Chris Grobe

What is a Roman, that is Cæsar's foe?

Greater than Cæsar: he's a friend to virtue.

- Joseph Addison, CATO (1712) (the Founders’ favorite play)

Seconding this as a Mariners convert from Cubs fandom -- it was obviously the curse-breaking that cursed the nation, not the Cubs winning. Only the Cubs losing in the WS -- preferably to the Mariners -- could undo it. Curse lifted/restored!

Deep Vellum partnership creates new literary translations - Arts & Sciences Magazine Photo by Will Kirk In the 2019 novel Schattenfroh, as narrator Nobody contemplates history, philosophy, religion, and art, his thoughts are forcibly

magazine.krieger.jhu.edu/2025/10/deep...

There’s a good poem about this:

www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

(Nods sagely) The Three vs. The Many

In a nutshell the modern actor is someone trying to ditch bad forms of “mechanicity” (basically, that of the clockwork automaton) in favor not of “organic” “human” expression but in pursuit of a different, refined “mechanicity” (that of cybernetic, “responsive” machines). Welcome to my TED talk…

There’s nothing strange or “hypothetical” about this notion in a theater context. The idea that self-consciousness is the enemy and that actors need to travel some via negativa to strip it away — this is the post-Romantic consensus in actor training and acting theory.

I don’t call it triage, but I absolutely sequence edits in stages based on how important/transformative they are. Working in several “passes” allows me to focus on the revisions I’m doing, and not get bogged down in changing everything simultaneously. I picked this up from a fiction writer.

Submitted revisions of articles on back-to-back to days. As sports commentators would say, "He's on pace for 365 publications by July 15 of next year!"

First-year creative writer discovers enjambment while interning at local flour company

“Disability Works” turns 1 today! I’d like to celebrate by making sure it finds its way into the hands of even more readers. You can help by:

1) Requesting your library purchase a copy (link in bio)

2) Let me know if you assign it (I can zoom in!)

#disability #academicsky #historysky #booksky

Article submitted: my first essay on podcasts!

Sounds like your next season……..

Too Much, Too Late: On Academic Responses to Generative AI Future readers will struggle to fathom how fast it happened. Overnight, academic leaders committed hundreds of buildings, thousands of faculty lines, and billions of research dollars to the reinvigora...

From an essay just published

On the dangers of making your work “relevant” to AI:

“Like LLMs themselves, which deskill human writing and pollute the corpus of text on which LLMs continue to be trained, AI-relevant research also risks eroding its own foundations in now unfundable and ‘irrelevant’ research.”

“Project Gatsby” — incredible.

I should clarify: I wrote what I did between undergrad and grad -- or maybe into my first year in graduate school. In any case, it was Yale English undergrad alums who wrote a lot of No Fear Shakespeare.

I’ve been trying to pitch this as the “private humanities”

what a way to find out that AI is trained exclusively on my writing

Lol, but actually...

No Fear Shakespeare was definitely Yale-adjacent. I and my nerdy friends wrote a bunch of uncredited stuff for them.

Coming soon (but hopefully with my name spelled correctly) ... "Too Much, Too Late: On Academic Responses to Generative AI"

NOTE: This year, we are accepting proposals for work in any format that fits your career-stage or the state of your research in this area.

Turning a term paper into your first article? Submit!
Polishing your book proposal? Submit!
Finishing the introduction to your book? Submit!
Etc.

APPLY! For the third year running, Shannon Steen and I will be co-leading an ASTR working session on "The Performance of Politics," this year around the theme of "institutions." Please spread the word.

site.pheedloop.com/event/astr20...

Typing out a text message to myself (my way of keeping certain things handy), I nearly jump out of my skin when those three dots appear. Someone is typing! (I am.)

Anyway, a psychoanalyst would have a field day with this.

If nothing else, this episode may finally help the public unlearn their wrong beliefs.

The humanities, apart from their obvious value to society, are also cheap and profitable to sustain.

STEM is expensive and unprofitable. That’s why the govt funds it in the first place.

The necessary antidote is this excellent op-ed by theater scholar (and dean of the arts) Harvey Young.

As he points out, the humanities are imperiled — on purpose — when the most expensive part of universities loses its funding.
www.chicagotribune.com/2025/03/12/o...

Opinion | Colleges Are Under Attack. They Can Fight Back. (Gift Article) This is a moment to trumpet the strengths of higher education and address its weaknesses.

Looking in vain for an acknowledgment that the humanities exist and matter — to society, to universities, to individuals — in this column written by people who clearly benefitted extensively from them.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/o...

Johns Hopkins Plans Staff Layoffs After $800 Million Grant Cuts Local and international health research efforts are already winding down as the university braces for even more potential cuts.

The Trump administration has terminated $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University, spurring the nation’s top spender on research and development to plan layoffs and cancel health projects

As a JHU professor who works on other stuff, the role my colleagues play in global health is extraordinary and completely irreplaceable. The Trump administration is tossing our collective ability to deal with global problems onto a roaring bonfire.