GET-UP Grads graphic: 99% of participating members voted yes to ratify a first-ever contract with the University of Penn.

Congratulations to graduate student research and teaching workers at the University of Pennsylvania, who just ratified their first-ever contract by an incredible 99% 🎉🎆🥳

Happy Valentine's Day 💕

"We show up for the people who need us to bear witness, because it can't just be one group of people bearing the brunt of their tyranny. This is a struggle to protect our freedom and democracy, those things are on the line. He lost his life for those values."

Just 30 minutes inside "Dream World" was a cure for my rural ills

Happy Thanksgiving! We developed a neat contraption for cooling off the cherry pie

dozens and dozens of banker's boxes, full of books

Reflecting on some of my life choices

1/2 A temporary new work of public art on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway by local artist Nicolo Gentile centers the celebrations and protests that have become part of the fabric of Philly's grand boulevard.

Nicolo's "Bar None" will be on view through the end of October!

Rümeysa Öztürk describes the library in the prison where she was held for 45 days for co-authoring an op-ed

Happy Bastille Day from the rive gauche (of the Schuylkill)

My own presentation was about how periodical sketches by Leigh Hunt and Dickens mediated the effects of London's urban development as it blurred spatial boundaries and class lines—and offer ways of reading how histories of civil unrest are overwritten by civic development #RSVP2025 #VoicesVisions

Had a wonderful time at my first #RSVP in Chicago—hearing great talks and viewing some archival treasures at the Newberry and Poetry Foundation!

For Friedrich, landscape was the expression of spirituality and a personal connection with God. By isolating individual objects in this composition and rendering them in specific detail, such as the tree, spider web, and thistles, Friedrich gave them a heightened clarity that destabilizes the familiar and suggests a hidden, sacred significance within organic forms. The viewer’s dilemma---deciding upon the meaning and significance of the scene---is echoed by the woman herself who gazes toward the vening sky. Her pose and gesture suggest a searching awareness that evokes melancholy and suspended resolution. Surrounding her are symbols of morality in the barren trees, thistles, a caught fly, and the setting sun. In this woodcut, Friedrich depicted for one of the first times a theme that became a leitmotif, what art historians have called "the drama of the self facing the universe."

The Woman with the Spider Web between Bare Trees https://clevelandart.org/art/1995.68

Congratulations!

BREAKING: Mahmoud Khalil speaks out after being released from ICE detention.

"The Trump administration are doing their best to dehumanize everyone here," Khalil said.

Great update: www.wnyc.org/story/new-so...

Action without Hope A study of how writers from the early phases of our prolonged climate emergency used aesthetic strategies to redefine the category of action. What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that ...

*Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse* is out today! The official release got pushed back due to an issue w the art, & despite being mostly about literature it's very visual.

So to celebrate its full entry into the world, a thread of some of my favorite images from it:

Rainbow over Center City

Happy May Day from Boz—and Bernie

Taught 2/3 classes outside today 😎

omg

Mahmoud Khalil’s Son Arrives After ICE Refuses to Let Him Attend Birth (Gift Article) Mr. Khalil, a permanent resident detained in Louisiana, had requested a monitored furlough for the birth. His request was denied in less than an hour.

NEW: Mahmoud Khalil's wife gave birth to their child without him after ICE denied their request to let him be present.

“This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer,” Dr. Abdalla said. “My son and I should not be navigating his first days on earth without Mahmoud."

Figured out a way to make grading take literally forever, thought it might be helpful to share

faced with a profoundly unjust decision against him, Mahmoud Khalil chooses to show incredible solidarity

First comment overhead while filing out of Philadelphia Orchestra's magnificent performance of The Firebird this evening: "Ah well, of course the Sixers lost"

The panel's abstract reads: Sterile, tedious, vulgar: suburban stereotypes abound. H. G. Wells thought “the Modern City looks like something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed.” John Ruskin found “no existing terms of language … to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin,” of suburban development. Yet these supposedly repulsive spaces were extraordinarily attractive. What do the suburbs offer our understanding of the novel’s social horizons? The nineteenth-century novel's realism has been primarily understood as a metropolitan phenomenon. How does literature from the Victorian era to the present, within and beyond realism and the British tradition, confirm or challenge assumptions about suburban spaces?

"The Country, the City, and the Suburbs" convened at NeMLA yesterday with a full slate of great papers and generative discussion. ("Sterile, tedious, and vulgar"?—it was anything but!) Thanks to our presenters and all who joined us. @ruthquante.bsky.social

Amy Offner and Sam Layding | Penn must not obey in advance Guest Columnists Amy Offner and Sam Layding encourage Penn employees to push back against administration's anticipatory obedience to executive orders.

Read Amy Offner of @aaup-penn.bsky.social & @slayding.bsky.social of GETUP-UAW in the DP calling on Penn to uphold research, sanctuary, DEIA and nondiscrimination, and the rights of all members of our community
www.thedp.com/article/2025...

NEW SOUNDS SLATED TO BE CUT FROM WNYC/NYPR | New Sounds | WNYC New Sounds is hoping to find new major philanthropic funder (or, failing that, a new home) to keep New Sounds on the air past the current end date of May 31.

oh no 😱 New Sounds, indispensable background music for all my late-night writing sessions, slated to be cut! If you are—or know—a major philanthropic donor, please help!
www.wnyc.org/story/new-so...

Trader Joe's has switched to giving out single bags, instead of double by default. Folks, this is going to be a DEEP recession