Dan Sinykin

#ScholarSunday Thread 253 (12/7/25) – Black and White and Read All Over Like Rudolph or Mariah, the #ScholarSunday powers grow ever stronger as December deepens. See for yourself with my 253rd thread of great public scholarly writing & work, podcast episodes, new & forthc...

Like Rudolph or Mariah, the #ScholarSunday powers grow ever stronger as December deepens. See for yourself with my 253rd thread of great public scholarly writing, podcast eps, new & forthcoming books from last week. Add more below, share widely, & enjoy, all! 🗃️

blackwhiteandread.com/scholarsunda...

great conversation starters for a first date:
- what's your favorite Linear A inscription?
- how did you learn Linear A?
- would you like to establish a written correspondence in Linear A?

The scene in MATERIALISTS where Pedro Pascal bends his knees to show Dakota Johnson how short (and self-loathing) he would have been—5'6"—without his heightening surgery is the stupidest bit of cinema I've seen since DON'T LOOK UP.

That anyone likes this movie is shocking. It's so bad.

I did not use canvas in any of my classes this semester. I set up a google drive (yes, I know, imperfect but I did it in ~1 week) for each class with subfolders for various materials and assignments. Things went well with only a bit more checking in *until* the end of the semester crunch. A thread 🧵

American’t-o part 2

Now that this chapter is concluding, I think it's fair to focus our ire on the true villains in this story: the management at Vanity Fair who hired her in the first place.

We'd all be in a better place, including her, if she weren't brought back like this.

"Those of us who reject romantic notions of individual genius nevertheless can admit that there’s something to be said for a dose of extreme, un-assimalable newness—an aesthetic experience that does not appeal merely to our existing tastes and preferences, that does something unprecedented to us."

Title page and hand colored frontispiece featuring a squirrel with a quill facing a book with the caption "Bob writing his Travels."

Hand-colored illustration of squirrel sitting near water with caption, "Bob Embarrassed."

Looking through old photos & rediscovered The Travels & Extraordinary Adventures of Bob the Squirrel (1847). (Note the amazing captions, somewhat impressionistic hand coloring, & illustration credit given to "Distinguished Artists.")

Life-Giving, Imaginative and Underfunded: Small Press Publishers in Crisis A recent letter co-written and signed by small press publishers has highlighted the significant pressures they face, threatening them with closure and potentially damaging the literary ecosystem ir…

"small presses take risks that bigger publishers don’t, so we end up with some really interesting and original writing. With Cipher, we publish exclusively queer and trans literature; our aim was to amplify work from underserved authors" lithub.com/life-giving-...

The print version of my new book has now dropped -- proposing a new theory of literary value, a cultural sociology of literary networks, taking a "institutional" look at US/Anglophone lit between 1800 and the present

Why Sales For Olivia Nuzzi's ‘American Canto’ Don’t Look Good Despite the high-profile rollout, “American Canto” seems to be the flop of the year.

I'm in Forbes calling the Amazon rank for AMERICAN CANTO "strikingly low" 💪🤣 www.forbes.com/sites/maryro...

CRUCIAL! by Stephanie Foote

"I...lived through the devastation of a solid public university by a professional grifter who imagines himself as a visionary, and who takes every opportunity to express his vision. That person was Gordon Gee, and the university he destroyed was West Virginia University"

My favorite 21C film is UNCUT GEMS and my dad, Jewish, was Minnesota's top table tennis player in, like, 1972, so to say I'm stoked for szechuan and MARTY SUPREME on Xmas is a huge fucking understatement

Also, in Clarissa-related news, I am VERY thrilled to be part of this today (my little presentation will be on the perversity of close-reading one little bit, a single word, in a 1500-page novel)

Let’s say you had the opportunity to assign college students *1* thing (article, video, podcast) to help them understand what edtech is, how it’s funded, who benefits from it, and how it preys on their data. What hits these bases in a comprehensive, up-to-date, and powerful way?

After the University…page proofs

The Invention of Close Reading By transforming quotations into evidence, close reading served as way to turn postwar criticism into a specialized knowledge. But what if we treated it more as an art form?

Maybe this will be my year to make the Adam Morgan round up. www.thenation.com/article/soci...

This is great. One of the things we should be teaching is "taste" and "discernment." This used to not be unusual. I have an experience in The Writer's Practice that's a "passion argument" where students have to convince the audience to do something (like read a particular book). I used it often.

the one i read in 2000

Not too many books more deserving of the kind of heater this book is on right now with the year-end lists.

Unwanted Reading: A Review of Tom Comitta’s ‘People’s Choice Literature’ The Sunday before I taught Beloved last spring, I sat on my couch wondering how I was going to convince a room full of second semester seniors that, before they left high school that June, they sho…

Had a lot of fun writing this review of @tomcomitta.bsky.social’s strange, moving, and hilarious book. Gets us to think, as I argue here, about the value of an aesthetic education—something we all should aim for as we teach our kids.

mid-theory.com/2025/12/04/u...

UNL professors march through campus in New Orleans-style 'funeral' to protest proposed budget cuts Students, alumni, faculty and community members came together to protest the $27.5 million in budget cuts.

art is for everybody, language is for everybody, ideas are for everybody, including nebraskans

www.klkntv.com/unl-professo...

He never sleeps, Toronyan. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

i wonder where anyone got the idea to call zionists colonizers

could it be from their conference in 1899 voting to publicly declare their intention to colonize the holy land? their language not mine.

Co-writing this was a very rewarding experience. If anyone hasn't had a chance to read these stories by Jamil Jan Kochai, I'd urge you to do so!

Friends, @keeblearin.bsky.social and I have a new essay out at ASAP/Review about @jamiljankochai.bsky.social's "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak." It was a pleasure to work with Arin and with @davidhering.bsky.social and @emmywaldman.bsky.social!

asapjournal.com/node/jamil-j...

“Not So Ephemeral After All”: Talking Op-Eds, War, and Memory with Bécquer Seguín - Public Books “Why does the op-ed still hold sway over writers who want to be intellectuals or want to have some public presence?”

“Muñoz Molina has what we might call a hypermoral sensibility, which drives his newspaper writing and, I argue, simultaneously drives his novel writing.”

New at PB: @becquer.bsky.social on the novelists who became Spain’s premiere op-ed columnists.

“The labor is unsustainable and we have to do something to break the cycle of burn out.” 😮‍💨

We really need to talk more about fundraising in small press and university press publishing *as* fundraising — ie a job duty — and as a labor issue not just a revenue stream or potential constraint on the product