Gabriel Hankins

so it's literal skynet, then

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/03/iran-war-heralds-era-of-ai-powered-bombing-quicker-than-speed-of-thought

If a bunch of smart contemporary cultural criticism types got together to do a "Fight Club at 30" thing, I would read/listen to it the very moment it became available. Surely, something like this has to be in the works? It's timely in the worst way.

This book is so weird to read from the standpoint of someone who thinks about publishing and about how people talk to/about teachers. Published by Random House, it’s an anthology of readings “about” teaching that includes readings from Dostoevsky, Camus, Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger-

!! wow

congrats!

(Actually not that bad, a proto-slasher rather than actual slasher)

yeah good point!

I don't think you want to Anna! but the search / key final scene is incredible -- let me know if you want to chat about it

We should also shift the argument to the now obvious point that no spending on further US weapons can ever be justified, ever again, by commitments to rule of law, liberal world order 3.0: we're out of the liberal parenthesis where it was pretty to think we upheld the promise of a better world.

Just preceded by that other classic of the telephone as infrastructural unconscious, Black Christmas

for what it cost for our allies to shoot down three of our own planes by accident in a murderous illegal war we could have funded the NEH at 150% of its historic peak funding for a year

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

As a professional military strategist, I just wanted to make sure everyone has a full understanding of the American strategy in Iran, thank you for your attention to this matter

Why is everything possibly better in that font

Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran has no mandate – or legal basis US president violates UN charter just days into his Board of Peace era, and chooses to take the biggest gamble of his administration

"Over [the] half century, Iran has arguably never posed less of a threat than now" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

An excellent piece throughout

The first war of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace era has begun – an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict, and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public.

What an opening passage!

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Cool essay about how designed environments shape our cognitive practices, especially in libraries, which the author calls "a gymnasium for attention"

On Life Support--cover with cutaway image of a section of a ringed space station, showing buildings, greenery, and people. Title type in star-filled letters above--next to The Inattention Economy--cover with title in white on black background, upper left. Subtitle and author in oval fields among colored circles and eyes that take up most of lower right.

So many great books (w/fantastic covers) coming out this spring. I'm thrilled to see Matthew I Thompson's @quickpickles.bsky.social On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s & Lisa Nakamura's @lnakamura.bsky.social The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet!

"The biographer is a kind of scavenger, who lives with corpses and finds pleasure in devouring them...Any biography seen as a story has a philosophy of history implicit in the sense of a succession of historical events. But what if life had no meaning, in both senses of significance and direction?"

Early in the day for this one! Even worse, what if one life in isolation has no meaning

Jennifer Scappettone's Poetry After Barbarism Tickets | Free | 1 Mar @ 2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles | DICE The Poetic Research Bureau presents a reading for Jennifer Scappettone's new book *Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance...

This Sunday (3/1) at 5 pm, The Poetic Research Bureau presents a reading for Jennifer Scappettone's new book POETRY AFTER BARBARISM: THE INVENTION OF MOTHERLESS TONGUES & RESISTANCE TO FASCISM at 2200 Arts & Archives in LA. bit.ly/4rzVNnd @xenoglossic.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social

@tedunderwood.com posted a version of this? It seems like acceleration is coming whether or not the left plans for it

Another excellent MLA 2027 guaranteed session for which I will help evaluate abstracts: "Postcolonial Indigenous Ecocriticism in the Global Anglophone." 200 word abstracts. Deadline: 3/15.

More info here: mla.confex.com/mla/2027/web...

Please share!

Birria and kimchi ramen with dill

When all else fails make a birria + kimchi ramen

"In my meditations I had a sense something ominous was coming": to be fair, absolutely accurate

The Enclosures of Free Verse Throughout the twentieth century, scholars accepted that there was something called “traditional” poetic meter, and that free verse liberated poets from ...

In honor of the publication day of The Enclosures of Free Verse (uncpress.org/978146969306...), here's a little thread about what the book does and does not offer.

$ALT economies of the word!