Stephanie DeGooyer

Why is it impossible to watch *Ernest Goes to Camp* anywhere?

I get it: AI is having a moment in higher Ed and literature faculty see openings. There are new funding initiatives and centers to be apart of. But the amount of born yesterday expertise I’m seeing is as concerning as the rise of AI itself.

External observers have long been struck by the rampant depoliticization that has made the most celebrated American writers susceptible to the lures of unprincipled power and vacuous celebrity: for instance, David Foster Wallace spending over twenty thousand words to investigate, indecisively, whether John McCain was a moral hero and a “real leader or merely a very talented political salesman,” when a quick glance at the voting record of the warmongering Republican senator would have sufficed. In recent years, writers abroad who are, or romantically see themselves as, necessarily alienated critics of society have been baffled to see American counterparts gratefully receiving laurels from Barack Obama, “our own Black shining prince,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates, borrowing from Ossie Davis’s eulogy of Malcolm X, put it. In their eyes, some unprecedented confusion of literature with neoliberal chic occurred when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie read aloud, at the PEN America World Voices Festival, her Atlantic article that she had wanted to title “Why Is Hillary Clinton So Widely Loved?” as the former secretary of state looked on fondly.

Damn, this essay is FIRE

archive.is/JLWvu

Historians - as you think about the new semester, consider this first-day exercise as a way to get conversation going about what historians *actually* do, and the context within which we do it. catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

Congrats Thea!

Opinion | When Novels Mattered

I’m sorry but does Brooks know anything about the Romantic novel?

“There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/o...

“Stupidly beautiful June morning?” Yawn. And the conjunctivitis-love image? Not good.

NYT writing trying too hard to sound cool:

Gah, is everyone writing on AI now?

There is no way that this season of The Bear wasn’t written by AI. Wow it was bad.

Also thanks to @rbuurma.bsky.social and @laheffernan.bsky.social for highlighting the longer history of this work—often led by women and centered on collaboration and building archives. I appreciate Rachel’s reminder that many of these methods resemble bibliographic methods & literary historicism

Rethinking Birthright - Boston Review We need a more just conception of citizenship—one that abolishes the distinction between “natural” and naturalized citizens.

This is an old article of mine, but I think it still helps understand the current birthright debate. I arg that birthright is not enough in a country where naturalized citizens are not the same as natural-born citizens. It's a call to think about distinctions: www.bostonreview.net/articles/ste...

FIRST USWNT GOAL FOR CLAIRE HUTTON 👏🇺🇸

I’m cheering for the U.S. obviously but I’ve never cried during the Canadian national anthem before.

Best trip, even if I did spend the day of the oysters in question deleting every word I wrote…❤️

It was my first time discovering it, despite coming here so many times!

Some things should always stay the same…

We are back tomorrow 😤

#USWNT x Allstate

Still no better feeling - especially now - of flying into New York City on hot summer’s night.

Gosh I’d love to get you down here!

🧵 of upcoming events (in-person and virtual) for THE INTERNAL COLONY in June.

Excited to be in conversation with so many smart people over the next few weeks!

Shout out to Baltimore! Courtesy of @becquer.bsky.social

Incredible! Ryan, a former student of mine, pitched this in the “Public Humanities” grad course I taught and now here it is in the world. Another zany banger from the incomparable @ryancarroll.bsky.social!

Man wait till he hears about how authors design elaborate spreadsheets and spend hours calling and emailing and pay out of pocket to clear 600 words they’re just quoting to make a point about the writing itself

Christ. Just came downstairs to find my dad watching an entirely AI-generated YouTube video about an event that didn't happen involving the Pope. Had to convince him the whole think was fake. "How can you tell?" he asked. He has five degrees including a PhD.

This Friday, at the SNS conference at Duke, I am speaking on the plenary panel at noon. Each panelist will give a 10 minute position on "novel languages." Predictably, I'll speak about law & maybe a little Crusoe, if time...

w/ Ainehi Edoro, Victoria Saramago & Jorge Téllez

A year ago I was writing about how this kind of immigration ‘solution’ was pioneered and rhetorically perfected in Denmark - the avant-garde of immigration control. I couldn’t know how quickly the uptake and activation of using poor and unstable countries as dumping ground would be in the U.S.

Our soccer coach forbade parents from using verbs and would yell at any who disobeyed his order. It was magical!

So much of the skill in soccer is decision-making. These parents are actually impeding the skill of their child when they do this!