In the waiting room?

You are not what you own.

"There is nothing to stop young, ambitious American artists from de-centering New York--divesting from its grind--and building new communities and new kinds of art on their own terms, literally anywhere else."

For a way out, the essay looks to the small city music scenes of the 90s, when the best music was coming out of places like DC and Louisville and Olympia.

But now that nostalgia is part of the marketing, the lifestyle fantasy that attracts young artists from elsewhere and keeps them in a city where they're never going to make it.

Who can resits nostalgia for an older, grittier New York where people dwelt in burned-out warehouses and factories, where the subculture was edgy and bohemian, where art was more like a calling than self-branding--and where, nonetheless, artists ended up famous and successful?

The overhead expenses at the major galleries are all so high that they can only really display safe, conservative art marketed to the rich.

In the new October, Josh Kline writes about how New York's real estate industry is killing its art world. No working artist can afford an apartment, much less a big studio to make ambitious work.
direct.mit.edu/octo/article...

Really good. Of course I loved the part about 90s small city music scenes as models for art-making and world-making.

Pie chart showing that nearly 2 million people are incarcerated in the U.S.

🚨NEW: Last year, the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. increased again. The driving factor? President Trump’s deportation agenda.

Our annual report, The Whole Pie, gives the big picture of mass incarceration. Here are some key takeaways 🧵

Albini Sessions (Benefit for Letters Charity), by Fugazi 12 track album

New & Notable: A new take on a familiar classic: The lost Albini mixes of this Fugazi milestone are now available, with proceeds going to Letters Charity.

Marxism and Form An influential introduction to Marxist cultural criticism by the acclaimed literary theorist

press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

The Prison-House of Language A groundbreaking critical introduction to Structuralism and Russian Formalism by the acclaimed literary theorist

Coming soon from Princeton UP: new editions of 2 Jameson classics. The Prison-House of Language, Foreword by Paul North & me. Marxism & Form, Foreword by Sianne Ngai. The great early books where Jameson worked out his thinking about theory & form. Get some!

press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Sentimentality is an underrated fash affect

Cities Under Siege Cities are the new battleground of our increasingly urban world. From the slums of the global South to the wealthy financial centers of the West, Cities Under Siege traces the spread of political viol...

Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege is available as a free download.

"Here’s urban geography as it looks like through the eye of a Predator at 25,000 feet. A fundamental and very scary report from the global red zone."
- Mike Davis

Just watched the video of what looks to be another ICE murder in Minneapolis and thinking again of the incredible bravery of these protestors, facing out of control armed paramilitaries with only whistles and phone cameras.

Opinion | State Terror Has Arrived

M. Gessen, gift link: The soviet secret police too "were ruled by quotas... Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works. The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive"

Somebody told me once that most of religious studies is really about media, and most of media studies is secretly about religion.

Devoted to the church of Fugazi What a weird format! I’m writing this essay on an airplane currently flying over the North Sea, and it’s hard not to feel like an overeager seatmate muscling my way...

Happy to have been part of this forum at @immanentframe.bsky.social on Latour, science, trads, punks, and the feeling of (being) discipline(d)!

I focused on how leftism has increasingly been cast as the politics of "you can't" while "conservativism" has taken on the mantle of "do what thou wilt."

Good essay! What a big, beautiful, sprawling production this was. Hope people read it.

Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now

This book was incredible!!! Riveting, brilliant, funny, moving, relatable, all of it. I have rarely read a non-fiction book so fast and happily. Cannot recommend it enough to my humanist friends

“This represents saving higher education, saving public research and the standing up of faculty and staff and students”—AAUP, one of the parties that brought the case against the Trump administration

World Building - The Massachusetts Review A Review of Reasons and Feelings by Sarah Mesle (University of Chicago Press) Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now is a new contribution to the University of Chicago Pres...

"This section defines REASONS AND FEELINGS itself quite brilliantly: it’s a book working to avail itself of a different style of the “guide to writing” genre to attempt to know the world differently."

Jon Hoel on Sarah Mesle, for #MassReviews: massreview.org/2025/10/28/w...

red book cover with pink lettering and a black arrow that says "REASONS & FEELINGS: Writing for the Humanities Now by Sarah Mesle"

This book is officially out today. I feel pretty confident that everyone in my feed (academic and not) could use it — I certainly got a lot from reading it in process, and, also, hearing Sarah say these things to me live and in person over a period of many years. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Penn rejects White House proposal for special funding treatment With the decision, Penn becomes the third university to decline the offer.

🚨🚨🚨

And THREE stood up!

Penn has joined MIT & Brown in rejecting Trump’s loyalty oath compact.

When we join together and fight back, WE WIN!

No amount of federal bribery is worth surrendering the freedom to question, explore, and dissent.

LET’S GO!

#DefendHigherEd
@aaup-penn.bsky.social

Adding in some other LK pieces into the thread. A recent short interview with TYR bsky.app/profile/yale...

Good morning! If you'd like to read smart things instead of all the stupid things, the new ELH is out, with essays from The English Institute. New work by Quashie, Post, Orlemanski, Yousef, CW Smith, Tongson, and yours truly, introduced by Fleissner and Enelow.

muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

"Models of Ideological Analysis" by Fredric Jameson Listen now | Opening Lecture of 1977 Institute On Culture & Society

"Models of Ideological Analysis" by Fredric
Jameson, Opening Lecture of 1977 Institute on Culture & Society (audio)
theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/models-of-...

Home | The Tidewater Initiative We are a multidisciplinary research group devoted to study, stewardship, and stories of working waterfronts, coastal infrastructures, and oceans under conditions of globalization and environmental ins...

We're launching a new Tidewater Initiative at JHU. Our research group on working waterfronts and coastal infrastructures includes a new student research lab, courses, programming partnerships with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, and more in the works. sites.krieger.jhu.edu/tidewater/

The Jameson Tapes, Side B with Isabel Bartholomew, Anna Kornbluh, Caleb Smith, Robert Tally, & Fredric Jameson

So happy with how this came out.