I am offline next week. I didn't quite manage to write a newsletter this week. Here's something from last week. Or maybe it was this week. Time is as surreal as the times we are in. With killjoy solidarity to everyone surviving and fighting imperial war machines. FKJ xx substack.com/@feministkil...
‘If Trump’s intention was to remove Khamenei from the political landscape, he may instead have fixed him in it, recast in the eyes of his devotees as a figure of sacrifice rather than failure.’
@eskandarsadeghi.bsky.social on the US war on Iran, new on the blog.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
New at PB: English professor Ben Parker asks: How good is ChatGPT at writing, really?
Imagine this kind of student organizing against Ed Tech / AI.
“I lost out on learning! Relationships! Oh and all of my personal data, too!”
www.bbc.com/news/article...
Thank you Dom! Hope you are well
Joan Scott on why the attack on gender studies by powerful patriarchal men is not a coincidence, but an attempt to silence critique and analysis of their abusive behavior. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
I don’t expect it to happen, but having unlawfully arrested and branded hundreds of your citizens ‘terrorists’ should really be a resigning matter for the Prime Minister in any free society.
"Only two English words rhyme with culture, and these, as it happens, are sepulture and vulture. We don’t yet call museums or galleries or even universities culture-sepultures, but I hear a lot, lately, about culture-vultures (man must rhyme)."
Raymond Williams
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!
Overjoyed to have my first article published in Textual Practice today on life-writing, network infrastructures, and formal experimentation in work by Kathy Acker and Joanna Walsh.
It’s open access too! Read here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
'A consultation run by the City of London Corporation and published on Thursday found that nearly 90% of respondents backed trans-inclusive access to the ponds' 💪🏳️⚧️❤️
I hate to tap the sign but again: this is all made to make in-person education and access to knowledge transfer a preserve of the elite. Human education for the few, bots for the many.
Another turn on the Genre Turn (and a review of Jeremy Rosen’s excellent Genre Bending). www.chronicle.com/article/is-l...
“In my writing, I want to display a self that disintegrates. I can prop that up with theory, but something must compel me in the first place.” —Robert Glück buff.ly/hw5gXxh
Really enjoyed thinking with your work!
wow - honoured to be here
This essay is part of my ongoing PhD research into the legacy and afterlife of Acker’s oeuvre. I’m exploring how Acker’s innovative strategies inform experimental literature by women and queer writers today.
Overjoyed to have my first article published in Textual Practice today on life-writing, network infrastructures, and formal experimentation in work by Kathy Acker and Joanna Walsh.
It’s open access too! Read here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
what a shocking turn of events
who could’ve seen this coming
Still plenty of time to submit an abstract for the BACLS New Work in Contemporary Literary Studies graduate conference at The University of Leeds on May 20th for PGRs and ECRs! Please share widely call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/11/...
@bacls.bsky.social
@maxrshirley.bsky.social
‘“I can’t pay my rent with prestige,” one sign said. Another was a mock-up of the cover of Great Expectations, with “Great” crossed out and replaced by “Reasonable”.’
Anna Aslanyan on the strike at the British Library, new on the blog:
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...
Anagrams Online guy, Neil Young Canterbury Tales, rusty tabernacle Marcel Proust, corrupt males Kylie Minogue, I like 'em young No real charm beneath Helena Bonham Carter Michael Keaton, the coke animal Julia Roberts, bestial juror A really sublime twit, wait, I'm really subtle, William Butler Yeats Revenge is our way, Sigourney Weaver Erotica villainess, Alicia Silverstone Andie McDowell, a wild old menace No brains on a date, Antonio Banderas (From Padam Padam, Collected Poems by Kevin Killian)
Anagrams by Kevin Killian
Cover of Lyric beyond Containment, a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, volume 36, issue 2–3. A yellow cover with black text.
differences 36.2–3 is out now — edited by Sarah Dowling and Claire Grandy, "Lyric beyond Containment" features essays from Jacques Khalip, David Marriott, Andrea Brady, Amy De'Ath, Whitney DeVos, Jan Mieszkowski, Ren Ellis Neyra, Susan Briante, more: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...
This headline is the end of civilization.
kind of obsessed with this custom binding for Moby dick by Susan and Chaim Ebanks at Exeter Bookbinders
It's official: 400 redundancies and a campus closure. At-risk staff will get a letter next week. Absolutely no serious consideration of any of the union's counterproposals.
Please share widely.
TODAY on the Small Press Takeover podcast, listen to Cole Swensen read at a special edition of the series, in collaboration with the Material Poetics Symposium🧡 open.spotify.com/episode/466i...
wrote an article for @thebookseller.com outlining to the industry why small presses are the lifeforce & future of book production. Pls share esp w people who may not know what small press publishers do!
www.thebookseller.com/comment/dont...
A graphic with the text "15 years / Double your impact. / Reviews essays interviews / Give today. /LARB
To ensure the future of our paywall-free writing, educational workshops, and staff and operations, we’re challenging ourselves to raise $100,000. All gifts are matched through Dec. 31; donate at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/donate/?utm_source=bsky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mgfd25&utm_id=mgfd25
