Justin Smith, Ph.D.

And, if you are interested, I am working on putting together an AALCS panel on Black Artistic and Literary Responses to Misinformation that you can view here.

call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/10/...

ALA 2026 CFP: Come Present with AALCS in Chicago! African American Literature and Culture Society Call for Papers American Literature Association 37th Annual Conference May 20-23, 2026 Palmer House Hilton 17 E Monroe St,Chicago, IL 60603 The …

ALA 2026 CFP: Come Present with AALCS in Chicago!

Please share and submit an abstract!

aalcsblog.wordpress.com/2025/10/12/c...

I'll cautiously say I've noticed more skepticism about AI in the corporate world and it's mostly because people's coworkers are creating extra work for them. They don't have the vocabulary to describe it yet but it's basically the "Why should I read what you couldn't be bothered to write" thing

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

I'm an autistic person working in autistic advocacy. I'm reading the White House transcript so you don't have to. Stay tuned for my commentary.

And please consider inviting me onto your podcast! I've got a lot of experience speaking!

#ActuallyAutistic

We’re gonna need a bigger reconstruction.

weird that neither of these articles two main stories decrying censorship mention WaPo's firing of @karenattiah.bsky.social I guess democracy really does die in darkness

In the deserved uproar over Kimmel's suspension, don't forget WaPo & Bezos's gutless firing of the last Black columnist on their Opinions team. I've been following Karen since her bravery over Jamal Kashoggi's death and she walks the walk that so many of us are afraid to.

We’d be in a much stronger position right now if mainstream Democrats had taken a common sense stand for First Amendment principles instead of piling on undergraduate standing up for Palestine.

👇🎯 Once again, the answer here is that there are exactly <zero> societal institutions more protective of free speech, viewpoint diversity, & the marketplace of ideas than universities, least of all these places EK & RD think liberals don't go bc of their "bunker mentality"

bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Don’t you dare call us fascists, they say, as they force people off the airwaves for criticizing them while vowing to crush and criminalize their opposition.

After Charlie Kirk's death, teachers and professors nationwide fired or disciplined over social media posts At least a dozen faculty and staff have faced fallout over insensitive comments online.

I am having a hard time reconciling "Charlie Kirk was a fierce advocate of open dialogue and free expression" with "we must identify and persecute everyone who is insufficiently mournful"

Lost in the discussion of how Charlie Kirk "did politics the right way" are the lives of the two victims assassinated at Florida State University by a member of Kirk's organization, Turning Point USA, in April 2025.

the maga constitution doesn’t allow any institution, public or private, to explicitly work to ameliorate racial inequality but allows the government to racially profile

"Just the other day, I was in the audience at Lincoln Center when Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, while promoting a new book, that she doesn't think the United States is in a constitutional crisis," Farias told us. "Today, the Supreme Court, without offering a single line of reasoning, more or less declared that the Fourth Amendment, which protects everyone from unreasonable searches and seizures, nonetheless allows the Trump Administration to arrest and detain anyone who looks Latino, citizen or not, on account of the language that they speak or the kind of jobs they do. The ruling putatively covers the Los Angeles area, but the effect could be national," he continued. "If that's not a constitutional crisis, then what is?"

The New Yorker asked me “how bad” today’s Supreme Court ruling was. I boiled it down to one paragraph:

link.newyorker.com/view/5bda429...

The president of the United States just declared war, actual military war, not a metaphorical one, on a major American city, and one governed by his political opponents.

In any other period, this would be impeachment-worthy.

Transgender studies professor Dr. Susan Stryker tears Gavin Newsom a new one while accepting the Transgender Legacy Award from the California state legislature 🔥🔥🔥 @susanstryker.bsky.social

The Hobbyist Restorer Who Rocked the Art World With an A.I. Innovation

Can't help but think of current pause on PhD students in the excellent Dept of Art History at University of Chicago when reading this. A few thoughts on the AI-enhanced art conservation technique in this piece, i.e. digitally printed mask to be laid over paintings 1

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/w...

just thinking about it makes me so angry. the worst kind of open race baiting in american politics since george wallace.

I am a “decimate” truther.

I thought it coulda been that moment 17 years ago & it wasn't - and because it wasn't, a lot of avoidable damage, carnage and suffering has happened in the interim. Is now the tipping point? I'm older and wiser and have a better sense of what I don't know. So I don't know. But I certainly hope so.

Describe something you learned from lecture this week that you didn’t know just from doing the readings. Connect something you learned in 209 this week to something you are learning in another of your classes this semester. If Monday and Wednesday assigned readings were from two different texts, make connections between the two. Do they share themes? Forms? Tone? Historical context? Do you find them equally interesting? Look at the very first paragraph of one of our texts and discuss how the opening lays the groundwork for the rest of the work. Quote specific lines, phrases, or images. Using quotes from a text, persuade someone (friend or foe, your grandma or your senator) to change their mind about something important. Compose a 5 song playlist to accompany an assigned reading from this week, and write a few sentences for each song, explaining your choices. Describe an idea you had in response to the readings/lecture/discussions for our class this week- any idea, about literature, or the world, or yourself. How might you pursue this idea, in your studies or elsewhere? Choose a passage (no more than 10 lines) from the readings this week and rewrite it, changing at least one of the literary aspects such as: person (change from first to third-person or vice versa), tense (change from past to present etc), focalizing character (i.e. write it from a different character's perspective), style (adjectives, diction, description, tone). Then write 2-3 sentences about the effect of your changes. Compose a yelp review to strangers, or a letter to a specific person, or a booktok style video, recommending a novel/poem/play from this week’s reading. Write a letter to someone who has questioned your choice of majoring or minoring in English, explaining why you value what you’re learning. Include quotes / ideas from this week’s readings.

syllabus time, teaming up for the herculean efforts of reinventing writing assignments. here, some prompts for required weekly low stakes 250-500 word reflections/ process pieces that have proven relatively conducive to real writing in lit class. please share any similar suggestions in thread.

Those who organized Colored Conventions rallied for democracy and citizenship rights as state and national forces sought to deny them protections clearly outlined in the constitution. They were often forcefully dissenting voices.

We will soon make public a new trove of Reconstruction conventions.

This is an increasingly unsettling story, told only in ChatGPT conversation screenshots, that illustrates both the "bullshit, not hallucination" phenomenon as well as the straight up, sociopathic lying that AI tools will do to keep us engaged

YouTube video by Freethink Why Do Selfies Matter? Ask Frederick Douglass

Interesting article, but I think Douglass still has to hold the title of "original selfie king" youtu.be/6_Oagi-WvQE?...

Dr. Hayden has been such a transformative and inspiring Librarian for the past decade. If you haven't had the privilege to spend time with LC staff, you may not realize what a sea change she brought to our national library. One of the all-time greats. A huge loss for millions and millions.

Congress has the power to restore funding to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Join me in calling your reps!

19th century US history is replete with examples of collective organizing in resistance to tyranny. Slavery could not have been abolished without underground and out in the open organized collective resistance and refusal to comply with unjust law.

Unfortunately @zooniverse.bsky.social is still down, and may be that way all of today. status.zooniverse.org

If you're looking for something to #transcribe, may I suggest helping the @douglassday.bsky.social folks get through the rest of their LoC data at crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/af...?