Hester Blum

🐋

"Stay free"

I was skeptical but here I am, lightly shaking. Thank you for the names, Bruce.

Print this and paper your communities

Is it even a writing day if you haven’t lightly wept over Melville’s letters to Hawthorne even though that’s not actually what you’re writing about

Generative A.I. This class helps you to be a better writer and thinker. Generative AI (ChatGPT, Copilot, and other platforms) is neither writing nor thinking. Any use of Al in this class (whether to write, brainstorm, outline, or summarize) will be considered a violation of academic integrity. It undermines your intellectual development, for one: AI content is often inaccurate or hallucinatory and is always boring, banal, and average. This is by design, as generative Al works by predicting the most obvious or basic sequencing of words. Good writingwriting that is persuasive, powerful, lively, funny, surprising, rousing, insightful, transformative, provocative-requires human work. Human creativity is weird and variable and uneven, but it holds the capacity for growth, revelation, empathy, and brilliance. We urge you not to abandon the glorious experiential potential of human messiness and transformation for the tedium of robot sentences. One further reason to abjure generative Al, especially in a class on environmental literature: in addition to its counterproductivity to your work as a writer and thinker, Al is enormously environmentally destructive.

Yes in thunder. My syllabus statement:

Wood type letter press proof print that reads Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

Wood type letter press proof print that reads Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

Wood type letter press proof print that reads Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

Wood type letter press proof print that reads Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

Week two of letterpress class: wood type, ink mixing: Greenland is for the Greenlandic people/ Kalaallit Nunaat, Kalaallit pigaat 🇬🇱

A crowd in the rain in the Grove neighborhood of St. Louis, protesting 🧊

A crowd on the march in torrential rain in the Grove neighborhood of St. Louis, protesting 🧊

St Louis standing up, in thunder

Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.

A publishing agreement between Columbia UP and Hester Blum for a book entitled LONESOME DOVE REREAD for Columbia's Rereadings series

I've probably pressed a copy of Lonesome Dove on you at some point if we've met IRL--and now I am beyond excited to work with @philipleventhal.bsky.social in writing LONESOME DOVE REREAD for @columbiaup.bsky.social's Rereadings series.

I loved some books this year (The Wayfinder, Gliff, What We Can Know). But the highlight of my year was returning to the Aubrey-Maturin series--this time on audio, superbly read by Patrick Tull, whose reading elevates them splendidly. Give yourself a gift this year and listen to the whole series.

A Woman Froze to Death on an Alpine Trek. Is Her Boyfriend to Blame?

This story is nuts and clearly murder?? or murder by man-must-summit?? www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/w...

I am a fanatic about Craig in those movies and you nailed exactly why he is so angry all the time

This is so so smart about Daniel Craig's Bond:

This is incredible!

Heed, heed, heed:

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future."

- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.

Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!

Hell yeah Essex County!

My outfit for the day it happens

Hayao Miyazaki

Notice how Trump and Republicans were having the worst couple weeks in the administration's history and they decided to pivot to hardcore attacking trans people?

hideously grinning David Brooks in the Epstein files--my caption refers to hideous Brooks's infamous 2017 column that included the following fake story: "Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican."

how do you like THAT soppressata

This man is here to "protect" children

This is a genocidal policy

His snarl “YOU, Lieutenant WEINberg” is the greatest depiction of casual antisemitism I’ve ever seen

Shithole country

Terror Camp | Polar Fan Conference Terror Camp is an annual virtual gathering of hundreds of polar exploration enthusiasts. Inspired by AMC's The Terror and the history of the Franklin Expedition, this polar exploration conference feat...

This weekend is the next iteration of Terror Camp, a free online conference for polar exploration enthusiasts, which has the highest level of intellectual content and hilarity I have ever encountered: www.terror.camp @terrorcamp.bsky.social

The cover of the St Louis post-dispatch: the top headline reads “Judge: Wig photos were private”

Good morning St Louis

And the book is incredible

Holy f@$k!

“ChatGPT exhibits the highest level of anti-Black racism ever experimentally recorded.”

This whole video is jaw-dropping.