Sean DiLeonardi
@sdileonardi.bsky.social
1.9K followers 1.4K following 130 posts
Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Center for Digital Studies at Pitt-Greensburg (he/him) Every day I wake up and cognitively map like my subjectivity depends on it.
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sdileonardi.bsky.social
‘the human centipede of content’ is the most succinct, brilliant, and horrifying description of AI yet. AI is not the future, it is the past returned as shit.
chronicleflask.katday.com
Daughter of Robin Williams, Zelda Williams 💔
zeldawilliams 
20m
From Create Mode 
••
Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I'll understand, I don't and I won't. If you're just trying to troll me, I've seen way worse, i'll restrict and move on. But please, if you've got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It's dumb, it's a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it's NOT what he'd want.
To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to 'this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that's enough,
, just so
other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening. You're not making art, you're making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs up and like it.
Gross. And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it 'the future. Al is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed. You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.
Reposted by Sean DiLeonardi
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
I made a lil game inspired by the Wordle universe. It's called Versedle (pronounced Verse-a-dle). You guess who wrote famous lines of literature.

As my parents can attest, it's hard! I made them an Easy Mode, but it's still kinda hard. Maybe you'll like it!

▶️ 📚: melaniewalsh.github.io/versedle/
VERSEDLE
Test your literary knowledge with Versedle!
melaniewalsh.github.io
Reposted by Sean DiLeonardi
lbmcgrath.bsky.social
Baby’s got a pub date! And some juicy catalog copy. MIDDLEMEN coming your way on April 26!

(Cover reveal soon!)
sdileonardi.bsky.social
Great! I’m glad I’m not alone. And I enjoyed the film but I realized he doesn’t want pynchon’s history of countercultures so much as zany action + dark humor (or something)
sdileonardi.bsky.social
Thesis: Unlike Inherent Vice, One Battle After Another is not ‘based on Pynchon’ (a formal claim that characters and plot points get remediated by film) but PYNCHONIAN (a stylistic claim that Anderson is actually moving his auteur brand toward the sensibility of Pynchon’s novels
sdileonardi.bsky.social
I can confirm that scientifically this is a first, because from 2014-2016 I watched an episode of Wild Kratts every day that said sperm whale/squid battles in the deep sea have never been seen by humans.
rebeccarhelm.bsky.social
I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
sdileonardi.bsky.social
Hey thanks to @lithub.com.web.brid.gy for including my recent piece on translated bestsellers in their daily roundup of “the best of the literary internet”! Check it out:

lithub.com/lit-hub-dail...
lithub.com
Reposted by Sean DiLeonardi
jdconnor.bsky.social
Judith Butler was decisive to my own intellectual development when they were at Hopkins. Watching the UC facilitate their persecution by dipshit wreckers in the Trump administration is enraging. Butler, in all their thorniness and range, epitomizes the centrality of the fight for academic freedom.
sdileonardi.bsky.social
1. I scan the book reviews in the TOC emails from major journals in my field, which means I’m several months late to the party (unless they’re reviewing advance copies)
2. Bluesky 🤷
sdileonardi.bsky.social
Conflict b/w globalism and nationalism is difficult to entangle because 1) globalism denies nationalism in name but depends on it in practice; 2) globalism erodes democracy as an institution but claims it as a ‘moral attitude’ (thus confusingly coercing the Left to the center)
Reposted by Sean DiLeonardi
publicbooks.bsky.social
New at PB: Jed Kudrick & @sdileonardi.bsky.social scour bestseller data to unpack trending translation in the US, despite the low national average of translations published each year.
How Translations Sell: Three U.S. Eras of International Bestsellers
A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it.
www.publicbooks.org
sdileonardi.bsky.social
The Leonardo Da Vinci museum has a jacquard loom! Plus a whole media technology through the ages section. Added bonus: models of plans for perpetual energy machines which is kind of bizarre to imagine a world w/o entropy
sdileonardi.bsky.social
I thought this was a pretty cool fact when I discovered it. I mean 80 weeks is hella long for a book to be consecrated by U.S. popular culture as relevant (average bestseller lasts 1 week). Even for English language writers, this is like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones big.
publicbooks.bsky.social
“‘The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’ spent nearly 80 weeks—more than a year and a half—in a top 10 spot. This gives Larsson’s novel the record of securing the longest length of time on the NYT bestseller list of any translated novel—from any language—ever.”
How Translations Sell: Three U.S. Eras of International Bestsellers
A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it.
www.publicbooks.org
sdileonardi.bsky.social
I’m on page xi ofTaking Back Control by Wolfgang Steeck and I’m already into it/asking questions:

“The nation-state is the only social site - the only institutionalized polity - that is potentially available for democratisation in opposition to capitalist distributional justice”
Reposted by Sean DiLeonardi
sdileonardi.bsky.social
Saw Noah Wyle at school drop off.
sdileonardi.bsky.social
I’m very excited to share this. My first time co-writing with a student who won a year-long fellowship to help compile the data. Many thanks owed to those who read, edited, and supported along the way. Please share widely!!
dan-sinnamon.bsky.social
Big essay out by @sdileonardi.bsky.social in @publicbooks.bsky.social today, drawing on 100 years of translations and bestseller data to show that the US has seen three waves of translation: European; Latin American Boom; Nordic Noir. And what this means for us.
www.publicbooks.org/how-translat...
How Translations Sell: Three U.S. Eras of International Bestsellers - Public Books
A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it.
www.publicbooks.org
Reposted by Sean DiLeonardi
sdileonardi.bsky.social
‘Print is a rent strike’ was top of mind when I decided to require all readings to be printed and laptops closed for discussions this semester.

Haven’t made the full leap off canvas though.
sdileonardi.bsky.social
I just have to remember to take a breath during each episode
sdileonardi.bsky.social
Hoo boy! I can’t believe it’s happening. We’ve been working on this for years. Thanks to @post45data.bsky.social you can now search our IB database, with a very cool interface!

Please share with anyone who might be interested

Special thanks to @ninasabak.bsky.social for aiding with the data source
post45data.bsky.social
New dataset on bestsellers from 40+ countries, with consistent coverage for France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the U.S.

Congrats to the authors @sdileonardi.bsky.social, @beccacohen.bsky.social, and @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social on this major contribution! 🎉

🔗: doi.org/10.18737/386...
sdileonardi.bsky.social
Of all the Coldplay lyrics when “Nobody said it was easy [cheating on your wife], but no one ever said it would be so hard” is right there
jshelat1.bsky.social
The statement from the Coldplay cheating guy is KILLING ME. The last line😭😭😭
sdileonardi.bsky.social
In Milan, I saw my first Jacquard loom in person, not knowing that the following day, in Bologna, I would see my second, though this one was programmed by an Italian artist to weave a pattern based on his own genetic code.
Reposted by Sean DiLeonardi
goblemark.bsky.social
That's a Jeff Wall photo, so please judge this book by its cover. Many thanks to @philipleventhal.bsky.social and @columbiaup.bsky.social.

In the world on June 3, available for pre-order now: cup.columbia.edu/book/a/97802...
book cover for Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion. Cover image is Jeff Wall's "Milk," showing a man sitting on the ground with a container of milk in a brown bag captured in the instant of spilling out of the bottle