Tina Lu

Is there something I am missing or did I in fact get the point? Harvard’s Asian Futures is all white people!

Oh, I thought you meant NHV!

Dude, have you ever been to this station during the week? Every Amtrak on the east coast stops here. Metro North goes to GCT several times an hour. It’s an extremely busy station—many trains an hour.

Thank you to all the MLA members who participated in this afternoon's open discussion session with @tinalu888.bsky.social, Herman Beavers, and Waïl Hassan and shared how the current threats to higher ed are affecting you and how the MLA might help. 1/3

I challenge my fellow members to come up with the most expansive, connective panels you can conceive of, to discuss as well as to mirror our “family resemblances”: panels that include not only different kinds of institutions but also of many different nations and fields. 10/10

a place of community and advocacy and a space for sharing our reading, writing, and teaching. With this presidential theme, I urge you to join me in considering our scholarly and professional familial and quasi-familial connections and in making the MLA into your intellectual home too. 9/10

concerns early modern Chinese sources and especially a kind of drama that originated in the area around Suzhou. Nonetheless, despite my niche corpora—and the fact that I have given my share of papers at the convention to an audience of less than a dozen —I’ve come to regard the MLA as one of my 8/10

but perhaps it can also spur us to reimagine the acts of comparison and relational thinking that are one core of our shared work.
I am honored to be the first Asian American and Asianist to serve as president of the MLA. As a scholar I contain even more minority identities: my work mostly 7/10

outsized impact in many fields, but perhaps especially literary studies, where it has turned out to be remarkably generative when it comes to considering genre, identity, and literary histories. This year’s theme invites conversations within traditions and about literal forms of kinship, 6/10

Nonetheless, it does not take a Wittgenstein to see all our family resemblances or the way in which our present moment places all of us not in precisely the same situation but in a complicated network of connecting challenges and opportunities.
This short passage by Wittgenstein has had an 5/10

build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way” (Philosophical Investigations, Macmillan, 1958, pp. 31, 32).
It would be similarly almost impossible to come up with unifying characteristics of the MLA’s membership and our collective work. 4/10

of detail.” Wittgenstein moves away from the definition—whose essence is to exclude—to the inclusive metaphor of the family: “I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: 3/10

Wittgenstein writes about how difficult it is to come up with categorical definitions of what constitutes a game. Even a quick glance reveals so much diversity: “we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities 2/10

Hi, folks. I am the President of the MLA and am planning plenary sessions for the @modernlanguage.bsky.social convention in January. The theme is “Family Resemblances.” Brainstorm with me—below or via email: tina.lu@yale.edu. Read more about my theme below! 1/10

i am going to put a finer point on this: executive orders are not laws. and they certainly are not royal decrees. they are interpretations of existing law for the purposes of enforcement. the fact that so many people are treating them as laws is actually driving me a bit insane.

I was yesterday years old when I learned that “condominium” is an 18th century word. It’s con-dominium (“shared dominion”) not condo-minium. You’re welcome!

Always felt this way about the character 襪.

Let me be a cautionary tale. Don’t send in passport photos in glasses.

Back by popular demand💅

…and high school valedictorian, and double degrees from Penn, and now a modern day 刺客!

What an utterly unlikely assassin martyr. Here’s another image of him. x.com/pepmangione

A high school valedictorian, a BSE and MSE from Penn, and now a martyr. The system really does seem broken.

images.app.goo.gl/SPbS7Yv4PzcN...

Omg I’m so excited!

Within a few months we’ll be following all the public health folks. Might as well get a jump and start following @gregggonsalves.bsky.social !

A single mutation in bovine influenza H5N1 hemagglutinin switches specificity to human receptors In 2024, several human infections with highly pathogenic clade 2.3.4.4b bovine influenza H5N1 viruses in the United States raised concerns about their capability for bovine-to-human or even human-to-h...

So we haven’t seen this occur in nature and there are other hurdles H5N1 would have to surmount to efficiently spread human to human. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

You should be able to go to your local Democratic Party headquarters and get help with anything you need help with. Don't have a printer and need to print out a form? We gotcha! Need help applying for a passport? We gotcha! Need a bathroom or a sandwich? We gotcha!

I'm not kidding in the least.

Wired for the GOP This column, by Alexander Burns, the head of news at Politico, is a rich example of the DC logic that only Democrats have agency and it’s only to Democrats that standards, norms…

"Democrats need to organize their future politics around the simple reality that the establishment media is structural hostile to the Democratic party."

My policy, reflecting different disciplinary standards.

An excellent balanced diet! Mine is lefty American handwringers (20%) and Qiong Yao (80%).

Metric for cultural China: ratio on your socials now of 瓊瑤 content vs that health care CEO who was just shot. Ol’ what’s his name. @chowleen.bsky.social