Mark Celeste

My hot take about the “students cannot read whole novels / watch whole films / etc.” is that they can learn to do it. None of us are born with attention spans suited for long media. It is a learned skill and can be developed with practice.

me: "I offer something even better than extra credit."

[*students sit up in excitement*]

me: "Regular credit."

[*general booing, hissing, and throwing of rotten vegetables*]

Carla Arnell calling for the creation of dedicated, credit-bearing writing labs: "If colleges still wish to claim writing skill as an important learning outcome, they need to become more deliberate about what it means to educate student writers in the age of AI."

You're very welcome, Riya! Your syllabus has been such an inspiration. Best wishes for this semester!

CALL FOR PAPERS: TRAFFIC
Proposal Deadline: 15 February 2026
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NASSR/NAVSA
Pasadena, California
November 11-15, 2026
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For more information, visit: traffic2026.ucr.edu
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#19C #Traffic @navsa.bsky.social

The rate of global sea level rise doubled during the past three decades - Communications Earth & Environment Global mean sea level rise amounted to 4.5 mm per year as a result of warming oceans and melting land ice, more than twice the rate of 2.1 mm/year observed at the start of satellite data in 1993, base...

The rate of global mean sea level rise has increased from ~2.1 mm/year in 1993 to ~4.5 mm/year in 2023. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Shoutout, too, to the excellent undisciplined Brit lit survey syllabus by Riya Das (@drrd.bsky.social): undiscipliningvc.org/html/syllabi...

For anyone prepping a #syllabus for a Brit lit survey:

Check out my recent open-access article in _Victorians_, which considers how to design an #inclusive survey for non-majors. By centering "amateur" undergrad knowledges, we can rethink Brit lit surveys from below.

muse.jhu.edu/article/969209

Fatberg weighing 100 tonnes discovered in east London sewer Mass of congealed fat, oil and grease 100 metres in length found blocking sewers in Whitechapel area of capital

The fat was here, the fat was there, / The fat was all around

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Tech wythout heart ys harmful.

For a bettir future we need poetrye, creativitye, historical studye, love of languages, dreames, dialogues, new storyes, & intellectual curiositye.

We must fund & expand higher educacioun yn HEART:

H umanityes
E thiques
A rtes
R hetorique & the crafte of
T eaching

Not now, haunted Victorian shoes

marks in my whale-books

a man is throwing papers in the air while sitting on a couch ALT: a man is throwing papers in the air while sitting on a couch

when H-Net releases a torrent of notification emails

Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020 Cambridge Core - English Literature: General Interest - Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020

It's very exciting to say that Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020 has just been published in @universitypress.cambridge.org's Elements in the Gothic series – and it's currently open access and *free* to download until the end of December!

doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Line graph showing the history of different types of '[adjective] reading' in Anglophone literary studies from 1920-2020. The x-axis represents publication decades, while the y-axis shows the percent of '[adjective] reading' instances in literary studies journals as a 9-decade moving average. Multiple colored lines track various reading methodologies over time. 'Close reading' shows the most dramatic rise, peaking around 2010 at approximately 18% (33 times its 1920s usage). 'Original reading' dominated the 1920s at 7.6% but declined to 0.5% by the 2010s. Other notable methodologies include 'careful reading' (peaked 1960s), 'critical reading' (peaked 1980s), 'wide reading' (1920s), 'correct reading' (1930s), 'new reading' (1950s), 'feminist reading' (1990s), 'textual reading' (2000s), 'distant reading' (2010s), and 'nuanced reading' (2010s). Each labeled point includes the decade of peak usage, the percentage at peak, and the ratio compared to its lowest-usage decade. Data sourced from JSTOR across seven leading literary studies journals including PMLA, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, ELH, Modern Language Review, Review of English Studies, and Modern Philology.

The relative usages of "[adjective] reading" in Anglophone literary studies journals, 1920-2020. Made for my "Prac Crit" course next term, "[Adjective] Reading". Interactive version here: public.tableau.com/views/Adject...

Chart from The Economist showing the annual income in 1798 of various professions and of Jane Austen characters

Happy birthday to Jane Austen, and to this very on-brand Economist chart
www.economist.com/christmas-sp...

"I've had it up to here with your pathetic fallacy, buddy."

the TLDR of mercantile maritime capitalism

The first installment in the Charles Dickens Cinematic Universe™️

*pushes nerd glasses up nose* Actually, the meme-phrase is inaccurate: Dickens's original line is "You will be haunted ... by three spirits."

you will be visited by three spirits

[3/3] Those insights grew sharper, I feel, because students had to put themselves in my shoes and imagine how *someone else* would view and assess their work.

Several told me afterward that getting outside of their own heads wasn't easy, but it was productive.

[2/3] There's some (intentionally?) comic glazing, of course ("He turned in the best essay I have ever seen in my whole career! He deserves all the extra credit!"), but there's also some astute, honest insights about their own strengths and areas for improvement.

[1/3] For their final reflection of the semester, I had students pretend to be me and write a short letter of recommendation about their overall work in the course.

The hard copies also (1) show you who actually has the reading with them in class (although we shouldn't be the police) and (2) cuts down on distractions. I think that this is one of the last opportunities to model slow, focused thinking for students.

I've almost exclusively been using hard copies over the last year, and it's produced good results overall. Beyond the genAI issues, the printed copies also encourage students to develop a system of annotation -- more than just highlighting half the page.

there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally

The Origin of Hegseth’s Anti-Beard Obsession The fierce opposition to facial hair is less about policy and more about memory.

Beards don’t compromise military effectiveness, former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Alex Wagner argues. Pete Hegseth’s policy proves he’s failed “to align military policy with evidence, fairness, and the diverse composition of the nation”:

The second sentence: a blue Christmas indeed -- Dickens's oceanic imagination at work.

snow on dogwood tree branches

snow on the dogwoods this morning