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Last Notes

2026-08-16 04:40:43 CEST

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Such a sweet movie!

2026-07-26 17:50:04 CEST

I am still processing that this really happened. Yesterday my spouse and I came across a young woman and her mother with an open pet backpack, and we saw she had a large red-eared slider turtle on her lap. We waved, and she asked me if I wanted to hold him. He was surprisingly light, with a lovely oiled shell, strong legs, and a long neck, bright eyes staring at me. She had been raising him for 20 years, and said she could teach him our names. "Teach," she said, then "Carrie. Where is Carrie?"

2026-07-23 00:37:15 CEST

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After we discussed it here a few weeks ago, i played it a third time.

2026-07-05 16:47:16 CEST

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Video game blorbos are a big category for me.

2026-06-13 16:54:26 CEST

Penzeys is giving away $20 worth of Mexican vanilla with purchase if you use the code BROKE at checkout, and there are several other free or cheap spices--$1 small vanilla sugar, free "Outrage of Love" seasoning blend, smoked paprika for $2, etc.
https://www.penzeys.com

2025-12-09 01:51:17 CET

Two of the 12 students in my 18th-century novels class showed up today with copies of Penguin's Frances Burney's Evelina, sold as Evelina, with covers labeled Evelina, but every page inside is Trollope's The Duke's Children. What a mystery! Was this the futile last-day-at-work protest of a Penguin printer? FWIW, both students read quite deep into Trollope, wondering the whole time when this Evelina chick was going to show.

2025-11-05 03:56:22 CET

If billionaires aren't taxed more and don't spend their money here, but do most of their polluting here, why would we want to live anywhere near them? I am a billionaire NIMBY. If you like them so much, you take them into your neighborhoods and find out what they're like.

2025-11-03 18:30:13 CET

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When I was a kid, I liked how it treated kids with moral seriousness, as people whose actions matter. But I think it hindered me from feeling I could be playful, exploratory, etc. Edmund is basically convicted of treason at, what, 8 years old, and sentenced to a gruesome public torture and execution? I'm teaching it in a college course on literature for children, and my students are sort of enjoying the amoral imaginative freedom of earlier books--despite being religiously observant.

2025-10-14 01:33:06 CEST

It's been too long since our Boardgame Rehoming ceremony. Let's get to it!
The games we are giving away are listed in this Google Sheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gk0PEoxL3u7HxAv6I_3qhe2IJQhQManLEwlGSDgdwUQ/edit?usp=sharing
If you live in the 48 contiguous US states, we will send you 3-6ish games (depending on sizes) for the cost of USPS shipping plus a little for shipping materials.
If you live in NYC, you can come get them from our apartment. (We can't hand-deliver them to everyone.)
Claim 3-6 games by responding to this thread with your choices.

2025-10-05 16:51:33 CEST

Over the weekend, I wrote to the nearly 200 members of c18.masto.host who joined us in 2022-2024 and then stopped logging in over a year ago. I've gotten several emails back saying that after committing to Bluesky, social media as a whole came to feel like a bad idea. It is my hope that keeping the lights on here and providing a space where we can have meaningful, fun, interesting conversations can help us rebuild community here. (Please support your local instance!)

2025-09-15 00:51:20 CEST

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If I want to time-travel to everything I was thinking about in 1997, I put on this album.

2025-09-02 17:20:16 CEST

Paper proposals are due October 15 for our Slavery and Abolition in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy workshop at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia! Aminah Hasan-Birdwell and I are so excited about this event next May 13-15, and we are in the process of securing travel support for participants. https://forms.gle/f9UkAQPeBuU8TWsp8
#Philosophy #slavery #18thcentury

2025-07-15 23:35:56 CEST

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It's wild that when this happened to me at the (notoriously difficult!!) Chinese consulate, I had to get out of line, but they had an inkjet printer so my visa application went through. At the DMV, when I didn't have enough ridiculous documents, they just sent me home without a RealID and gave up.

2025-06-27 16:12:54 CEST

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So we have a clear pipeline problem in the study of writing about slavery. English departments and history departments are far more advanced than philosophers because they've had a few generations of concentrated study, and there have been excellent secondary works on the topic for almost 100 years. But philosophy is still very resistant, as a discipline, to treating 18th-c writing about slavery, especially by self-emancipated people, as philosophy.

2025-06-27 16:08:41 CEST

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When I was an undergraduate and graduate student, slavery was not a topic you could study in philosophy. I took several courses on Black literature in the English department, but anything from before the 19th century was folklore--because we were focused on creative writing, not theoretical argument. Rigid disciplinary boundaries are unnatural to the eighteenth century in general, but for African diaspora writers, they erase almost everyone.

2025-06-25 17:17:57 CEST

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New Yorkers, as voters, understand this better than most US residents because we live in public. We share space together all the time, in our apartment buildings, in parks, on the street, on transit. None of us wants to be victimized or terrorized, and none of us wants our loved ones to be in danger. We tend to be pretty nice to each other, because we've all been on the receiving end of someone else being nice. More resources for everyone make being fair and kind easier to accomplish.

2025-06-25 17:15:02 CEST

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And what does it say about Democrats that they no longer understand someone who says you fight crime by making people's lives survivable? That doesn't even register anymore? You don't *eradicate* crime 100%, but it's crucial to remember that most people don't get involved in crime because they're evil sadistic maniacs. That's just the billionaires, who never face consequences! Most people who do crime do it because they can't afford to live or thrive otherwise.

2025-06-25 16:57:25 CEST

Today the DNC is cranking up their concern trolling machine in the name of Islamophobia, refusing to take responsibility for putting their weight behind a billionaire-funded sex pest who hasn't lived in NYC since the 20th century for mayor. We've seen them do it for racism, misogyny, antisemitism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism--anything rather than admit that candidates with obligations to fascists and billionaires aren't inspiring or motivational.

2025-05-15 02:34:09 CEST

Sometime in the past year, we just stopped using Netflix for anything. We watched GBBO in the fall, and the weirdly interim season of Squid Game, and then... nothing until the threat of removing Bandersnatch this week made us finally watch it. It makes me sad as someone for whom the DVD mailing envelopes were sanity and joy during a difficult stretch of my life--late school, visiting professorships. I loved watching commentaries and getting rare gems in my mailbox.

2025-04-02 15:38:57 CEST

I would be a lot more excited to announce today that I have been accepted to participate in the NEH's Slavery and Early Modern Philosophy institute at Georgetown University this summer, but it also comes at a time when the NEH and all its staff are under Sauron's eye at DOGE.
If you are in the US, please take a moment to contact your representatives in defense of the (incredibly cheap and effective) work that the NEH supports. https://p2a.co/1gzPVYl

2025-03-07 14:20:04 CET

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But worst, she continuously contrasted "honors students and Hispanic immigrants," insisting that national statistics tell us that Hispanic immigrants don't study literature or philosophy "because they have to work for a living." She said this in front of our student department assistant, a Spanish and English double major honors student, and a DREAM Act beneficiary from Venezuela, and one of the most brilliant undergrads I've ever taught, with dozens of job prospects.

2025-03-07 14:11:15 CET

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I am extremely proud of the work my colleagues and I did to offer a meaningful education and opportunities for students who would have done anything for learning. Even in the midst of a poisonously racist and anti-academic culture, students in classes would have measured up to anyone's undergraduates. They were so hungry to learn that they created clubs to learn everything the administration took away as courses. They didn't need credits; they needed to learn everything they could.

2025-03-07 14:01:39 CET

Just heard that at the university where I was tenured in Philosophy and Literature, there is no longer philosophy or literature. Fairleigh Dickinson University is cancelling these majors:
Art
Chemistry
Creative Writing
Entrepreneurship
Environmental Studies
Fine Arts
Government and Law
History
Literature
Management
Marine Biology
Mathematics
Philosophy
Social Studies
Sociology
Theater Arts

2025-02-04 17:31:23 CET

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I wrote a whole book about this, so I won't repeat myself, but this is probably just a point on which we disagree. The wisdom of Hume and Kant won't be killed off by me or Lu-Adler or anyone else.

2025-02-04 17:17:03 CET

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I, for one, am rather tired of the sanctification of certain figures as impervious to interrogation--see the incredibly vicious responses to anyone discussing Hume or Kant's racism. We should question everything! But *everything*, though, without swaddling certain figures in cloaks of innocence they themselves never asked for.

2025-02-04 17:13:45 CET

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To me, "question everything" seems like a gentler version of Marx's "ruthless criticism of all that exists" and the whole arc of critical theory that springs from Marx--which I think most academic philosophers (in the US especially) are generally hostile to.

2025-01-28 19:02:09 CET

Last night, one of my students thought he had read a specific poem by a poet we're about to read, but I didn't recognize his description of the content of the poem. So he opens up Google and types in the poet's name and the topic, and it just spat out a fabricated poem in her style. This is what's really unnerving--"AI" is not adding value to a search service that works; it's flooding the search results with so much crap that you can't even verify a date or the existence of a text anymore.

2025-01-24 16:33:45 CET

It's here, it's here! I've been waiting since last summer to share this special issue of the Journal of Modern Philosophy on Imperialism, Racism, and Slavery in the Modern Period, guest edited by Julie Walsh and John Harfouch. https://jmphil.org/issue/318/info/
My article, "Ottobah Cugoano on British Slavery, National Debt, and Speculative Finance" is here. https://jmphil.org/article/id/2500/ But don't just read mine--so much exicting work here.
JMPhil is an open-source journal--no credentials needed. #philosophy

2025-01-01 00:38:05 CET

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I put onion slices in the hot oil before I put the batter in so it caramelizes under it!

2025-01-01 00:28:10 CET

We're gonna need all the help we can get. Happy new year!!
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/113/750/020/428/482/054/original/410f75cca6bc4418.jpg

2024-12-27 21:23:27 CET

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OMG, so many "Hey prof I'm thinking about rewriting that paper from October and resubmitting it some time in the next few weeks when I get a chance to think back on it some more..." The semester! Is over! We're done!

2024-12-27 17:21:42 CET

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There's still nothing I can do for them other than encourage them to turn it in today or ask for an incomplete for the course if it really is an emergency. But it's still the one day of the whole semester that I have to meditate on not taking it personally before responding with the options available. The good work I get is so excellent that I really have nothing to complain about. Still, as a woman humanities prof at a men's college, I think "You wouldn't ask Dr. Mister Chem Prof this." But---

2024-12-27 17:17:46 CET

On the last day of every term, I am the professor most likely to get "can I get an extension" requests for final papers and exams. Even after 23 years of doing this, I still have to meditate myself out of the assumption that my course is clearly not a priority for them.
1. Some are especially perfectionist about work for my course and want more time because they don't want to be anything other than excellent.
2. Many of their other professors are harassing them every moment about work due.

2024-12-27 05:31:14 CET

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For kanji, Wanikani is amazing, but after a year, I realized I wasn't actually able to read well because I wasn't putting anything in context. I could pass all my lil tests, but I'd read posts in Japanese here and go... what? I was watching a YT video from a Japanese teacher who said, if you don't have a reason to be learning Japanese, you will hit these walls when your knowledge just doesn't show up when you need it. Basically, I have to keep applying, not just taking lil tests.

2024-12-27 03:22:59 CET

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This is not a toot of self-righteousness, btw. I too love taking lil tests and am trying to at least stop confusing that for learning. Duolingo especially is built to make learning take years and years to cover a few concepts a good teacher could explain in a pair of lessons. I got a good look at their new music lessons recently--after several weeks, you can read about as much music as a first piano lesson teaches. Pa-ping! Dun-dada-dahh!

2024-12-27 03:18:48 CET

Sometimes I wonder how many former "gifted kids" are out there spending their 40s and 50s studying for lil tests that they pay to be given. Once I realized that my Duolingo/Rosetta/Wanikani cycling was just about giving myself lil tests rather than learning to engage meaningfully with texts and people in other languages, the pings and fanfares felt less satisfying. (Now I'm focusing on listening to real people talking, reading found text--no pings!)

2024-12-14 16:05:59 CET

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Microscope works this way, and is a lot of fun to write! https://pdfcoffee.com/microscope-rpg-resumo-2-pdf-free.html
A long time ago I did another one with friends that could only be played on a wiki host, in which you all write entries for a letter of the alphabet each day, and you have to cite previous and future articles as you go, but it wasn't as flexible or coherent as Microscope.

2024-12-04 17:00:46 CET

"naturally as soft as the pap of an apple"
Somehow I missed this chapter, and in my Shandean way, I allow myself to return to it. How could I have missed Toby getting his knuckles crushed to a jelly by Slop's hideous forceps? This is a crucial passage that reveals to Walter that his trust in the man-midwife may be tragically misplaced.
#TristramShandy

2024-11-20 20:43:52 CET

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No, I've thought the same myself, though it would trouble Tristram's account of his ejaculation. It would certainly make the last joke of Volume 9 make more sense!

2024-11-20 15:08:45 CET

"unparallel’d modesty of nature"
Just a warning that we're going to be here for a while, waiting for Tristram to be born upstairs. Toby's wound is introduced, and the effect it has on his character, to make him extremely shy around topics of sex and desire, which Walter speaks of incessantly with the satirical rage of a betrayed man, despite not having been betrayed at all. Ultimately, character is in the blood and in experience, not the weather.
#TristramShandy

2024-11-18 16:53:27 CET

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How kind of you to say it!

2024-10-22 16:21:45 CEST

I don't know anyone who actually likes Malcolm Gladwell anymore. 22 years ago, I was Your Friend Who Despises Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks and Will Not Shut Up About It. I would go around talking about how they are dumb men pretending to be smart men pretending to be dumb men. Their whole method for writing a book or column is to begin on the authority of "I think I thunk a thought." Loathsome work, loathsome ideas. More here on Gladwell's latest grift: https://culture.ghost.io/forget-gladwell/