kate metcalf

reading beatty's white boy shuffle was a big part of my interest in becoming an americanist in college; reading the sellout a few years after i'd moved on from that was the first (and maybe last) thing that made me regret leaving lit studies behind.

and this was a social call, not even research! book two will be refrigerators: so, so much worse than you think

googled 'when does daily writing habit get easier' in a low moment; first result was 'slowly, don't despair if you're getting only 800 words in two hours!'

my feelings about this are unspeakable

today I had a phone call with some microbiologists in my life, who described in passing a "mysterious frozen brick," made of "certainly organic material.... but probably not tissue?" that they cleaned out of the back of a lab fridge today. we have never been biosecure etc etc

you're not even double stacking! you could get so many more books on those bad boys

I'm already out $3k for fall conferences and I've developed some kind of carpal tunnel issue but in my elbow (??) from terrible typing posture..... what more can grad school take from me before the quarter even starts 😔

there is nothing braver than revisiting your own interview data as audio rather than transcript, and listening to your own voice (awful) ask the worst possible questions (terrible) and make no good inferences at all (useless).

listing the song before the band name is psychotic behavior. i don't care about the song title if i don't care about the band; by omitting my off ramp you've subjected me to four extra words that i didn't want to read (12 if its midwest emo)

I like to think of it not as writing shit to amuse myself, but writing shit to psychologically damage my chair 😇

i hate that you have to write the bad draft before you can write the good draft. that really sucks and if i was in charge it'd be the other way around.

need to find a single detail in this book to clean up one last citation on an almost-finished manuscript.... but the book has NO INDEX *twilight zone music*

On the first day of class, Emre plans to give her students a poem without a name or date and instruct them to analyze it. "Oh!" she exclaimed suddenly, grinning ear to ear. "This would be a fun exercise. I'm going to show you my poems, and you can tell me what you think." She pulled them up on her laptop, and my mind immediately went blank, unable to form even the most rudimentary appraisals about verse or meter. "This one sounds, um, contemporary?" I said. She nodded encouragingly. "Notice anything else? Look at the last word of every line." Her hazel eyes probed me expectantly. "Can you count the syllables on each line?" Beads of sweat rolled down my forehead in the heat of Emre's dining room. "Are you uncomfortable?" she asked, four poems in. "We don't have to do it if it's not fun."

as a profile i think it's somewhere in the not-great to bad spectrum, but someone being this thoroughly intimidated by a cultural critic is like riotously funny to me

🙏

does someone have a gift link or something for the merve emre piece? i have an english degree i will literally perish if i can't read it

casting zooey deschanel as the mocking, prettier-than-you interior voice in the new season of physical was an inspired choice for a show designed to appeal exclusively to alt-inclined millenial women--most of whom experienced new girl-era zooey in this way for themselves

still waiting for a social media platform to come back around that's based on just posting cryptic song lyrics about how you feel, i think that could do really well in the y2k renaissance

bad paper reviews range from nbd to sort of funny for me, so then why are bad grant reviews an absolutely world historical amount of soul crushing?

Self portrait with orange curly hair on front of a painting of a woman with orange curly hair

I love her

This is an excellent piece on the misleading framing of "AI ethics" & "AI safety" as two equally valid research endeavours, while the former is grounded in reality, the latter adds no value
https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/talking-about-a-schism-is-ahistorical-3c454a77220f

Are we doing paper announcements here? Check out my ✨new essay✨ in Surveillance and Society (with Lilly Irani and Vero Uribe del Aguila), which examines institutional Covid data management and the limits of "privacy" through the lens of feminist surveillance studies. https://tinyurl.com/2p89tpud

no but really if i live past the NSF august deadline my life will be good again ferreal this time i really mean it, if i live past the NIH september deadline--

someone should.........

Text reads: TABLES: 2.1 Horizontal Transfer; 3.1 All 2^2^k=16 Boolean functions for binary elements with k=2 inputs; 5.1 Natural necessity mirrors logical necessity; 6.1 Sherman's levels of analysis; 6.1 Where conflict occurs. FIGURES: 1.1 Argument structure of the book; 3.1 Directed arrow graph for the case k=n-1; 3.2 A switching network can be transformed to represent a network of honeybees

reading sandra mitchell like borges poetics

(annoying person at the union meeting who you know is going to be a huge fucker) "oh no I don't have anything to say I'm just here to listen"

a painting of a black cowboy in a white hat and red shirt on a canary yellow background

a treat to go to the palm springs art museum--i've routinely thought of this piece (Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Side Profile of David Theodore) since i first saw it a few years back, nice to visit

this is a july 4 song, and also a labor day song, and also a flag day song if you wanna get weird about it

fridge as database is my whole dissertation

pulling up to the death of the internet

finding it very hard to get set up on this website when "sts" returns exclusively mass transit content and every tech critic appears to have been forcibly converted into an AI ethicist