Had a really nice dream where someone handed me a cocktail called a “flip flip” and then the alarm went off. Will now spend weekend attempting to engineer the “flip flip.”
06.03.2026 15:02
👍 5
🔁 0
💬 0
📌 0
Had a really nice dream where someone handed me a cocktail called a “flip flip” and then the alarm went off. Will now spend weekend attempting to engineer the “flip flip.”
Which would I think amount to something like access to the solace, joy, and enlivening complexity of art and ideas
The opposite of whatever it is that ”informational texts” and dumbed-down excerpts are supposed to offer them
The Department of Silly Names and Made-Up Jobs is really having a banner few months
But this is so hard when just making time in a course to read one big book, let alone many, is a lift, and always in competition with other “skills.” Imagine a version of secondary education that responded to the literacy crisis by allocating more time to work with long, complicated texts…
I hate how ”which books” debates can distract from the accretive nature of literary study. Reading *in quantity* is part of learning to close read individual texts well—you need the comparative tensions that emerge through engagement with lots of literature to hone in on nuance etc in a single work
Interesting how when a tradition gets undermined to the point of meaninglessness its essential weirdness, previously latent, seems inescapable
“Thoughtful responses” ☠️
So many delightful things about What We Can Know, but I especially liked the modesty of its long-scale optimism: the humanities still endure, mostly. Social media and AI still exist, but as public utilities. Most people avoid America when they can. A truly British speculative future.
I hope literary scholars are proud of the fresh, grounded stuff coming out lately. Big Fiction, Teaching Archive, now Manshel on high school English, McGrath forthcoming on literary agents ("Middlemen"). All the concrete aspects of literature-as-human-activity we used to ignore. +
Counterpoint: don't underestimate the power of obsession—a Wuthering Heights lesson
I like that the new one is so flagrantly *not* the novel. It's such a mess, delightfully so. Those title quotation marks don't lie! But I also know that it's going to guide a lot of people's experience of the novel and that does bum me out a bit, but then also, this is how pop culture works!
I get this. See also: Frankenstein
I feel like if the book is that good/beloved the adaptation doesn't really matter, you know?
It is! I think only vols 1-3 have come out in English, but it would be possible to teach the first on its own
Will always take an opportunity to recommend On the Calculation of Volume
It's here! I hosted a symposium on close reading at Emory in November. Matt Seybold recorded it for his podcast, American Vandal, and the first of three episodes is out today. Catch me, @johannawinant.bsky.social, @becimay.bsky.social, @bakaari.bsky.social + more podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...
Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.
CALL FOR PITCHES
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.
We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.
Details below!
264 days until Halloween, which should be just enough time to finish your dancing grass costume
Technology that doesn't work is a desired feature to the surveillance state, not a bug. When everyone is a "maybe" match, then probably cause can be manufactured to justify whatever it is one wanted to do in the first place. www.wired.com/story/cbp-ic...
This would be a great piece for info. literacy, research, AI literacy topics in first year writing and beyond. Tracking the timeline of proliferating zombie citations. One challenge I see with undergrads is lack of concept of the ecosystem in which info is created and circulates.
cover of The Washington Post on Wednesday Feb 4, 2026. Headline on bottom, right: Musk wanted to hook users; his chatbot got more sexual
My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power
I mean, shortsighted, really. Fire all the critics and who will you be able to coerce into writing a fawning paean for Melania II: The Third Inauguration
Thinking about ecosystem collapse as a metaphor for what’s being done to cultural criticism. You wipe out enough individual parts, eventually the whole thing turns into a wasteland
Oh also cats but that one’s accurate and on me
I love how the algorithm acts like my primary concerns are hot flashes and leggings even after I’ve mainlined anti-ice protest content for days
I hope someone good applies for this and gets the offer and then writes a tell-all essay about it in like the @yalereview.bsky.social or @thebeliever.net