Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 10d

4) 1 or 3 + UChicago pedigree

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Atrios @eschatonblog.com · 13d

10 years on insecure visas does not encourage anyone to "integrate" - the possibility of settling does

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 19d

love a ha-ha

mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 22d

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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 24d

one of the fine distinguishing features of Bouie as a columnist is that he very much Does The Reading

🎃scarecrowcialism👻 @swolecialism.bsky.social · 24d

i stg one of the problems with the modern pundit-pocalypse is their sheer *incuriousity*. everything is based off their first impressions, their gut instincts, their thinking from first principle. they gotta get that take out before they do any reading. what hath the Blog Era wrought, man

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Postcard From The Past @pastpostcard.bsky.social · 26d

The beams are low and Alan keeps forgetting.

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AAUP @aaup.org · 26d

The rampant violations of academic freedom and intrusions on extramural speech are escalating rapidly. Faculty members have the right to speak or write as citizens, free from institutional censorship or discipline. Expression of opinion as a citizen does not constitute grounds for dismissal.

Clemson fires two more faculty members over Charlie Kirk comments

Clemson leaders had come under increased pressure from people online as well as South Carolina Republican politicians to take action.

www.wcnc.com

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 26d

i think you are missing the continuing importance of the courtship plot. it's in the novel’s dna that the person you marry tells you something about the person you are, or want to be. in other words, it’s part of the mechanism: how the novel *thinks* not, or not just, a theme

mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · 28d

a triumph of modernist design

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Sep 12

JG’s ‘‘enshittification’ just a word for the commodity form being applied to more and more things” is a good insight. hadn't thought of it that way before.

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Sep 8

Slightly diminish a book.

Snack Poems

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Sep 8

Slightly diminish a book.

Snack Poems

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Sep 7

Have you come across Ian Patterson’s writing about IM? I went to a talk of his more than a decade ago titled something like “Ian McEwan sucks” and now I see that he is at work on “on a book which analyses contemporary literature through a hostile critique of Ian McEwan’s work”

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Sep 4

When my third daughter was an infant, I could place her against my shoulder and she would stick there like velvet. Only her eyes jumped from place to place. In a breeze, her bright-red hair might stir, but she would not. Even then, there was profundity in her repose.

When my fourth daughter was an infant, I wondered if her veins were full of ants. Placing her against a shoulder was a risk both to her and to the shoulder. Impulsively, constantly, everything about her moved. Her head seemed about to revolve as it followed the bestirring world.

These memories became very much alive some months ago when-one after another—I had bear cubs under my vest.

- John McPhee, “Under the Snow”

mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Sep 4

i have been listening to John McPhee in audiobook form, but there is so much fun in his artful punctuation, I may have to switch to print

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Sep 4

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Jeremy Noel-Tod @jntod.bsky.social · Sep 3

Interesting to note, too, that it was indirectly the result of New Labour politics: (Lord) Bragg became a peer in 1998, and the BBC brief was to invent a radio format for him which could follow the Today programme without risking topicality

John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social · Sep 3

A huge moment -- Melvyn Bragg steps down from In Our Time after over a quarter of a century. What a programme and what a legacy! Just a model for how to make great, clever, engaging radio, and a twenty-seven-year experiment that proves there's a huge global audience for smart, scholarly programming.

Melvyn Bragg decides to step down from presenting In Our Time

After 26 years on the programme, the legendary presenter bids farewell to the series

www.bbc.co.uk

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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · Aug 29

More or less universally a country seeking to limit foreigners studying in that country is a sign of a society, culture, great power in severe decline.

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · Aug 28

One of the main benefits of doing a US PhD is the extra time you get, that's one of the big reasons I advised my students to apply for US programmes. We offer a four year degree here, there'd be no advantage over us. The US is euthanising its massive advantage in research for no good reason.

Oren Samet @osamet.bsky.social · Aug 28

I know there's a lot happening today, but this is sneaking in under the radar. This proposed new rule would absolutely crush foreign PhD students, potentially making it impossible for them to enroll with any certainty of their ability to finish www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Aug 17

a fillip of etymological delight encountering “digital” bearing its original meaning in a book from 1976: “Tree lines tend to be *digital* here, fingering into protected valleys.”

mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Aug 13

I am in disbelief that Chicago would even consider this.

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kate wagner @katewagner.wehwalt.net · Aug 13

Jesus FUCKING Christ

Theo Nash @theonash.bsky.social · Aug 13

This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Jul 24

The other, less bright boy’s effort in its entirety read: ‘The swallow is a migratory bird. He have a roundy head.’” - John Banville libertiesjournal.com/articles/in-...

In Blood-Boltered Times: The Northern Poets - Liberties

The late Michael Longley told of how, one Saturday morning in the middle of the 1970s, when tribal warfare in Northern Ireland was becoming bloodier by the day, and even more so by the night, he and h...

libertiesjournal.com

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Jul 24

The bright boy had written, ‘The swallow is a migratory bird. At the end of the summer it flies south and winters in North Africa . . .’ And so on, for two or three pages of peerless prose.

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mpallen.bsky.social @mpallen.bsky.social · Jul 24

Shortly after they had got started he interrupted the exercise, and separated the copier from the copied from, sending the former to sit at a desk on the far side of the room. At the end of the allotted twenty minutes he gathered up the schoolbooks.

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