My pal & partner in many crimes Eric Schaller has a story up at The Dark magazine about Concord, Mass., Transcendentalism, and vampires. Good fun! www.thedarkmagazine.com/matters-of-t...

I've been thinking and talking and writing about the death penalty for my whole adult life and the past week+ has been truly surreal and exhausting, not only because of the onslaught of horrors but because there seems to be so little historical memory of what this system is and always has been.

In practice, AI literacy doesn’t start with building the tool for your personal use. It starts with understanding yourself as a collection of tasks who should subcontract those out to a machine. Almost no regular person’s life currently exists as such.

Bryn on the Streets; Bryn in the Sheets, too 🏳️‍⚧️@brynstone.bsky.social · 2w ago

Truly, the first time I've read an AI critique that ties into cultural competency, and I'm honestly embarrassed I never considered that angle (mostly because I find using it to be morally radioactive to begin with).

Saddened to hear that a writer was contacted by a fake Danielle Dutton (not our very real and human editor) pretending to be asking for work on behalf of Dorothy. We do not solicit work that way (i.e., cold emails). Please help us spread the word?!

All English Departments, including mine, should do this

Joseph Rezek@rezekjoe.bsky.social · 4w ago

BREAKING: Boston University's English department (my dept) recently voted to approve new learning outcomes for the English major, including an anti-AI provision that requires students to “craft and revise writing that is sustained, original, and generated without the assistance of AI."

“You are the only one of you, she said of it. … Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. You writing it makes it possible.” Beautiful essay & especially this, which I’ll give to my students

Alexander Chee@alexanderchee.bsky.social · 4w ago

I wrote about being Annie Dillard's student at Wesleyan in the spring of my last year in college for Elizabeth Benedict's Mentors and Monsters anthology, and The Morning News: themorningnews.org/annie-dillar...

This is low-level propaganda that elides the real story, which is that the younger candidate in this race is an anti-trans clown and the older candidate is one of the Senate's strongest progressives. Please vote for Markey in MA, friends. The old guy is the only choice here.

NBC News@nbcnews.com · last mo.

Tuesday’s primaries in Massachusetts have turned into the latest battlefield in the Democratic Party’s generational divide, with several longtime legislators facing off against younger challengers.

international students want to learn, supporting that freedom is invaluable, eroding it is bigotry.

leilacancode.github.io/everythinggo...

My daughter and her friends got so into The Scarlet Letter that they had a whole Hawthorne group chat where one of them literally said, Hawthorne’s style is fire.

Kingfisher & Wombat@tkingfisher.com · 2mo ago

I swear to God, part of the problem of literacy is that we make kids read SO MANY books like this. Of course they’re going to associate reading with misery! We put them in a Skinner box and shock them when they read, what did people THINK would happen?

UPDATES Call for creative writing: Contemporary Indigenous Horror (University Press of Mississippi, 2027) solicits original, unpublished short horror fiction, poetry, and experimental works by self-identifying Indigenous creatives. www.cfplist.com/CFP/46993

The CFP List

An academic call for papers database.

cfplist.com

Wish I still lived in Oakland. I would be going to this event for @cynthiasaysboo.bsky.social’s novel Muñeca. If you live in the Bay Area, you should go!

Cynthia Gómez@cynthiasaysboo.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Reposting again for the evening crowd. This event will be -- hopefully, if I fill the seats! -- the biggest event I've done so far. So I'm really hoping to see many of you at the Oakland Library on September 10.

Hey all! I have a couple more spots in my workshop on domestic fabulism if you want to join us! (Or watch it after, which also works!)

No Place Like Home: Writing Domestic Fabulism with Amber Sparks

Learn to write domestic fabulism with author Amber Sparks. Transform ordinary home and family stories with fantastical elements in this online seminar.

writingworkshops.com

Short stories my horror fiction students have found especially engaging: “The Noises from the Neighbors Upstairs: A Nightly Log” by @ambersparks.bsky.social in @smokelong.bsky.social Perfect to read aloud on the first day and imagine the terrifying possibilities www.smokelong.com/stories/the-...

The Noises from the Neighbors Upstairs: A Nightly Log - SmokeLong Quarterly

Night One The noises are small, faint scratches and scrapes. We lie in bed and look at the ceiling, drowsy, unconcerned. Rats in the walls, you say. Maybe a squirrel. I think it’s the ceiling, not the...

smokelong.com

@thelincoln.bsky.social needs to add the three-mile omniscience to his recent taxonomy

Dr SpookyGoth@ghostingdani.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Hello today is the day for my favorite piece of literary criticism ever:

🔥SALE🔥 Prime Day is now thru the 26th? COMPLETELY COINCIDENTALLY, ALL OUR E-BOOKS & MAGAZINES ARE 50% OFF THRU THE 26TH. Buy from our webstore, get your books & mags delivered INSTANTLY, + you own them outright! (Sorry, not applicable to preorders) 🖤☠️ store.tenebrouspress.com/collections/...

e-Books

Independent, award-winning publisher of Horror/Sci-Fi/speculative books, magazines and merchandise. Hail the Tenebrous Cult.

store.tenebrouspress.com

“One night, a police officer tried to arrest one of Compton’s trans patrons on some charge or other, and she responded by throwing hot coffee in his face.” “We were tired of being arrested for nothing,” Felicia “ Flames” Elizondo, a trans woman who lived in SF at the time, said in 2018. #Pride

Years before Stonewall, a cafeteria riot became a breakthrough for trans rights

<p>All about the Compton's Cafeteria riot, when drag queens and trans women rose up against police at a diner in San Francisco.</p>

advocate.com

Gabe Ortíz@tusk81.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The mural commemorates “Gene Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in August 1966, when transgender and gender-nonconforming patrons fought back against years of police harassment. The event is considered among the first significant LGBTQ uprisings, predating New York’s better-known Stonewall Riots in 1969.”

Also, daughter and I went to friend’s art gallery opening tonight in Boston and we spotted so many kilts. Fun vibes out there

Our family follows Mexico too so the World Cup is off to an excellent start

Hmmm. Did @theonion.com read my story “Conflagration Kills Five” in @smokelong.bsky.social which is definitely about a boy and a scary cake on fire? I will make a non-scary cake for the horse, by the way.

The Onion@theonion.com · 4mo ago

Commentary: I Work Very Hard, And I Would Like To Try Cake

Patrick Cottrell’s Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is compelling from beginning to end, so funny and weird and terribly sad and really just wonderful work. I want to read it again because there’s so much to think about, but first I want to go back and read his first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace.

This should be a bigger story. I didn't know Isaiah but almost everyone in my lab, my TA, and a few close colleagues knew him well. They all say he was a sweet guy who was just really into herps. This is a tragedy.

Uncle Leo@alazar.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Michigan State Police are investigating after an MSU zoology student from Maryland that was getting ready to graduate was shot, by his mother's count, 17 times by police. 17 times.

Editor Mea Cohen interviewed me about my piece “Gin: A Diptych” in The Palisades Review. Grateful for the thoughtful questions. www.thepalisadesreview.com/authorfeatur...

interview with Wyatt Bonikowski — The Palisades Review

thepalisadesreview.com

Just returning from a trip to Corpus Christi to visit my dad with my siblings. In addition to being a fun time hanging out all together, I also managed to eat six breakfast tacos and a plate of flautas in two days.

Methinks @djkungfugorilla.bsky.social might like these findings :)

Animation Magazine@animag.bsky.social · 6mo ago

A new study from UC Santa Barbara shows that watching experimental animation expands creativity and opens new ways of seeing the world. #Animation #ExperimentalAnimation #MentalHealth #BrainRot

The House must come back into session immediately to vote to end Trump’s war. The President is unhinged, lawless and bringing global chaos and we must stop him NOW. Our service members, Iranian civilians and our country’s national security depend on it. Read my full statement here:

"The 49-year-old Navy captain and former combat pilot from Pomona, California, makes it a habit to listen to Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" and Marvin Gaye's "Make Me Wanna Holler" from the white-dominated Apollo era." www.pbs.org/newshour/amp...

Meet the Artemis crew on NASA's first moon mission in more than half a century

This first Artemis crew includes a woman, a person of color and a Canadian, products of a more diversified astronaut corps.

pbs.org

Strong recommendation to teaching faculty to just say no to this stuff, even if you are AI curious/enthusiastic. This is meant to reduce faculty autonomy and capture human labor with automation. You're selling out your future self and the profession as a whole. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Canvas Unrolls AI Teaching Agent

The new AI agent aims to save faculty time on “low-value tasks,” but stops short of fully automating grading. But some experts worry that the rise of agentic AI could lead to a dead classroom, where c...

insidehighered.com

In The Village editor Kim Magowan talks about what it's like to edit Pithead Chapel. smokelong-quarterly.mn.co/posts/intro-...