Amanda Watson

Every time a woman runs for president I hear that she’s too emotional and unstable to make wartime decisions, unlike the men in charge who make really reasonable decisions like bombing kids to death, starting water wars, and poisoning the entire planet

I don't ever want to hear that it's wrong to call them Nazis again.

Happy belated!

I think we should loudly, publicly start planning the trials for Trump et al for When This Is All Over. Some NGO should pay lawyers to start tracking crimes, preparing legal theories, crafting enabling legislation, etc. It should be the legal equivalent of constructing a gallows in the town square.

It’s me; I’m no one. 🙃

Take this as your sign that YOU too can fight back against ICE. Everyone has a part to play when it comes to resistance!

Sermon on the sea-mount: the fascinating history of fishy sea pulpits The 18th-century witnessed a strange proliferation of sea-themed pulpits across central Europe. We’ve caught several in our net

Moby-Dick shipmates, check out these sea pulpits! 🐋

The eventual reveal of those birds' names is so unsettling and strange!

A man asked me last night what publishing needs to do for literary fiction to begin appealing to men again. I said, as nicely as I could, that, with over 2,000 books published every Tuesday, of which many would appeal to men, it’s not a publishing problem, it’s a men problem.

I'm seeing the Met's new production of Tristan und Isolde at the end of this month, and already all I want to do is listen to several dozen different recordings of the Liebestod and write a lot of unhinged essays. Send help.

NANCY MACE: What is a woman? Have you learned that lesson?

WALZ: I'm the governor of Minnesota. I'm not here to be a prop for your obsession.

I was just reading about the backwards Bohème in A New Philosophy of Opera and thinking, damn, I'd go see that.

Ooh. Downloading!

Years ago a bunch of my colleagues at various special collections around NYC were talking about how they could collectively put together an entire exhibition on Hair in Archives. I still want to see that actually happen someday!

Millay’s Hair Because Norma saved even the grocery lists,

Getting ready for some writing retreat time where I'm planning to see how far I can go with an idea for a future Queer Bibliography talk (or maybe article) on Edna St. Vincent Millay's queer readerships. Whatever I end up writing, I'm citing this poem:

Big W from Tish James here.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

brb, writing a poem sequence using "Miss Magnesium Lamp," "Miss Fire Prevention," "Miss Photoflash," and "Miss Roquefort Cheese" as titles (I'm only half kidding)

For months I thought I'd lost my favorite pen, but today I found it in...a cup full of pens. I must have performed the Banishing Ritual* at some point.

*i.e. saying "I'll put this away somewhere sensible" and then putting it somewhere sensible, thus guaranteeing you'll never find the thing again.

Algorithmic thinking—the idea that anything you see must be intended for you, individually, the sole audience, leading you to misunderstand the context of practically everything.

It's so good! I'm overdue for a rewatch too.

we were probably all up last night staring at the ceiling with our own version of the same thought running on endless loop, but mine looked something like this:

I hate these people to a degree that feels simultaneously corrosive to the soul, and also the only righteous response to this kind of evil

“Silence is not neutrality; it is permission. The record that university chancellors, presidents and trustees create in this moment — who spoke, who acted and who stayed silent — will be studied long after today’s political actors are gone.”

So mad at myself that he walked away down the platform before the shock even wore off and I didn't have the presence of mind to yell "FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR NEPHEW TOO, SHAME ON YOU BOTH, MOTHERFUCKER" at him.

To the asshole on the subway who saw my "Melt ICE" pin and felt the need to tell me his nephew just joined ICE:

May everything that you put out in the world come back to you *and* your shitty nephew a thousandfold.

May both of you feel the shame you deserve, and may it crush you into the earth.

Call your reps about this. Every time a book ban has been overturned or shut down, it's because the vast majority of people who believe in the freedom to read spoke up.
Find your reps' info at reps.fyi.

The companies that do this are (naturally) the ones who also don't bother verifying email addresses. My email doppelgangers, who always type my address when they mean to type theirs, currently have a *lot* of unpurchased items in their carts. I am blocking SO MANY businesses right now.

There are, of course, much bigger things we should be prosecuting, but I really think the person or persons who thought up the whole "you have unpurchased items in your cart" email thing should be pelted with rotten tomatoes every day for the rest of their life.

I keep reminding people that admins hate English departments because they are popular (read: inefficient), not because they aren’t. AI is in a long line of technologies that promise to solve that problem for them.

I once went to a marathon reading where the first reader delivered that line as "Call me --" [pause, slight shrug] "Ishmael." I've heard it that way ever since, like he's making up a name on the spot. 🐋

hey, remember when the transphobes started coming for gender-affirming care for minors and it was framed as “concern for children” and trans folks said “lol they just want us to not exist” and our society full of rubes and people with turnips for brains took the transphobes’ arguments at face value