re losing recipes re: criticism. Even reviews of Morrison’s novels in the 90s that were ultimately positive would include barbs that I think would shock people today. A lot going on there, but popular criticism used to be just as tough as Emily’s review.

IN A WORLD WHERE TWO ROADS DIVERGE ONE CHOICE CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE

Jesse Hawken@jessehawken.bsky.social · last wk.

Studio execs are going to want to adapt more poems for the big screen now

Citation-as-conversation vs. citation-as-showing-your-work is one of those huge mindset shifts that separates mid-career and senior scholars from junior scholars. It’s also one of the best places to start when converting a dissertation chapter to an article for the first time.

dr joshua phillips@woolfianjosh.bsky.social · last wk.

One drum I will bang until the end of time is that we need to shift our thinking around citations. They're not a task that we do lest we're punished; they're a form of conversation and thinking-in-public that are foundational to what we do as scholars.

The AMS Study Group for Early Musics Skills & Resources is delighted to announce Early Music 101, a new series of interactive online workshops aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduate students curious about musical practices before 1600.

Westworld but just Southwest Plaza. Give me Sam Goody and a Dairy Queen so I can be whole again.

Jacqueline Antonovich@jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 2w ago

I would pay good money for a recreated 1980s mall. Punks smoking outside Waldenbooks. Stoners at the Orange Julius. Weird abstract sculpture fountains. Fake plants hanging from nowhere. A food court that smells like pizza and industrial carpet cleaner.

Discount code for The Skywalker Symphonies now available!

There needs to be a word for that feeling when you finish a book and you’re sad the book is done and you’re not ready to start a new book yet.

Also email folks you’d like to meet and ask them if they have a window! I have had many great conversations with grad students over coffee at the conference.

samuel mehr@mehr.nz · 4mo ago

i will stake a strong claim and say that it is almost never a bad idea for you, a grad student, to roll up to a conference and just introduce yourself to people you'd like to talk to. profs absolutely love talking to students. just go for it!! we're nice!

When I left fb years ago it was after making a careful study of what I wanted to see and what was actually there. 95% of posts were dunks or imperatives (along the lines of “if you don’t x you’re a bad person”). No wonder it was a sucky experience!

Greg Sargent@gregsargent.bsky.social · 2w ago

Endorse. Less "watch me dunk on Ezra, Matt, Stancil, Atlantic." More "check this out, it's good work that you might not have seen."

I’m exploring giving the students a printout they can fill in with their grades as they get assignments back along with instructions for how to calculate their current grade. Better systems are possible!!

Tobias Wilson-Bates@phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 2w ago

I tried out a bunch of structural changes this summer, but one that was surprisingly effective is that I stopped keeping an online grade book and instead just gave my students grade updates on paper every two weeks. Zero grade complaints and also seemingly less ambient stressing over the grade.

We’ve been on a 10 year run of colleges shutting down their most unique and valuable departments in favor of bland templated programs that they offer vacuous, mediocre versions of to students who just assume college has always been vacuous and mediocre in this manner.

This is the gift of real human writing! And we are being pressured to sand it away in favor of empty soulless nothing prose.

Christina Orlando@cxorlando.bsky.social · 2w ago

the best thing about reading a book (or anything) written by a friend is seeing your friend all over it. sometimes theres a sentence and i just think, oh! oh how lovely! that's such a him thing to say. there's so much of my friend in here.

The anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/

an idea's been rolling around in my head about how what we lose with assuming everyone wants "answers" & not search results is similar to what we lose when "route" is the only kind of map we encounter I won't get the academic terms right, but it's some version of skipping an essential abstraction

Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 3w ago

I am losing my mind. Chat isn’t a search engine. this isn’t normal. framing it as normative is slimy. Tone, vibes all bad.

lol do people think the GRE is … hard? Like any academic can handle the high school level math and vocabulary tests, and believe it or not one thing Ph.D.s prepare you for is … studying for exams. Sure, you want me to brush up on high school geometry and knock out some analogies? 🙄

Claire E. Aubin@ceaubin.com · 3w ago

A real - actual - I swear to god - argument happening over on Twitter right now is whether or not faculty should be regularly forced to retake the GRE

Also reading in a new genre right before drafting something can inflect your prose in great ways! And I love Helen Sword’s advice to consider whether your scholarly article is a whodunnit or a thriller or a romance, etc.

Joanne Harris@joannechocolat.bsky.social · 3w ago

Unsolicited writing advice, no. 2136778: If you read widely, outside your genre, your writing will be much less likely to be formulaic and predictable.

We hung out at the movie theater, Barnes and Noble, and Starbucks. I grew up in a beautiful place and we took lots of walks on the trails and sidewalks.

Dr. Marianne C.E. Gillion@mcegillion.bsky.social · 3w ago

The owner of a local, tiny, independent bookshop allowed her store to become a third space for me and my friends. She even let us carefully read parts of books, knowing we would spend our allowances there. She also gave me my first part-time summer job. An amazing person; sorely missed.

Calling your friends’ parents and asking for turn by turn directions to their house.

Michael D. Green, PhD@michaeldgreen.phd · 4w ago

Can’t lie, the fact that y’all were driving with PAPER maps is insane. Even worse, you had to ask random strangers for directions??

It’s not that this person still has their job, it’s that they’ve leveraged each bad investment into a better job at a nicer school.

Nathan K. Hensley@nathankhensley.bsky.social · 4w ago

my bet is that there is at least one highly placed person at every US university who redirected large portions of institutional funding to go all-in on the following things, in succession: 1) Second Life 2) MOOCs 3) "The AI revolution" my further bet is that this person somehow still has their job

EThOS platform restored! 'Following restoration work, all metadata records previously available on EThOS have now been restored, along with an additional 14,000 records added since the service was taken offline' - more to come https://www.bl.uk/stories/news/ethos-records-restored

EThOS records restored

We are pleased to share that EThOS (E-Theses Online Service) is now available again following restoration work after the cyber-attack.

bl.uk