Dan Sinykin

a man wearing glasses and a vest with the olympic rings on it is laughing . ALT: a man wearing glasses and a vest with the olympic rings on it is laughing .

First-year student stopped me in the library to ask me, "Hi, I'm new here, and I'm just looking around. Where are all the books?"

Reader, I wept.

(*the college culled the physical collection and, put those remaining in high density storage in the basement.)

The Prototype

The Mutational Romances of Silicon Valley Speculation (A Tale of Today, Episode #18) with Jordan S. Carroll, Jacob Silverman, and...Fredric Jameson

today I did 3 important things: listened to @jordanscarroll.bsky.social on @mattseybold.bsky.social's The American Vandal, became a *paid* subscriber to the AV, & bought Jordan's now Hugo-winning book--& you can too! www.upress.umn.edu/978151791708... theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-mutati...

Inside Out: On Lara Mimosa Montes’s “The Time of the Novel” - Cleveland Review of Books In "The Time of the Novel", these anxieties concerning what constitutes the real versus the fictional are pushed to their logical extreme: a young woman quits her bookstore job in order to instead, sh...

For @clereviewbooks.bsky.social, I wrote about Lara Mimosa Montes’s excellent ‘The Time of the Novel,’ and the book’s porous boundary between reality and fiction: clereviewofbooks.com/inside-out-o...

This is so cool! Sharing with researchers who are interested in the literary market 👍

The Canon of Asian American Literature – Post45 Data Collective This dataset traces the Asian American literary canon through nearly 1,900 scholarly citations from 1971 to 2023, capturing which authors and texts have shaped the field over time.

📚 New dataset: The Canon of Asian American Literature

From 1971–2023, nearly 1.9k scholarly citations chart the evolving field—spanning nearly 800 authors, 1,000 works, and five decades of canon formation.

Explore the data here: doi.org/10.18737/092...

A fantastic resource for anyone interested in American literature, ethnic studies, or the changing literary canon!

This resource maps the growing fields of Asian American literature & scholarship since the 1970s.

It includes more than 700 scholarly publications, plus every work cited in them—books, film, TV, video games, etc—and detailed demographic information for their authors.

Explore, teach, & build on it!

There's an unfortunate Kind of Guy who thinks he's smarter than everyone else, resents that dumber people have had more success, and responds by being mean, nasty, and snarky online. The Unrecognized Genius.

Hey look at who Cuomo has running his socials

looking for some fun literary datasets for the upcoming semester? check these out!

The missing piece of the equation explaining why so many critic positions are being eliminated is the little AI summaries at the top of Google results, which reduced click-throughs drastically. Once again, a tech company has stolen human labor and monetized it and doesn't care about the impact.

The good internet is history On Deadspin, The Awl, and the end of a golden age of cultural criticism

theweek.com/articles/875...

Just devastating, I'm so sorry

Some of you know from FB or elsewhere already, but our wonderful, funny, & unfailingly generous colleague Ricardo Ortiz died suddenly over the weekend. It is the most brutal possible news, and so profoundly sad. He was a source of joy and love and was a committed mentor to so many of us here.

Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips announces he has taken a buyout and the Trib is eliminating his post. Unless I am missing someone I believe this leaves the nation's third-largest city without a single full-time film writing gig.

"very finished" 😭

A Golden Age? Today, criticism is being practiced and received as an artform in its own right. What makes this possible, and can it last?

I think this is totally right as the task. And also I suppose then you don't buy Ryan Ruby's golden age of criticism argument.... www.vinduet.no/essayistikk/...

I'm about to teach my "criticism in the digital age" class again this term, and, for the first time, I'm not going in thinking that my main hurdle is getting students to take a disposable form seriously, but rather that what I need to do is INTRODUCE a form they either don't know or distrust. 4/x

Something I've come to realize in my teaching the past few years is that, while I grew up thinking of reviews as kind of "easy" to consume — service-oriented, shorter, the fun stuff at the back — they aren't anymore. On a spectrum that includes RT or TikTok, reading reviews feels like work now. 1/x

I hate this. I was addicted to Siskel and Ebert as a kid. Introduced me to criticism, as conversation, with stakes. That their papers no longer will have film critics, another daily blow to a life more than neoliberal necessity and authoritarian subjection

that's the Chicago Sun-Times and the Tribune getting rid of their film critics within six months of each other. If they made Siskel and Ebert today it would be two empty chairs.

There is so much depressing culture news but wow this hits HARD.

First proofs!

good morning happy back to school to all who celebrate, happy one week of summer left to all the syllabus scramblers, happy grr to the quarter system people, here's some help for all of us in the college classroom

against-a-i.com

Just learned that Ricardo Ortiz died suddenly and much too young of a heart attack on Friday. He guest edited a cluster on public humanities for me at @atpost45.bsky.social several years ago and it was a pleasure working with him. Real tragedy.
post45.org/2019/07/intr...

Bears Will Be Boys A data analysis of animal gender in children’s books

Also the very VERY cute visual essay with @puddingviz.bsky.social pudding.cool/2025/07/kids...

This came out while I was canoeing in Canada so I missed it but it's terrific and Melanie rules

A dot plot titled '"nthropomorphized Animals in Popular Children's Books (*Animals That Appear in 10+ Books)" showing the proportion of animals depicted with gendered pronouns. Animals toward the left side are more often represented as male (he/him), and those toward the right are more often represented as female (she/her). Birds, ducks, and cats lean female. Bears, monkeys, dogs, elephants, foxes, wolves, and frogs lean male. Each animal is represented by a colorful, illustrated face.

Screenshot of Publishers Weekly article titled "The Sneaky Gender Bias in Picture Books: Animal Characters" that includes photo of the author, a woman with brown hair and glasses. Text reads: "Melanie Walsh is an assistant professor in the Information School and an adjunct assistant professor in the English department at the University of Washington. She uses data to analyze contemporary culture, especially literature and publishing. She is currently at work on a book, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century, which follows the surprising social media afterlives of five iconic American authors. Here she shares her investigations into the subtle gender imbalance often at play in picture books featuring animal characters. I recently published a data analysis with The Pudding, a digital publication known for data-driven storytelling, about animal characters in picture books. We read approximately 300 popular English-language picture books from the past 70+ years and noted the gender of any anthropomorphized animal character that was important to the story. We found that male animal characters were twice as common as female characters across all the books. Some strong animal stereotypes also emerged: frogs and dogs were boys; birds and cats were girls. Even more surprising, according to our data: this disparity is not obviously improving, even over the last 25 years."

For PW, I wrote about the persistent gender gap in fictional animal characters—a pattern I noticed while analyzing 100s of picture books with @puddingviz.bsky.social.

It's a more interesting (and pervasive) problem than I first thought.

#kidlit #booksky

🔗: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

You know what confuses people? “Leery,” “weary,” and “wary” are different words. At this point they’ve sort of morphed into one.