Hester Blum

Sarah Mesle’s brilliant new book Reasons & Feelings: writing for the humanities now, with a bright red-pink cover featuring a tattoo-style arrow, saying hello to my tattoo of a Temple toggle harpoon head

Yesssssss @sunsetandecho.bsky.social !!

A minor G on you

Sign the Petition SAVE WPSU

The Penn State BoT is killing the public radio station. WPSU serves a half million rural Pennsylvanians, and it was cut at the same time the Board gave the PSU president--whose greatest hits include closing 7 (seven!) PSU campuses--a 1.1 million dollar raise. Please sign

www.change.org/p/save-wpsu

What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? (Update) - Freakonomics What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? (Update) - Freakonomics

Freakonomics just re-aired its three-part series on the history of whaling – it was a joy and an honor to be part of that conversation: freakonomics.com/podcast/what...

The fully-constructed Lego Endurance, elaborately packed by excellent movers and ungrammatically labeled

If only the non-Lego Endurance were so well cradled

Herman Melville’s Commode I have recently become the reverential custodian of a commode that belonged to Herman Melville. I achieved this honor through an unlikely sequence of events that began with a Facebook post about a …

(the story of how I came to have Melville's commode: avidly.org/2021/12/05/h...)

thank you, very excited!

The wooden surface of a c19 commode, missing its marble topping, with joinery and screw visible.

yr correspondent with a glass of cider sitting on the floor of an old, garishly painted house surrounded by packed-up bits of art and broken marble and a leather couch not yet packed

My spouse pouring out a green bottle of cider made from Herman Melville's apple trees, with the cap labeled "A" for Arrowhead

We are about to move, I finally opened the bottle of hard cider made from apples from Arrowhead, Melville's farm. It was dry and lovely and I drank it amid the packed-up broken pieces of marble that top Melville's commode, which I was even more wonderfully given a few years ago.

Resharing my A.I. statement for the fall semester—I’ll be amending “hallucinatory” because hallucinations are actually interesting and original.

Excellent to see this resource, @annakornbluh.bsky.social—thank you. (I’ll be updating my syllabus statement from last spring: bsky.app/profile/hest...)

This is super excellent, Haaris!

self-hugged 🙋‍♀️

Bananas paragraph from Herman Melville's Mardi: "And here, in this impenetrable retreat, centrally slumbered the universe-rounded, zodiac-belted, horizon-zoned, sea-girt, reef-sashed, mountain-locked, arbor-nested, royalty-girdled, arm-clasped, self-hugged, indivisible Donjalolo, absolute monarch of Juam:—the husk-inhusked meat in a nut; the innermost spark in a ruby; the juice-nested seed in a goldenrinded orange; the red royal stone in an effeminate peach; the insphered sphere of spheres."

Happy birthday HM

Look at what the fabulous Dr. Sarah Mesle and I are up to!!! We’re offering a seminar at C19's 2026 conference in Cincinnati, Ohio! Proposals aren't due until September 15th, so you've got plenty of time. Spread the word!

Details on how to apply, etc., at www.c19society.org/2026-confere...

Ooooh that looks excellent

Ephemera studies is the best

Oh wow, this makes me happy, thank you Allegra!! What is the book?

Meredith McGill‘s chapter in my edited collection Turns of Event addresses this beautifully! @mlmcgill.bsky.social

Well-governed angels the both of them

Nobody in government is monitoring anything but their vile appetites

My therapist today was asking me about moving from an allegedly purple state to a red state and I was saying that Pennsylvania has not felt like a safe place in a while. Fuck Penn (I’m a PhD alum and will never support Penn again), fuck the state medical systems that are now betraying trans kids.

A bus advertising “true girl” which promises to bring “moms and daughters closer to God and to each other,” in teal and pink lettering

At the back of the same bus, in red white and blue lettering, the boys version which is called “born to be brave, a one night father son adventure”

Close up on the profound cringe of the line “100% cool 0% awkward”

Can’t teach about gender or queer books in schools, can be “100% cool and 0% awkward”

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.”

I just walked out of seeing the Materialists thinking it was the worst thing of all time and then I saw that the US has joined this hideous war and I stand by my judgment of the Materialists

This may be A.I.‘s biggest crime yet

Middle-age mom of a trans teen wearing a T-shirt that says “you will have to go through me“ in pink blue and white lettering

Hello!

A grid of nine illustrated faces from the Melville Society Conference in thin black lines. Each one has a forest of word balloons around it containing cropped quotes from talks.

QUEER WHALES! EMANCIPATION NARRATIVES! SCURVY! I’m infiltrating the International @melville-society.bsky.social Conference this week to bring you the latest and greatest in illustrated academics. (Full versions to come when I’m no longer sleeping aboard a Danish sail training vessel from 1882.)

The Mystic River in heavy evening fog

Mystic

Karin!! Thrilled for your first reading experience, and sending you an email…