actually this would be perfect
06.03.2026 22:30
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actually this would be perfect
Hear me out, @npr.org... new weekly show featuring authors, editors, agents, publishers, prize judges, fanfic aficionados, TV scouts, and READERS of all kinds. It's called "BookTalk" and you've already got your new host IN STUDIO!
https://open.substack.com/pub/theamericanvandal/p/criticism-and-the-chatbot-bubble?r=hykx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
https://theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/theory-at-the-bargaining-table-vandal
I have to admit, I was always a little confused by the idea of "live" podcasting. There were many nudges and false starts before this current season of Vandal Live went into production.
These are now the two most-downloaded episodes in the history of the pod.
Shows how much I know.
i must've read the flamethrowers in 2014 or 2015. i'm reading it now. i forgot, or never knew, how good it is.
Really happy to say that my article on Pynchon and Star Wars is out now in Studies in American Fiction. I'm grateful to SAF for supporting a long and idiosyncratic piece. Honestly, it's kind of my life's work thus far! (2025 date is presumably because of a backlog.)
muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
Spoke with Vara for this one, stoked to read it.
Remarkable graph here of James Patterson's productivity over time
The Flamethrowers really has such DeLillo-esque prose. Is all Kushner like that? It's like McCarthy after Faulkner.
Kristi Noem misattributing a paraphrase of Rudyard Kipling to George Orwell really does sum it all up huh
"my favorite book of the year" 😭
front cover of the book Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant
making memes is a great classroom activity to complement the work students can do guided by my favorite book of the year
Half way done teaching Intro to Python for humanities - been great! Anyone have ideas for public datasets focused on culture for students to work on for final projects? @mellymeldubs.bsky.social @laurenfklein.bsky.social @nolauren.bsky.social @dmimno.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com @mariaa.bsky.social
A man asked me last night what publishing needs to do for literary fiction to begin appealing to men again. I said, as nicely as I could, that, with over 2,000 books published every Tuesday, of which many would appeal to men, it’s not a publishing problem, it’s a men problem.
This thread, please.
5. There are criticisms of LLMs that are much more plausible. They are built on a large scale expropriation of the intellectual commons. Demonstrably true! They involve a radical and extremely worrying derangement of power relations in favor of a tiny number of men with weird beliefs. Also true imo.
4. I think that it is important that critics of LLMs get this. The 'LLMs are useless which is terrible and everyone is using them which is also terrible' shtick contained contradictions even in the beginning, which took a lot of work to maintain . Now it contradicts people's lived experiences.
Screenshot of a course description that reads: Surviving the Textpocalypse. The advent of generative AI has been described as a ¿textpocalpyse," with chatbots producing content ranging from ¿AI slop¿ to missile target suggestions. As literary scholars and as people in the world, how do we survive? This course, paired with a humanities graduate seminar, will explore this question through theories of resistance, refusal, and reimagining; and through practice by gaining knowledge about how genAI works. Our goal is to implement strategies of survival and worldbuilding.
Pretty excited for HOW TO SURVIVE THE TEXTPOCALYPSE, the seminar I'm teaching at @emorycollege.bsky.social next fall with @shsalter.bsky.social (and with a nod to @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social for title inspo)
BookReconciler P - Metadata Enrichment and Work-Level Clustering • Who is this for? Digital humanities researchers, librarians, metadata specialists, and more. • What does it do? Finds, clusters, and enriches records for books. Adding ISBNS, HathiTrust IDs, subject headings, descriptions, page counts, publication dates, and more. To learn more about this tool's design, motivations, and related work, or to cite this tool, please see the following paper: "BookReconciler * •: An Open-Source Tool for Metadata Enrichment and Work-Level Clustering". ' Matt Miller, Dan Sinykin, and Melanie Walsh. Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. December 2025.
GitHub - Post45-Data-Collective/BookReconciler: BookReconciler, A Tool for Metadata Enrichment and Clustering of Book Data github.com/Post45-Data-Co… #AI #metadata #libraries #books
Honestly I might adopt DFW's resume section headers:
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS &c (IF ANYBODY CARES...)
300 years from now the last literary critic will spend their lonely life wondering, “why did all the classic literary characters wear dirty diapers?”
I think I finally found a good, ethical use for AI: have it rewrite classic literature but revised so that in each case the protagonist is wearing a dirty diaper.
I'm excited to be a co author on this new paper, "Computational Hermeneutics," with a bunch of other great scholars from the humanities + computer science. In it, we lay out concepts for evaluating gen AI's capacity for interpretation esp ambiguity, context, etc. www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...
Everything is the worst rn. Work keeps on keeping on. Support research in feminist and ethnic studies (not necessarily mine). If you are inclined: PREORDER dukeupress.edu/inside-the-b... Discount code E26PINTO @dukepress.bsky.social
cool!
I've seen versions of your project in a couple different forms over the years and look forward to its completion! If you have links to the CS studies, do share
I've been wondering ever since when we're going to see studies based on Ted's example....
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
