Patrick Whitmarsh

I didn’t think the first AI paper I’d find during grading period would be… from a respected, peer-reviewed journal asking me to review a submission.

Fucking bleak.

Against AI is constitutively labor-minded. It’s been a generative topic of discussion among certain people in my department.

This is the classics version of the sci-fi meme “we have created the Death Star from the famous story DO NOT CREATE THE DEATH STAR.”

I think @jordanscarroll.bsky.social nailed it when he diagnosed a serious incapacity for reading among a certain instrumentally minded demographic.

how is Rose Betts the most majestic combo of Imogen Heap and the Decemberists? And how am I only learning about her now? I’m obsessed.

This is one of the first songs I remember hearing as a child that has stuck with me—can’t wait to read! The taconite reference also reminds me of Springsteen’s “Youngstown.” We need more environmental histories via folk songs.

Like my man Zevon says, “If I leave you, it doesn’t mean I love you any less. Keep me in your heart for a while.”

We’ll miss you Bon. You were the best cat anyone could ask for.

Colleagues and fellow scholars, here’s info on a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies that I’m coediting with Matthew Gannon and @katemarshall.bsky.social: “Long Modernism, Altered Natures,” cfp below—send us your abstracts!

call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/...

I love Watertown

That’s bullshit

Contents | Science Fiction Film & Television 18, 2 This paper focuses on the TRON duology – Steven Lisberger’s TRON (1982) and Joseph Kosinki’s TRON: Legacy (2010) – ahead of the release of Joachim Rønning’s TRON: Ares (2025) to situate the series in relation to the social dreaming of utopianism. As I’ll ...

My newest piece on Peele’s NOPE and the McManus bros’ THE BLOCK ISLAND SOUND is out in SFF&TV, along with several other banger essays. Check it out here (if you don’t have access, dm me)

liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/sfftv/18...

a cat is laying down in a dark room ALT: a cat is laying down in a dark room

Tobias, your book is the one we need

Let’s be real, LLM is just way too similar to MLM.

Of course, this requires a lot of cannibalizing those 37 false starts.

Sometimes, the way a draft of something gets written is 37 false starts and aborted efforts and then BAM. 7500 words in two days.

1. 2005
2. Brick
3. Burrito bowls

This right here is why we study literature.

This is wild Nathan. Thank you for posting about it.

The upshot of extractive capitalism is a house of mirrors where what’s below is above, as we’re crushed within centuries by what was buried over epochs.

The frontier is alive and well in the world-ecology.

Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures. By Sarah Dimick A deceptively simple question animates Sarah Dimick’s Unseasonable: what do literary and cultural depictions of seasonal regularity (or irregularity) revea

My review of Sarah Dimick’s tremendous new book, UNSEASONABLE, is out at ISLE. Academic friends and fellow environmentalists, check out Sarah’s awesome work!

academic.oup.com/isle/advance...

Stoked and stacked for IMAGINING CRISIS IN 21C AMERICAN LITERATURE in the fall!

Daveed Diggs’ sci-fi rap trio Clipping: ‘We are at war all the time. It’s one of the great tricks of capitalism’ Diggs’ harrowing music is a world away from his Hollywood films and a Tony-winning run in Hamilton. But his band’s world-building – setting resource wars in imagined cyberpunk clubs – is no less drama...

The new clipping. has been my commute soundtrack for the last few weeks

www.theguardian.com/music/2025/m...

Thomas Pynchon announces Shadow Ticket, his first novel in more than a decade The elusive 87-year-old author’s new book is a noir caper set during the big band era following a detective in search of a cheese heiress

“Set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the Great Depression, Shadow Ticket follows Hicks McTaggart, a detective who is tasked with finding the heiress of a cheese fortune.”

I mean, that tracks.

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

ngl it ain’t easy reading Karen Russell’s THE ANTIDOTE when I feel the urge to write down notes about every. single. page.

I can vouch, this book is 🔥

clipping. - Dead Channel Sky | Reviews | Clash Magazine Music News, Reviews & Interviews Cyberpunk currently stands as the last great popular vision of the future. Since its emergence in the early 1980s, via novels by the likes of William

ummmmm clipping. dropping a Neuromancer concept album? I will inhale this shit

www.clashmusic.com/reviews/clip...

Michael was my undergrad thesis advisor. This really sucks to see.

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

Book 20: Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

Book 19: Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (Karen Tei Yamashita)

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

Book 18: Blindsight (Peter Watts)