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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃

@kellenhoxworth.bsky.social

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Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University at Buffalo - SUNY. Author of “Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance”: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810147072/transoceanic-blackface/

nupress.northwestern.edu

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · Oct 17

My book Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance is available from Northwestern University Press.

It maps the global history of blackface, minstrelsy, and related forms of racialized performance such as brownface and yellowface.

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 1d

The victory parade could either make or break Chicago’s potential as the prime site for the Resistance.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 1d

Higher Ed in 2025 is opening your mailbox to see that your institution has sent you:

1. A Center for Teaching and Learning call to integrate AI into your classroom; and

2. An Office of Academic Integrity email encouraging you to crack down on students who use AI to cheat.

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 1d

This is perfect because it succinctly communicates the point that AI boosters inevitably miss:

Figuring out hard things is the point.

Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 2d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 1d

a little girl is making a funny face while sitting at a table with potted plants .

Alt: The little girl saying “Por qué no los dos?” meme.

media.tenor.com

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 2d

Really makes it when they cut from Big Papi and Vlad to A-Rod and Jeter squirming.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 2d

When the metaphor “we’re burning the planet for AI” literalizes:

niki grayson @nikigrayson.com · 3d

the city of los angeles burned in january in part because of a man who couldn’t stop generating images of burning cities on ChatGPT, and then after he lit the fire he asked if the fire he started was his fault

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 3d

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · Feb 5

just saying: it's possible that "I'm gonna dramatically constrict my state capacity while plotting dramatic imperial expansion, and expanding my set of internal enemies while alienating most of my foreign allies" is the beginning of a world-historical masterstroke. but also possible that it isn't

Reposted by 🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 3d

"It wanted to signal strength. Instead, it’s revealing its weakness. The administration’s need to break the academy is forcing it to make a desperately risky gamble." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

Opinion | You Beat Trumpism by Banding Together. It’s as Hard and as Simple as That.

www.nytimes.com

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Peter Butler @peter-butler.bsky.social · 3d

Bloomberg research found wholesale electricity up ~270% in areas near data centers

It doesn't seem like nearly enough people are taking it seriously

One A.I. image isn't too much energy, but 5 million videos? Per day/hour/minute whatever. It's not sustainable

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring

Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.

www.bloomberg.com

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 4d

Just need another one that says, “They don’t know that I don’t practice Santeria.”

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 4d

Can’t wait for politics to finally run on a Matthew Arnold-Brad Nowell axis.

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Chibdm @chibdm.bsky.social · 4d

Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 6d

Will to Power and Grace

Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 6d

The funniest thing in the world is someone posting something egregiously fake followed by “let that sink in.”

Debra Messing: @emmabenson92 I have nothing against Socialism, don't know where you got that. I voted against M because he celebrated 9/11.
Let that sink in. I love my country. My reasoning is not Islamophobia. I I've chosen to live in the most beautifully diverse city in the world.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 7d

Ironically, the Atlantic has played a major role in the gender revanchism trend.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 8d

They’re playing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Y Control” at the grocery store.

I am officially an Old.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 8d

He sings the songs that remind him of the good times
He sings the songs that remind him of the better times

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 9d

I have Magnolia higher, but we can all agree that Licorice Pizza was a nadir.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 10d

The Aristocrats!

Aaron Bady @zunguzungu.bsky.social · 10d

it's actually super-great that the Riyadh comedy festival both allowed these clowns to beshit their reputations AND ALSO allowed everyone to spend a news cycle observing that Saudi Arabia is a despotic nightmare

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 10d

The Aristocrats!

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 11d

The main thing I got out of the Ezra Klein-TNC interview was that I can read a podcast episode in 1/3 the time it takes Ezra Klein to debase himself with what amounts to really baroque self-pity.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 12d

Hey hey now: let’s not forget their love affair with indentured servitude as a liberal-contractual form of legalized enslavement.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 12d

“Awakening into truth” connotes a near religious conversion after which one is saved from lies.

“Staying woke,” if it has any religious undertones, suggests that lies are real and present dangers, and that devils walk among us waiting for us to allow our complacency to render us helpless.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 12d

The other key to this is how the rightwing politics of “awakening” are antithetical to “staying woke.”

QAnon and the various forms of rightwing radicalization entice followers to facile understandings of politics as an awakening.

Staying woke is a longterm project that takes constant effort.

Judah Grunstein @judah-grunstein.bsky.social · 13d

This is, after all, the original and authentic meaning of "stay woke." In fact, the perversion of "woke" into an epithet is perhaps the defining metaphor of our moment: Historical victims are not only being revictimized, but also mocked for never forgetting this is always a possibility in the US.

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🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 12d

Ironically, this nostalgia seems geared for precisely people who grew up seeking to escape suburban despair but who have found them evermore ensconced in it. So now they fabricate a lost past to yearn for from the prison of their own making.

🎃 a frightful hoxgoblin 🎃 @kellenhoxworth.bsky.social · 12d

Also, the nostalgia misses the crucial context: whatever positive valence Walmart or Target or Perkins at 11 pm had for suburban kids, it was because it was a glimmer of freedom, autonomy, and escapism from the otherwise banal ennui that pervades suburban life.

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