Christopher Yates

only just realized the Taschen sale has been happening for a few days but now you know too

kiradeprinz @c6r5fatui can you imagine how bad THIS is? For months now I've been transparently running a Bluesky account for Fidaa because they kept deleting her for having an IP in Palestine. This account was an online aid corridor to her family and it has just now been closed by Bluesky. BLUESKY FACILITATES GENOCIDE. Bluesky @bluesky Can you imagine how bad the sexual content on X has to be for the French to think you've crossed a line?

i hate twt but as someone whos seen way too many ppl on bsky acting morally superior to twt users this was kinda wild to learn

Bonus: Dorothy Parker deciding to take a swipe at Freud too, while she’s at it (note: these are all just excerpts, except the WCW.)

I like to imagine Marlowe, Raleigh, Williams (etc.) all in a room just looking at Donne and pausing their debate to say "wait what are you talking about"

it was "everyone jumps poor Christopher Marlowe for trying to catch a vibe" day in class

an interesting cliche that you find in the blurbs of 50% of contemporary romance novels is “she’s the only one who can challenge him.”

the really funny way that Assassins Creed: Valhalla resolves the question of diversity in a game set in 9th century England is to introduce exactly one (1) Chinese character who explains that she was a merchant traveling the Silk Road and kind of just kept going

like is this a "baker's chocolate" kind of situation

okay so Aphex Twin. Very cool music! Are you supposed to like, listen to it or something else.

fear-mongering about "15-minute cities" is yet another sign of the complete Americanization of UK politics. Four fifths of the British population already lives one!!

As far as Shakespeare authorship conspiracies go it's pretty mild; at least Emilia Lanier was a real Elizabethan and not a time traveler or alien or whatever.

“a new book claims that Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman” I’m sorry but you can’t bait me into getting mad about this. Going a little bit insane about Shakespeare and publishing a book about it is a storied, centuries old tradition and arguably foundational to lit crit as a whole.

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step.

1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish.

2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

I put on a big long scarf and immediately become a different person. I’m walking around campus with the demure but tragic stateliness of princess Diana right now.

Something you can reliably trust is that young people will reject the verdicts of anyone who lived and wrote in the powdered-wig era. This is exploitable.

Back on my old tricks (getting students to like metaphysical poetry by first showing them how much Dryden and Johnson hated it)

it does seem like that!

I privately believe that I deserve credit for reviving the storied tradition of Being Chinese as a White Guy in the 21st century by learning how to play mahjong a few years back and also making the interesting creative decision to be 1/4 Chinese, the most chic amount of Chinese to be

(the illustration isn't of Leibniz but the book is is 1697 work on all things Chinese)

Leibniz basically invented being met at a very Chinese time in your life

well, it was the first day of the semester at Brown yesterday and now you have to card-swipe into buildings, which is good and responsible except they did not give me card-access to the building where I'm teaching (free hot chocolate all around campus, though.)

I did enjoy the film's interpretation of Penelope's suitors as a kind of cabal of evil Abercrombie & Fitch models, however

part of what's interesting about anything as old as The Odyssey is catching glimpses of something like (our conception of) psychology in a functionally pre-psychology era. It was kind of inevitable for someone to do the "Odysseus has PTSD" film, but it's not necessarily compelling.

Just watched The Return (2024), an adaptation of The Odyssey that was overshadowed by the upcoming Nolan film. A strange adaptation that removes all the supernatural elements and imagines the epic poem as a Shakespearean drama (the problem imo is that Homer is not Shakespeare.)

no idea why they didn't do that. "Benoit Blanc is touring English country churches on holiday when he bumps into a murder" is a more charming Christie-esque premise anyway

the movie clearly wanted to do some fire-and-brimstone Southern baptist gothic thing, faith-healing and all, but couldn't figure out how to make that look interesting (skill error); also there is not a single moment where anything looks convincingly like upstate New York (weird choice)

We're all acquainted with the incoherent catho-pisco-baptist-gelical-byterian Christianity favored by Hollywood but I do think that you've been more than usually negligent if your Catholic priest character inherited his church from his grandfather, also a Catholic priest

I was watching the new Knives Out film and thought to myself "oh, so Rian Johnson was raised Evangelical" and then looked it up after the movie and he was indeed raised Evangelical and that's my review of the film (2/5 stars)

I imagine that all of this is very appealing to the Greenlanders

Of course the US military would fire on US citizens. They yearn to. It is their holy grail, their four minute mile.