Alison Booth

Toni Morrison Is Not in the Epstein Files Let's talk about the serious intellectuals, the ones not on the Lolita Express, the ones who could spell.

open.substack.com/pub/virginia... Virginia Heffernan calling out the loss and sinister warp to American intellect because of the Epstein magical mystery tour.

To Do List A distraction, From April, 2008; revised December 28, 2020; share, January 8, 2026

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... is one of my poems inviting future stirrings of household gods or stuff. What we waste or keep is a metaphor and an actual hassle,

Unreliable Narrator Any Memoirist

There's lots to say when you think about the Unreliable Narrator as I do. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... The emulator machines are out there giving verisimilitude for unreliable reasons, like courtiers. But take joy in all the good stories also out there. How to preserve these posts?

Throughout the day, I'm going to attempt to tag some of the PI's who just won HAVI awards from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social! "Bridging Large-Scale Computational Analysis and the Close Viewing of Film and Television" @dbamman.bsky.social @nolauren.bsky.social Taylor Arnold, Allison Cooper.

Photo of a wood-boothed videogame arcade booth with red and blue buttons and joysticks; the monitor shows a videogame credits list

Photo of an interactive typewriter art electronics and collective memory mapping exhibit, with an electric typewriter and printer in a red snd blsck marble painted booth with an iridescent acrylic surround

Closeup photo of a wood poetry generator machine, a massive wood barrel made of staves laserburned with short phrases; 3D printed red chains allow three sections of the cylinder to turn at different rates when the crank is cranked, aligning the phrases into new combinations of poetry lines

Photo of a wood poetry generator machine, a massive wood barrel made of staves laserburned with short phrases; 3D printed red chains allow three sections of the cylinder to turn at different rates when the crank is cranked, aligning the phrases into new combinations of poetry lines

Machines in the lab. Retro arcade videogames, a typewriter that types you prompts to type back memories & prints the outcome as a zine; a even wooden generative poetry machine (last 2=by Critical Makerspace Fellows Holly Zhou, Alexa Luborsky; both w/Ammon Shepherd) +

Haunting National Holidays, Superhero Teams, and Other Time Laps In which clever readers will detect political allegories; some will appreciate a story and poem by Edith Wharton; others will note recommendations of Tana French and other detective series

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...
There's a tad in this post of DH re literature online (a mess). Or well done, e.g. Donna M. Campbell's bibliographies for the Edith Wharton Society public.archive.wsu.edu/campbelld/pu...
And let's winnow wheat of supported history from chaff of fake tributes.

Urgent Email Redux, Contextual Help Tech Memory Laps 1

Remember your first email account? Curious about AI? See how helpful Claude can be! But do not volunteer when asked to help the LLMs shape your world and consciousness! This post semi-seriously proposes AI as a workaround for our decades of email overload.
open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

Flowers in Fall sunshine in Conservatory Garden, Central Park.

The waterfall surrounded by Fall foliage in the Harlem side of Morningside Park, with green pond in foreground.

This is an imported stalactite grotto with a girl who captured a goose statue at Kykuit, the astounding Rockefeller estate.

substack.com/@alisonbooth...
Let me be sure not to feature my profile picture. Fall cheer pictured from NY. All posts I read are suitably concerned about latest events. We keep on. I share a talk (outtakes and images) I gave to the hospitable Victorian seminar at CUNY Graduate Center.

Oh no! All health to you!

Edgar Allan Poe and Edward Gorey were hired to a new government agency to design the big beautiful triumphal arch, but they got talking, got the best idea for a Dr. Strangelove remake. No one in the world ever saw anything like it! Made America, get it?

Alison Booth (@alisonbooth) Friends who are in New York Thursday 10/23, come join the CUNY Victorian seminar: 6pm, CUNY Graduate Center, Room 8301, where I will present “George Eliot and Virginia Woolf Will Never Be the Same,” ...

substack.com/profile/1322...

Heroes for America: Ranking and Forgetting in Public A Nineteenth-Century Idea, a Proclamation for Statues in the Age of Chatbots

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...
In this post, I honor a book by Sheila Gerami that ties the 1901 Hall of Fame for great Americans to the 2017 unite the right rally in Charlottesville. But that ain’t all I share some AI chatbot absurdities about the proposed Garden of American Heroes in 2025.

American white girl , 1960-1970s Part III or so in My Race and Place

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

Alison Booth chat Join now in the Substack app

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... I post weekly or so. subscribe for free. I look at race and place, statues, memories about changing technology and academia across a lifetime. Practicing prose and poetry and keeping some hope a bit apart from the news.

I am always looking for an escape from ideology. That’s why I admire the Department of Ideology Hunters. They know gender backwards and forwards when they see it. (Love Virginia Heffernan).

MAGA Gender Theory Trump's ideas about gender are way, way, way more complex than Judith Butler's.

open.substack.com/pub/virginia...

Alison Booth (@alisonbooth) After long silence, thoughts on not dying too soon, also known as living to 100. We are celebrating my mother’s 100 year. What’s it all mean, Mr. Natural?

substack.com/@alisonbooth...

Autocomplete To be continued (feel free). creative commons license

UVA, with an Interim President, pays dear to a search firm and squanders human hours instead of serving the mission of learning! Instead of freaking out: share your pernicious or bizarre autocompletes. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

I hope all is well! I sometimes get similar reviews from family members.

Paul G. Mahoney Paul G. Mahoney is a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor and served as dean of the Law School from 2008-16. Mahoney's teaching and research areas are securities regulation, law and economi...

In a remarkably sedate Board of Visitors meeting (why, closed session for 1.5 hour at least), members of the community were able to hear the roll call to appoint Paul G. Mahoney the Interim President of UVA. www.law.virginia.edu/faculty/prof...

While I am feeling the changing of the guards in the library.virginia.edu/dh-center I take delight in
rewriting today: Substack newsletter. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...
A sabbatical in this day and age doesn't mean I'm going anywhere.

Why AI chatbots lie to us A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic’s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agr...

Why AI chatbots lie to us | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A sensible account of why we must keep humans in the loop, ignore sycophancy, and keep a leash on "agentic" AI driven by the doubtful goals, roles, and notions that slipped into the pre- and posttraining. Humans still have work!

Inconvenient truths from @alisonbooth.bsky.social:
1. The narrative genre that ends in death is not (necessarily) tragedy. (See: biography.)
2. Reference entries (e.g. Wikipedia, Oxford Dictionary of Nat'l Biography, etc.) are not biographies. (Because genre, not bcse poorly written)
#DH2025

Richmond, Indiana 2 What one wants to remember

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...
I think about the secrecy of outsiders. As the white faculty family in a small town, we had little to fear, but we really were extremely bent to please. This post is wondering about Black-white relations in the 1950s where I was born.

How Many Statues are Enough? Mount Rushmore Ambitions and Iconoclasm

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...
Have a look, and share any statue interests of your own. Have you ever seen a Madonna of the Trail in person?

University of Virginia President Resigns Under Pressure From Trump Administration

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/27/u... After last night's headline, this outcome. What next, all y'all? There will be no university presidents safe from trumped-up charges in Newspeak. I actually invoked states' rights in my messages to senators and congressman this morning.

Richmond, Indiana Quakers of Earlham; National Roads

open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo... This begins My Race and Place, memories and investigations from childhood onward, probing privilege and contact zones. It's a thread in my Writing without Surveillance sabbatical newsletter.

The Fiction Folders Archaic documents

The second post has fun thinking about typing and the days of copy centers and sending originals to publishers. There will be more frequent posts at first to set up the sections or threads of this refreshing venture. open.substack.com/pub/alisonbo...

Writing without Surveillance Samples from an archive before email, before the Internet, before AI; a content provider experiments in a time of catastrophe as if we still send SASEs.

I am just starting alisonbooth.substack.com/p/writing-wi..., my year of writing in genres I supposedly outgrew after I got my tenure track job. I need my other favorite Substack authors for the most timely insights. What I past feels urgent to me but runs along memory lane.

@megsmith.bsky.social Like the Rocovery Hub for American Women Writers and your "infrastructure as mutual aid." I'm serious about satirizing the throwback National Garden of Heroes and the data implicit in the list of people offered as subjects for statues. #ACH2025