George Packer's review of Salman Rushdie's 'Knife' is exceptionally good. You can tell that Packer started his career as a novelist and still has one in him: theatlantic.com/books/archive/…

My take on the most recent antisemitism hearing: chronicle.com/newsletter/the…

On the latest Know Your Enemy: Matt and Sam are joined by historian Ronnie Grinberg to discuss her book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals.

dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your…

The new academic politics are not a recipe for disciplinary longevity, let alone for saving the planet libertiesjournal.com/articles/curri…

“Art as Device,” Viktor Shklovsky’s famous essay defining art as an experience of defamiliarization, is itself a work of defamiliarization—of the practice of literary criticism:
thepointmag.buzzsprout.com/1791285/148579…

'The Met exhibition suggests that “Harlem” was more an ethos than a geography; the movement’s “transatlantic modernism” extended far beyond New York.' Rachel Hunter Himes on the The Metropolitan Museum of Art's new show and the world-spanning modernism of Harlem Renaissance thenation.com/article/cultur…

For Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics, I wrote about what 'affirmative instrumentality' misses: libertiesjournal.com/articles/curri…

A useful thread on the 1A issues at play in the Chemerinsky backyard dinner controversy, which I wrote about here. chronicle.com/article/get-ri….

Wrote about reading books (and writing columns) on my phone and Richard Brautigan

newyorker.com/news/fault-lin…

I wrote about Ronnie Grinberg’s fascinating new book WRITE LIKE A MAN, on Jewish masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, for The Chronicle of Higher Education chronicle.com/article/the-ne…

Enjoying @gutkinlen's essay in this stellar issue of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics. libertiesjournal.com/articles/curri…

Thrilled to work through some 'Curricular Trauma' libertiesjournal.com/articles/curri… in such a phenomenal issue of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics

libertiesjournal.com/articles/curri… Modernism remains, (…) “our antiquity … the only one we have.” To have abandoned it as a hiring field will, in the not-too-distant future, deprive college students of access to one of the keys to any understanding of the present.

SCOOP: In 2020, Stanford’s Faculty Senate passed a resolution condemning Scott Atlas’s COVID views. This week, it will consider rescinding it.

A group of faculty is arguing the way it was passed set a “dangerous precedent” for free speech at Stanford.
chronicle.com/article/stanfo…

V4Iss3 now live libertiesjournal.com/articles/issue…

a beautiful, ruminative essay on teaching the humanities in the ruins of the university

lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/apri…

Sheila Heti has been editing and reworking her 500,000 word diary for a decade. The result is a kind of Symbolist poetry lareviewofbooks.org/article/making…

The Paris Review mourns the loss of John Barth (1930-2024). In memory of his life and work, we’ve unlocked his Art of Fiction interview with George Plimpton from our archive.

theparisreview.org/interviews/291…

W.G. Sebald in an interview (1998):

“The reverse of melancholy is always irony. One is amused about one’s distress occasionally and they are two complementary moods and you can’t really have the one without the other. […] All melancholic writers had a very funny side to them.”

Opinion: Did a prominent New York Times reporter get deceived by Covid scientists? chroni.cl/4cDp5dH