Megan L. Cook
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meganlcook.bsky.social
Megan L. Cook
@meganlcook.bsky.social
6.5K followers 860 following 3.5K posts
Your favorite medievalist's favorite medievalist. Middle English literature and/in early modern books, with a side of textual editing. In progress: Dirtbag Medievalism, Chaucer's Readers: 1400-2000, Lydgate's Shorter Works
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meganlcook.bsky.social
Today I finished a challenging semester of first-year writing instruction, *and* said no to a professional opportunity that, while appealing, was not the right thing for me right now. I would like a cookie, and a nap. (But instead I will have a department meeting.)
December 3, 2025 at 7:37 PM
meganlcook.bsky.social
LMAOooooooooooooo

(I listen to first wave ska while I write and hippy new age shit while I fall asleep, so this tracks)
Screenshot of my Spotify Wrapped stating my “listening age” is 73
December 3, 2025 at 5:28 PM
meganlcook.bsky.social
It's the time of year-- not even the semester, bc there's a blanket of holiday-related obligations atop the usual academic stuff-- when I am buried under a mountain of tasks that will take one to two hours to complete. Too long to knock out in the odd free moment, too quick to defer without anxiety
December 3, 2025 at 2:11 AM
meganlcook.bsky.social
Sorry to say but I don't see a way out of this without faculty getting more involved in administration
December 2, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Megan L. Cook
rikibeth.bsky.social
where my nerds at
Windows four-pane logo. Upper left red square labeled “sanguine”, upper right green square “melancholic”, lower left blue square “phlegmatic,” lower right yellow square “choleric”
December 1, 2025 at 1:54 AM
meganlcook.bsky.social
Did you send a fancy hot toddy kit to my office? If so, 1) thank you and 2) please reveal yourself, mysterious benefactor!
Hot toddy kit from Cocktail Courier featuring lemon, cognac, honey-ginger syrup, tea, and dried lemon garnish, lending a festive air to an otherwise staid desktop
December 1, 2025 at 3:44 PM
meganlcook.bsky.social
Consider it a reminder to wear your blaze orange if you're out in the woods!
meganlcook.bsky.social Megan L. Cook @meganlcook.bsky.social · 2d
For most of my drive to work today, I was behind a truck with large CUSTOM MEAT PROCESSING decals. I know what it means, but it still seems... vaguely threatening
December 1, 2025 at 2:23 PM
meganlcook.bsky.social
It's December 1, which means that I am exhausted and have no idea how I'll make it to the end of the semester, but also that it's time to indulge my abiding and sincere love for Fairytale of New York, the greatest Christmas song of the 20th century: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSkN...
Fairytale of New York (feat. Kirsty MacColl) [Top of The Pops Dec 1987]
YouTube video by ThePoguesOfficial
www.youtube.com
December 1, 2025 at 1:42 PM
meganlcook.bsky.social
For most of my drive to work today, I was behind a truck with large CUSTOM MEAT PROCESSING decals. I know what it means, but it still seems... vaguely threatening
December 1, 2025 at 1:39 PM
meganlcook.bsky.social
For the anti-fascist parents in your life this holiday: this adorable "All you babies bound to snooze" letterpress print www.instagram.com/p/DRpm7pHDo5...
radical emprints 🌹 on Instagram: "NEW LETTERPRESS PRINT & SMALL BIZ SATURDAY PROMO! This print started on a weekend away with some parent friends & their small children, when we were inevitably talkin...
135 likes, 8 comments - radicalemprints on November 29, 2025: "NEW LETTERPRESS PRINT & SMALL BIZ SATURDAY PROMO! This print started on a weekend away with some parent friends & their small children, w...
www.instagram.com
December 1, 2025 at 12:54 AM
meganlcook.bsky.social
Please send me your cool, funky stationery recs for my 6-year-old niece. She's a precocious reader and writer, into mermaids, unicorns, witches and potions (apparently all the rage with the 1st grade West Philly crowd, which TBH tracks). Looking for fun notebooks, stickers, pens, etc for Christmas
December 1, 2025 at 12:43 AM
meganlcook.bsky.social
I'm in-- because if I do not write various and sundry this coming month, there will be Consequences
annakornbluh.bsky.social Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 2d
starting Dec 1st! ie tomorrow!

for structure to eke out pages at a bonkers time of year (that is also a precious writing-est time):

you can do 250 words a day! books get written that way! if more, amazing! if not when grading or festive-ing, that's ok!

check in daily at #acadecawriteathon
annakornbluh.bsky.social Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 3d
is there a NaNoWriMo but for December and academic/ nonfiction? Should we start it?
December 1, 2025 at 12:40 AM
meganlcook.bsky.social
I was wearing my UMich sweatshirt at the grocery store today and a man in a Darthmouth cap moved aside to give me first pick at the kale. "You deserve a break," he said, and that is how I, a non-football-watcher, learned that Michigan lost to OSU yesterday
November 30, 2025 at 10:45 PM
Reposted by Megan L. Cook
bfletcherwatson.bsky.social
Eleven years ago, I wrote to Tom Stoppard to ask about this coup de théâtre from 1949. It took me down an unexpected rabbit hole - in memory of Stoppard, here's what I found.
"Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view. And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone. "When you look up the stage directions, it says, 'Exit Ariel.”
November 30, 2025 at 1:38 PM
Reposted by Megan L. Cook
nathankhensley.bsky.social
Or @hsteffen.bsky.social, in “Adjunct,” giving a concise, bullet-pointed definition of neoliberalism that can go right onto a classroom handout or union meeting flyer — I’ll teach it next week 🙏
Heather Steffen, in “Adjunct”: 38 University Keywords Neoliberalism is a concept that recurs throughout this book because many observers name the current era in US higher education the moment of the "neoliberal university," In one basic definition, neoliberalism names the set of economic, political, social, and cultural processes through which free markets have come to serve as our dominant model for social relations and institutional organization: • Social relationships become defined primarily through their economic facets. Students are regarded by their educational institutions as customers rather than learners, and, as Childress writes, "College has become a form of indispensable employment insurance, available for purchase on the open market at protection levels from community college bronze to Ivy League platinum" (2019, 48). • Public goods and services become privatized. Formerly public enterprises are now run by for-profit entities (e.g., for-profit charter schools; private prisons; privately held patents on the results of publicly funded research). • Individuals behave like entrepreneurs, and organizations behave like businesses: we imagine ourselves as mini-enterprises trying to grow our capital in the world's marketplace (e.g., the concept of human cap. ital, resume building for high schoolers). Organizations and institutions like nonprofits, universities, government agencies, and NGOs function on the model of for-profit businesses, despite their not-for-profit tax designation. Public institutions that have not formally been privatized become neoliberalized in that they behave like businesses. • Responsibility and risk are individualized. Rather than viewing the responsibility to employ, feed, clothe, and house everyone as society's responsibility, our society views it as each person's responsibility to fend for themselves (eg, the transition from welfare to workfare, drastic wealth/income inequalities). Similarly, we expect risks to be borne by individu… Adjunct, Continued: working lives, often shifting careers several times. Employers extract cost savings through tactics like automated scheduling, keeping workers just under the number of hours needed to gain benefits, falsely defining workers as "contractors" or "consultants," outsourcing, and speed-up (being tasked with more work but not more time to do it in).
November 29, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Reposted by Megan L. Cook
danglinghemmie.bsky.social
❌ learn to code
✅ learn to read
November 30, 2025 at 2:01 PM
meganlcook.bsky.social
I asked Aphrodite what it’s like being so beautiful, but she said she doesn’t speak with members of the press except by prior arrangement with her agent
A grey and white tabby kitten with blue eyes and a pink nose looks quizzically at the camera A grey and white tabby kitten with blue eyes sits on a fleece blanket and licks her nose
November 30, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Megan L. Cook
mcopelov.bsky.social
Look around. The case for more, not less, liberal arts education - actual, real education in reading, writing, thinking, arguing, analyzing, & synthesizing by doing the actual hard work for which there is no substitute - is stronger than it’s ever been at any point in human history.
November 30, 2025 at 12:07 AM
meganlcook.bsky.social
Meet Fox “Fluffy” Mulder, the newest resident of Spacecat Castle and a total dreamboat
A black, medium-haired cat with golden eyes and white toe beans and an ear tip gazes at the camera while relaxing on a fuzzy blanket
November 29, 2025 at 11:30 PM
Reposted by Megan L. Cook
joncg.bsky.social
'I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself...'

Damn.
RIP Tom Stoppard.

He had a good line in cheekbones and louchly-worn coats; wasn't bad with words either.
Black and white photograph of a young Tom Stoppard looking like a French intellectual, with shaggy hair, a cigarette, tweed jacket and a heavy roll neck.
November 29, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Reposted by Megan L. Cook
catacalypto.bsky.social
A story Stoppard told several times, in several places:
"Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view. And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone. "When you look up the stage directions, it says, 'Exit Ariel.”
November 29, 2025 at 6:10 PM
meganlcook.bsky.social
Hello from the President Gerald R. Ford Tribute Room
November 28, 2025 at 8:59 PM
meganlcook.bsky.social
Did not have W.W.J.D. bracelets on my "the 90s are back!" bingo card
November 28, 2025 at 6:42 PM
meganlcook.bsky.social
Getting all the tea about the local YMCA aqua-cardio instructors from my mom. Tammi doesn't get in the water when she teaches, she is not one with the people. Some Normal Gossip level shit
November 28, 2025 at 2:23 AM
Reposted by Megan L. Cook
meganlcook.bsky.social
Thanksgiving is a bullshit holiday, but I am grateful for you, friends who live in my phone
November 27, 2025 at 1:39 PM