Travis Chi Wing Lau (劉志頴)

I tried to express in this review my great indebtedness to the work of Dionne Brand as a model for the kind of scholar-poet I want to be. Thank you to Kathleen Lubey and Mark Vareschi for entrusting me with a book that arrived precisely when I needed to read it most: muse.jhu.edu/article/981565

Culture Study Podcast Questions! Each week, Anne will tug on the thread of our cultural fabric and see what unravels. But she needs your help! What questions do you have about the world around you? You can use this form to answer a s...

Keza Macdonald — author of a fantastic new book on the history of Nintendo — is coming on the pod this week to talk about women/non-binary people getting into gaming *as adults.* We need your questions!!

Spectacularly easy question submission form here:

docs.google.com/forms/d/1x-9...

Screenshot of text: unfuck google drive by shooting gemini Hey folks! Google is fucking you via sneaky enshittification again! Want the shit in your google drive to load instantly again, instead of taking for-fucking-ever? Open your gdrive (web OR app) Settings > Manage Apps Gemini was checked "use as default" (and i sure the fuck didn't set it that way, this was a silent push) Nuke that, and suddenly, folders that took up to a minute to populate and sort do so in a fraction of a second.

friend shared this, immediately updated my settings

Just a reminder that the UC system was not a party in this litigation. Faculty, staff and the @aaup.org fought on their own. UCLA, and the entire UC system, should be ashamed of themselves, and their leaders should be reminded of their submissives every day.

When @chelseaphillips.bsky.social first told me about this years ago I started dreaming up what identity-obscuring on-theme costumes one could use for other fields…

Landmark settlement could create new protections for harm reduction under disability law  A Christian group announces a potentially landmark legal settlement that the ACLU says could establish new federal protections for harm reduction services.

Harm reduction services, including syringe service and fentanyl testing programs, are proven to save lives.

As a federal court recognized, people with substance use disorder have a right to these services under disability law.

Stumbled upon a piece by an editor ridiculing a college student who withdrew from consideration for a reporting role because the publication outsourced all the writing to AI (yes, all the writing), and there’s so many parts of this that make my head spin with anger.

Please read. The sidelining of scholars from our distinguished Department of Mexican-American and Latinx Studies, alongside the rise of billionaire-funded new programs in “civic leadership,” in a state that is 40% Latino, is a shameless assertion of white supremacy.
latinopia.com/latino-liter...

Devastated to learn that Univ of Texas at Austin is closing the American Studies dept. The years I spent there earning my PhD were formative, making me the teacher, thinker, and writer I am today. I've passed on what I learned at UT to thousands of students over the past 20 years. Just awful.

Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.

Ars Technica has retracted the article about an AI bot that contained fabricated AI-generated quotes.

arstechnica.com/staff/2026/0...

This is a good first step, but it is well short of what Ars needs to do.

1/5

ALSO: the people making these propositions aren't proposing changes to state budgets to ⬆️ allocations toward faculty teaching time.

Also, by reducing professorship to just the teaching, that makes it much easier to replace with contingent labor. After which it's that much easier to tell them what to teach.

Chicago UP is running a HUGE sale, and you can get extremely well-researched hard-bound books about all sorts of topics and all sorts of places for a price of a cheap paperback press.uchicago.edu/resource/Sal...

‪Doctors say that vaccines protect children from dangerous diseases. A nepo baby who barbecues dogs and snorts cocaine off toilet seats says that vaccines make children vulnerable to 5G radiation. For busy parents, it can be hard to know who to trust.

This is a good thread. For email, I'd add @fastmail.com (which I have used for years) and the upcoming @thunderbird.net email as alternatives to Protonmail, as I think they're going to be a lot more usable for most regular users.

THE CONSERVATIVE FUTURIST HOW TO CREATE THE SCI-FI WORLD WE WERE PROMISED JAMES PETHOKOUKIS

I suspect I may have some opinions to share about this next book I’m reading.

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows. I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

Alice Wong Writer, editor, and disability justice activist. Born on March 27, 1974 in Indianapolis, IN, USA, she died from an infection on Nov 14, 2025 in San Francisco, CA, USA, aged 51 years.

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Myself and @sesmith.lol and others were interviewed for the Lancet’s obituary of our friend Alice. <3

How many times, in how many contexts, in how many ways am I going to have to say that this is what "AI" does— what it fundamentally *is*— before it sinks in? That all Bullshit engines do is statistically correlate training data & inputs via their weights to produce outputs you are likely to accept…

As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. 'I love this country,' he used to say, 'not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.' Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do everyday when you go out and pick the paper and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe in with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they're doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give 'em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than what we are. In other words, Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after. -Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (2011)

Black and white photo portrait of Grace Lee Boggs, by Robin Holland

"Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do everyday...Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after."

-Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015), The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the 21st Century
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

Since there is a new Dracula that is apparently pursuing the "tragic lost love" backstory, I want to talk about my favorite Drac, which is Louis Jourdan in the 1977 BBC miniseries COUNT DRACULA.

I don't think it is only our job to teach students how to read long novels; it may also be our jobs to teach them how to live without an online surveillance state. To learn without intrusive apps. To swap notes. To write in a book's margins. To exist in their communities in slow, clunky, human ways.

Holeee shit they disintegrated it

www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...

thread. related, my impression is a lot of higher ed administrators are significantly oriented toward making a mark on an institution in the short term so they have a claimable on their CV to get their next admin job elsewhere. that incentivizes vandalizing institutions, whether by AI or otherwise

Donate to Help pay the medical bills my rapist backed out of covering, organized by Mihir Joshi-Lennox My name is Mihir, and in 2024-2025, I was a victim of rape, p… Mihir Joshi-Lennox needs your support for Help pay the medical bills my rapist backed out of covering

Please consider supporting one of my students who has endured some of the most heartbreaking forms of harm I've had to witness as a faculty member committed to supporting queer, disabled students of color: gofund.me/3b0ff1a54

Opinion | How A.I. Companies Are Preying on College Students

I've said it before, but the first school that promotes itself as "AI-free" is going to corner the market on folks committed to learning. (gift link)

My book is out today and I got to write an essay reflecting on disability in romance for LitHub! Check out the article below🥹

Craftivism in a Crisis: Making the Humanities Matter When It’s All ... [/assets/images/header_craftivism.jpg] https://www.quinndombrowski.com/blog/2026/02/10/craftivism-crisis/ This is a write-up of a talk I gave at CESTA on January 29, 2026, with an epilogue covering...

Great piece from @quinnanya.me. A personal goal of mine is to convert my anger and frustration at current events into something productive, and this really resonated. #DHmakes www.quinndombrowski.com/blog/2026/02...

“We reach for [LLMs] because our world is asking for altogether too much: too much work without the time to do it well, too much caregiving without the community infrastructure to support it, and too much pressure to perform academically without the foundational skills to make it possible.”

One of the most miserable things about living in this era is having to watch the stupidest & most arrogant people in the world have to relearn The Why of literally everything good that we collectively do the hard way.

The answer is always ‘Because a bunch of people died, fuckwit.’