Charles Pidgeon

Ahahah and Riskin's book is a HEFTY tome. Maybe you need a taller house? :))

Love this! I think that Jessica Riskin's Restless Clock (2016) is a version of this book. But her book is marketed/formatted as scholarly, even though it is very engagingly written

Devastatingly accurate, isn't it?

I do! Also anecdotes about this had an afterlife in quote a few essays and critiques of the tech industry (I'm thinking Roisin Kiberd's essay on normcore / Zuckerberg / the hoody as coding uniform)

The Review of Beauty by Jessica DeFino | Substack A critical review of the beauty industry prioritizing people, not products. Click to read The Review of Beauty by Jessica DeFino, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Jessica DeFino's review of beauty is really good at staying up to date (but also very smartly critiquing) the beauty/fashion culture industry
open.substack.com/pub/jessicad...

I think the conclusion of this study is likely to be valid however it is worth noting that any attempts to localise cognitive tasks such as writing to a specific brain activation/connectivity is problematic because that's not how the brain works.

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One of your best!

This is a truly incredible series, cannot recommend enough!

The actual centre of literary studies? What unites it as a form of enquiry?

One of the main answers: the method of close reading.

But that has led to some really interesting historicising of how close reading developed (see Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant forthcoming book on close reading).

Most obvious focal point for this discussion is John Guillory's 2022 book "Professing Criticism", and reactions to that book.

He basically asks: with the capacious breadth of 21st c literary studies (ecocriticism, queer studies, diaspora literatures etc are all very different subfields), where is

The defining conversation of the recent 5 years of literary studies centres on: is/why literary studies is dying/being defunded? How/should it be saved? What part(s) are worth saving?

Not so much "can literary studies save the world", more like "is it worth/possible to save literary studies".

"The idea of granting rights to a future sentient robot legitimizes a kind of techno-optimist thinking which, much like the current fad of commercial space travel, actually undermines rather than promotes sustainability" firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

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Screenshot of Jathan Sadowski’s article Machine’s Eye View: Postmodern Data Science and the Politics of Ground Truth (2025). The following quote is highlighted: 'Through a vast, and still growing, variety of socio-technical systems, insurers and actuaries have created their own complex models to assess the risk and value of all phenomena, legitimated them as objective sources of economic and epistemic authority, and enforced them as a techno-political regime that governs the present, through the past, by predicting and pricing the future'

Only on page 1 and we’re already off to the races! This is excellent.

My bf and I have a spare room in Oxford? Pretty easy to do day trips to London

This episode was a game changer for me.

Those of us who have had the pleasure of reading and thinking about your work are not indifferent to you. And we're part of the universe. So, in a small way, the universe is not indifferent either. Good luck, Helen

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Interesting that behavioural economics was the fusion of studying folk psychology and economics -- and it became about how humans have biases, heuristics, and frailties when it comes to gambling $10, rather than about the stories we tell about The Economy writ large

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Second for Mazviita Chirimuuta's The Brain Abstracted (2024)!

The Limits of Data Policymakers want to make decisions based on clear data, but important factors are lost when we rely solely on data. A philosopher writes:

This piece by C Thi Nguyen draws on seeing like a state and updates, talking about research on law school ranking metrics and other examples: issues.org/limits-of-da...

Getting Personal By Mitch Therieau

This piece by Mitch Therieau on personal criticism and the critic's role as "encountered" is good: www.chicagoreview.org/getting-pers...

Also, the American Vandal podcast first season about the golden age of criticism.
I know that criticism and book review are not interchangeable, but do overlap!

Reminds me of Mary Midgley on philosophy as plumbing:
“Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed.”

Ah any chance of a last minute link? No worries if not!

And your 30s are for "inventing" a new subdiscipline that sits at the boundaries of two or more fields?

Wild guess but, I reckon First Monday (peer reviewed digital culture journal) might have a frontrunner? Launched 1996

I feel like philosophy on games is a reference to C Thi Nguyen?? and if that is the case all I can say is that his writing rules and dudes rock etc etc and more of this please

You'll be mogging us all soon, Mike