Gus McFadzean

An academic disliked an Oxford Very Short Introduction (145 pages) in his field so much that he wrote a 200 page book review attacking it. www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFi...

Hi hello the Venezuela stuff is entirely about oil, both in Venezuela and in Guyana (where Venezuela is laying claim to the oil in what is now Exxon’s largest oilfield, which Chevron has also bought into). It is the bidding of US oil majors and it’s not remotely subtle.

Why Is Warner Bros. for Sale at All? - The American Prospect Its product has never been more critically or financially successful. Why is it auctioning itself off?

Why Is Warner Bros. for Sale at All? prospect.org/2025/12/10/w...

“I am so bored by AI. One of the things I love about the theatre is AI can’t do it.”

Ethan Hawke is a dude 👌🏻

Artificial Intelligence and Academic Professions Educational technology, or ed-tech, including artificial intelligence (AI), continues to become more integrated into teaching and research in higher education, with minimal oversight. The AAUP’s ad ho...

This is one of the most important documents produced this year.

At a time when many of our professional organizations are punting, @aaup.org has been leading on EdTech, AI, academic freedom & faculty governance.

I'm humbled to be joining the team that authored this report.

Realism after the Individual A study of the transformation of the realist novel in the hands of early-twentieth-century American writers, who adapted this quintessentially nineteenth-century genre to the conditions of their age. ...

My book, Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel, is now out with @uchicagopress.bsky.social! Use discount code UCPNEW for 30% off. I'm so excited! 🥳
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Photograph of Melissa Schuh in front of a bookshelf, holding up her monograph (Literary Autobiography)

A book, Literary Autobiography by Melissa Schuh, with a front cover showing fragments of sketched faces in red pencil with a purple space in the middle for the book title, photographed on a book shelf.

Five copies of a book, Literary Autobiography by Melissa Schuh, with a front cover showing fragments of sketched faces in red pencil with a purple space in the middle for the book title, photographed on a book shelf.

Six copies of a book, Literary Autobiography by Melissa Schuh, with a front cover showing fragments of sketched faces in red pencil with a purple space in the middle for the book title, photographed in their box.

It’s here at last! On my shelf! Now that I’ve received my print copies of “Literary Autobiography: Contemporary Novelists and their Self-representations“ (Palgrave Macmillan 2025), the book feels like it’s actually real. Best early Christmas present 📚
@hss.springernature.com
doi.org/10.1007/978-...

SKULL OF THOMAS AQUINAS: TAKE A LEFT NOW
PRIEST: No, the GPS says we have to keep going—
SKULL: I KNOW A SHORTCUT
PRIEST: Do you remember the last ti—
SKULL: FOR THOSE WITH FAITH, NO EVIDENCE IS NECESSARY; FOR THOSE WITHOUT IT, NO EVIDENCE WILL SUFFICE

Meet the TikTok stars demanding oil companies clean up their mess There are millions of abandoned oil wells across the United States. A group of unlikely activists in Texas is making sure no one forgets they need to be cleaned up.

a big new one from me: I profiled a group of neighbors in west texas who have become the face of the abandoned well problem in the heart of oil country for @motherjones.com - an unlikely group of former industry workers and ranchers who are fed up with how Big Oil won’t clean up its messes:

ROMANCE ships this week!

everything you ever wanted to know about love, sex, and genre but were born too late to ask freud

if you don't already subscribe to Parapraxis, you can still order our new issue! and sign up to be 1st in line for #8, GROUPS!

www.parapraxismagazine.com/store/p/para...

Anagrams Online guy, Neil Young Canterbury Tales, rusty tabernacle Marcel Proust, corrupt males Kylie Minogue, I like 'em young No real charm beneath Helena Bonham Carter Michael Keaton, the coke animal Julia Roberts, bestial juror A really sublime twit, wait, I'm really subtle, William Butler Yeats Revenge is our way, Sigourney Weaver Erotica villainess, Alicia Silverstone Andie McDowell, a wild old menace No brains on a date, Antonio Banderas (From Padam Padam, Collected Poems by Kevin Killian)

Anagrams by Kevin Killian

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

Worth reading for lots of reasons, but particularly because it closes with something I see in my work and travels speaking on writing and AI. Many, maybe most students do not want AI-mediated schooling or lives. We can offer them something better. www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

is the journal still active? they seem to have skipped this year?

Hal Foster · Tightrope of Hope: Surrealism v. Fascism The Surrealists saw colonialism and imperialism as intrinsic to fascism, and from start to finish they campaigned...

‘As Adorno saw it, Surrealist art had been compromised by postwar conditions: made of “world-rubble”, the montages of Surrealism created only “nature morte”; “After the European catastrophe the Surrealist shocks lost their force.”’

Hal Foster on Surrealism v. fascism: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This kindertrauma scene from Nutcracker Fantasy (1979), a Japanese stop-motion animated film by Sanrio, loosely based on the Tchaikovsky ballet.

Ragman, a mysterious old man who roams the city looking into people's houses and turns children into mice if he catches them up past their bed time.

On Fri. 12/19 I'll join Andreas Malm and Wim Carton to discuss our new books, the deadly combination of accelerating global warming and stalling political action, and what is to be done from a left perspective. Moderated by @learning2live.bsky.social via @haymarketbooks.org & @versobooks.bsky.social

… and he SERVED ✨

This headline is the end of civilization.

Huge congratulations to the wonderful Donna Haraway for winning the 2025 Erasmus Prize:
erasmusprijs.org/en/laureates...

Cover of Duke University Press catalog. The background features the Puerto Rican flag colors—red, white, and blue. "Duke University Press" is written in yellow and white in the blue triangular section and "Spring and Summer 2026" is in the red and white section on the left. Features an illustration of Bad Bunny wearing a yellow outfit and a large straw hat, holding a microphone with yellow lightning bolts emanating from it is in the lower half. The DUP logo is in the lower right.

We're excited to reveal our Spring 2026 catalog, featuring books being published between January and June 2026. Many of them are available for pre-order on our website. Download your copy now!
bit.ly/48Ltv25

‘People still blame me for their perforated eardrums’: how we made the Tango ads ‘Gil Scott-Heron did the closing voiceover. He was giggling away, saying, “You English guys are crazy!”’

something so surreal and popular culture about finding out that Gil Scott-Heron was the voice of “You know when you’ve been Tango’d”

www.theguardian.com/culture/2025...

But during the 2007-2008 global meltdown, the step-children of ordoliberals, the Washington Consensus, came to see Keynesian stimulus, perhaps fatally, as no longer a threat to oligarchy, but actually a means of solidifying it. TARP bailouts, zero-interest rate policies, PPP grants, all manner of taxpayer-subsidized cash injections into industry, finance, and technology firms were initially a crisis response which offshored instability, then became what passed for sound fiscal policy, assuring that government supervision by entrepreneurial oligarchy could be sustained even as the war machine, and its associated police industrial complex, leveled up to fight undefeated abstractions like Terror. This period of Klepto-Keynesianism, a willful sacrifice of the federal government's financial prudence (and with it the public goods and services to which those tax revenues might otherwise be devoted) for the purpose of maintaining a fragile balance between state and market power, has continued now for nearly two decades. This is another reason why the post-Soviet shock treatments which produced Russian oligarchy make for a poor analogy. The transition from oligarchy to kleptocracy, if successful at all, will have happened at a glacial pace by comparison to the chaotic months between Yeltsin and Putin.

Arguing with myself nearly every day, but I still think this is fundamentally right.

Friends, @keeblearin.bsky.social and I have a new essay out at ASAP/Review about @jamiljankochai.bsky.social's "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak." It was a pleasure to work with Arin and with @davidhering.bsky.social and @emmywaldman.bsky.social!

asapjournal.com/node/jamil-j...

Book cover of Teaching James Joyce

Thrilled to receive my contributor's copy of Teaching James Joyce! Thank you so much to brilliant editors @seveneccles.bsky.social and @ellenscheible.bsky.social for putting together this amazing collection. Can't wait to read all the fascinating essays.

Algorithm of the Night, by A. S. Hamrah “A. S. Hamrah’s criticism is hilarious, irreverent, full of passionate and ingeniously defended judgments.” —Dana Spiotta

A very happy publication day to @hamrahrama.bsky.social! His ALGORITHM OF THE NIGHT is out today from @nplusonemag.com. An incredible collection of film writing that makes sense of the dystopian present without ever giving in. Essential! shop.nplusonemag.com/products/alg...

The Supreme Court’s Ethics Code Is a Joke. Big Oil Knows That. Oil companies want the Supreme Court to intervene to dismiss lawsuits about climate change. Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito both have big conflicts of interest on that front.

Big Oil is "wildly desperate to dodge the growing array of lawsuits over the damage caused by their decades-long scheme to deceive the public about climate change," writes @aaronregunberg.bsky.social.

The fossil fuel industry is again urging the Supreme Court to help them escape accountability.

The Public Scholar A Practical Handbook

breathing steadily, calmly. but there are blurbs now.

www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

starting Dec 1st! ie tomorrow!

for structure to eke out pages at a bonkers time of year (that is also a precious writing-est time):

you can do 250 words a day! books get written that way! if more, amazing! if not when grading or festive-ing, that's ok!

check in daily at #acadecawriteathon

an ad for the new series “welcome to derry” with the tagline “go back to where IT all began“, except somehow, they highlighted the word “to“ instead of “it“

"oh, don't forget to highlight, in bright red, the two-letter word in the tagline! the two letter word that's kind of the whole point of this clever ad campaign! the two letter word that links this show to the horror movie of the same name!"

"no problem boss. i'm on it"

this riveting 2:34 belongs on every energy humanities syllabus

@chiday.bsky.social @jeffreyinsko.bsky.social