@1977khv.bsky.social
English PhD who works for DoD, as was
No Official Positions
Really, completely unofficial
Slava Ukraini! 🌻
January 11, 2026 at 5:55 PM
from deep within my chest:
reading—especially fiction—is not a wellness practice
To get more young people to read, it’s best to treat the activity not as a public duty but as a vice, Adam Kirsch argues.
Reading Is a Vice
Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.
bit.ly
January 9, 2026 at 6:48 PM
*are there any wars right now where we’re not losing?*
But when when you launch military action in an unstable part of the world long beset by violence, there isn't really a bottom to how bad things can get. And rather than a serious plan for the future, we're already threatening other countries.
January 6, 2026 at 5:32 PM
on overlapping polycrisis

my only v v v minor gripe is that as ever it’s precisely the humanities that teach us how to recognize and analyze the overlapping polycrisis
This was published in the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s. If you work in education & were, reasonably, taking a break, maybe you missed it.

Don’t miss it.
The ‘Crisis of the Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing.
All of higher ed now suffers the attacks of politics and technology.
www.chronicle.com
January 6, 2026 at 3:21 PM
the reason that trailer is so steamy is cuz the novel is even steamier
the wild novel teems with antagonism, yes, but also with property, class mobility,+the slave trade - and those mists that roll across the moors, cloaking the gothic masterpiece - that is also a realist masterpiece of surging capitalism - in an all too worldly aura

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/b...
January 5, 2026 at 5:23 PM
Reposted
Brb off to run Venezuela
January 3, 2026 at 4:56 PM
it’s all so cortisol spiky
January 3, 2026 at 5:01 PM
once again real life has made fiction too
subtle
January 3, 2026 at 5:01 PM
playing landslide at an airport should be illegal

too many tears for too many reasons!!
January 2, 2026 at 9:51 PM
now seems like a good time to revive and revise our thinking on the realist novel as a liberal or illiberal form
December 31, 2025 at 8:57 PM
are the men alright
seems like maybe no
December 30, 2025 at 11:58 PM
among the million reasons we should all be reading Laurie Colwin all of the time is that this was her world and is the world of her characters
(There's something very complex here, that no one talks about, which is that independent presses publish not only books of high artistic merit but also ones that can, with the correct distribution, marketing support, and brand awareness, SELL. Not as mutually exclusive as folks would believe.)
December 30, 2025 at 7:50 PM
My hometown is a stunner and a showoff

And will break your heart
December 26, 2025 at 7:53 PM
It’s always true

But especially at this time of year

Being a parent really is walking around with your whole entire heart outside
your body
December 24, 2025 at 3:50 PM
on these points I am hopelessly old fashioned and naive but something about the press comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable…
Why’d they air the promos lol
December 22, 2025 at 1:02 PM
Today in all lit is chick lit
December 21, 2025 at 7:23 PM
From All Good Books in South Carolina

for the littles in my life
December 20, 2025 at 9:22 PM
inexcusably late to this
so glad to have gotten here
December 20, 2025 at 9:06 PM
a v good thing is an epistolary novel in the 21C
December 20, 2025 at 12:44 AM
the thing about the if we had more and better romcoms we’d have happier dating, romantic and domestic lives line is that I don’t want us living like any of those characters

still and all

all lit is chick lit
December 19, 2025 at 12:57 PM
We don’t have to live like this
We don’t have to live like this
We don’t have to live like this

Kyrie Elesion
December 15, 2025 at 11:43 PM
we should all be reading chandler’s *the simple art of murder* all of three time
this is a difference you see between more "traditional" detective stories (holmes, poirot etc), where the dapper detective is more removed from the action itself, and noir and hardboiled detective fiction, where the troubled, traumatized, alcoholic detective shapes and is shaped by the plot
my favorite thing about the benoit blanc movies is that they aren't really about benoit blanc. he is not grappling with demons from his past. we are not getting flashbacks to the husband whose murder he never solved. he just shows up and does his job like mary poppins for homicides
December 15, 2025 at 2:45 AM
we should all be reading auden’s *the guilty vicarage* all of the time
in classic detective stories, the world is out of order and the detective arrives to set it right. in noir/hardboiled, the world is out of order and the detective increasingly realizes over the course of the story that it's impossible to set things right ("forget it jake, it's chinatown")
December 15, 2025 at 2:33 AM
A very good thing is that people are writing and publishing v long v good novels

Bring forward all the best parts of the 19C
December 14, 2025 at 9:18 PM
The thing about the new *A Legacy of Spies* is that *The Little Drummer Girl* will never not be my best le Carré adaptation

The theatre of the real forever
December 14, 2025 at 11:51 AM