Dr. Emily Friedman

Passage from Tony Judy s THE MEMORY CHALET: "By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American - their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such *public* universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when - like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen -- there appears...a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone."

True enough - but when they're both gone we'll only miss one of them.

Tony Judt was right.

Bronze plaque saying "A Letter to the Future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. August 2019. 415ppm CO2"

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque:
"This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

insanely useless Q, but can anyone think of just a platonic example of an extremely coherent, well written, well argued scholarly article for a general audience as like, an example of the genre? perhaps on a poem or other "small" object the students could also read for 1 day?

YouTube video by WEGL 91.1 Critiquing Play with Quinns // Type Speaks // 02.18

Rae Nawrock’s in-studio conversation with @itsquinns.bsky.social (recorded at WEGL on the 19th) is streaming now.

Field Notes: PAX Unplugged 2025 | Dr. Em Friedman Get more from Dr. Em Friedman on Patreon

A few thoughts on PAXU, but really about how I navigate in the space. (there will be a theme to upcoming posts in that sense)

Audio version includes a few slips, including mention of the not-very-secret press my book proposal is under consideration with.

oh shit I love this????? I had never heard this story!

as always with wild saint lore, I’m just as interested in WHY certain legends stick. there’s something really moving in the idea of centuries of Catholics repeating and repeating a story where Mary’s miracle was saving two men from homophobes

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itch.io/s/167336/tee...

For my book I thought a lot about this position, which really does rest on a presumption, nurtured by first world, usually male perspectives that have been shaped by habituation to empowerment, that for something to count as victory it has to be total & complete; anything else is “failure.” +

Literally always in my freezer ready for guests or just cookie emergencies.

coconut brown butter cookies The crispy, toasty, nutty object of my late City Bakery cookie obsession, tweaked with brown butter and extra sea salt.

MVPs of my cookie parties pre-2020:

smittenkitchen.com/2014/06/coco...

www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/benn...

Oh 100%

Non canvas, non-online course work included using common place books (my favorite now—ht @ryancordell.org!), in-class outlining/writing workshops, in-class peer review (which was awesome btw), and the good old annotated bib styled as common place book entries so students could dialogue with sources.

I think about the consistently misunderstood case of the Luddites. They were extremely advanced machine users (go try to use a spinning Jenny!), but they recognized a technological regime that displaced expertise (and payment) from the artisan to the tool.

It’s like Suzanne wants me to apply for a longterm Newberry…

Bookish Holiday Fun and Games For... YOU!

Now in its sixth year, for this #NewberryLibrary Advent Calendar, we'll play around with the collection! Cards, Board Games, Puzzles, Gambling...

What's up first?
CHESS!

December 1 (1/24)

Here's last year's extra-shiny offering:
bsky.app/profile/drka...

i'm glad that stem colleagues now care that university administrators' claims of departmental "profitability" are all bullshit now that it's coming for them but a little solidarity while the humanities endured this for decades would've been cool

Just found out about Anna Barbauld's wonderful "Washing Day" which ends with these great Macbeth-inspired lines :

Earth, air, and sky, and ocean hath its bubbles,
And verse is one of them — this most of all.

Slave Compensation Act 1837 - Wikipedia

fun fact:

the british paid reparations as annuities to enslavers for all of the 20th century and only completed payments in 2015.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_C...

We have played it many times!

This is horrific and exactly what those of us in Black studies, gender studies, women’s studies have been warning our colleagues in the sciences about. Their seeming neutrality will not save them.

10.

the reason its bad to run universities like businesses is that almost all businesses fail on any reasonable timeline of evaluation.

hudson's bay made it the longest and even they only got to about half an oxford of longevity

OPEN BARRRR

Six smiling people.

This is roughly half of my home game, upon the occasion of our friend’s 60th (!!!) birthday.

If you <3 well-used wood type: a @penlandschool.bsky.social collab printing w/the *backs* of their letterpress studio's larger wood type, "illustrat[ing] not just the importance of resourcefulness+care, but of the relationships that grow out of shared time creating+noticing" #DHmakes

Bluesky posts from Joseph Rezek explaining that he now loves Jane Austen's NORTHANGER ABBEY.

Bluesky post by @profchander describing his newfound appreciation for Alexander Pope.

But on the bright side, the 18thC is clearly winning. @rezekjoe.bsky.social & @profchander.bsky.social bearing witness:

BREAKING: ‘This hurts’: UNL eliminates 4 programs despite faculty, student pleas The University of Nebraska-Lincoln eliminates the Earth and atmospheric sciences 8-0, educational administration 7-1, statistics 7-1, textiles, merchandising and fashion design 7-1 programs.

It's over.

Despite the fact that the academic council recommended against it, despite the fact that the program brought in more tuition than it cost, and despite the fact that Nebraskans need & deserve this expertise, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences will be cut.

www.dailynebraskan.com/news/adminis...

“They fuck you up your mom and dad…”

“Little, nameless, unremembered acts/of kindness and of love…”

“I wish/ what I wished you before, but harder”

“And for all this, nature is never spent;
/There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”

I’m teaching Mondays and Wednesdays this spring, and am playing Syllabus Tetris this weekend.

Pro: ability (in theory) to travel without disrupting class

Con: for 2 of the first 3 weeks of class, we only meet once in the week.

Engrave it on my heart.