sure it's a tool of social control and surveillance owned and operated by fascists, but it writes work emails for me. on balance who's to say it's good or bad

Big Wet Wipe knows how to make wet wipes that can be removed one at a time but refuses to do so because they make so much money when you pull them out in clumps

Everyone should learn how to parallel park. Even if they never own a car.

Two efforts to help Hampshire workers facing job loss:

General emergency relief fund: www.helphampshireworkers.com

Fundraiser for staff of Hampshire's Early Learning Center, which will also close: www.gofundme.com/f/elc-staff-...

Re-sharing @ronakkapadia.bsky.social post, which hits queer & trans* studies, medical humanities, disability justice & abolitionist thought, among others

cc @edrabinski.bsky.social @alexanderchee.bsky.social @noethematt.bsky.social @ethnography911.bsky.social - pls reshare

Nooooooo

(yes, I admire minimal fashion, but not the fetishization of libraries when they continue to be de-funded, threatened, shuttered)

Stolen Letters That John Keats Sent to His Beloved Are Found

!!!!!!!!!!!!

The whole web is built on a primary grace: that the people visiting you are trustworthy. It costs a little something for me to serve my webpage to everyone who goes there. When the number of scrapers outnumbers the number of humans by an order of magnitude, this grace is fragile.

Reference: programminglibrarian.org/programs/civ...

I think a reimagined Civic Lab program would a) gain a more regular rotation, b) leave the library and hold space in multiple spaces, and c) be tied to intentional community-building like what @katmabu.bsky.social started at her campaign office.

Sometimes, I want to revive a program I worked on for a few years (before I resigned and the program gradually phased out): a pop-up civic engagement discussion/exhibit focused on questions about a current event or topic with vetted library resources + a 1-page resource sheet for further reflection.

Being raised to work for the market economy doesn't mean I (and we) can't dream better and more expansively about an education.

Professional colleagues whom I don't know closely are losing their livelihoods. Students and alumni will be uprooted, buildings will be shuttered. This is a school whose embers will be felt long after the fire is extinguished.

As a child of immigrants who were not imaginative about the possibilities of college education beyond its credential-building capacities, the directive was clear: build a career, degree in hand.

In hindsight, I wonder how much my life would have changed had I insisted upon and charted another path.

The End of an Experimental College Hampshire College and the Limits of Reinvention in American Higher Education

"When Hampshire replaced grades w/narrative evals. & standard majors w/individualized programs, it was not just making a choice about how to organize education. It was opting out of the signal system on which the economic value of a college degree depends."

stevenmintz.substack.com/p/the-end-of...

Academic/art friends and comrades, I’m beginning to circulate a new talk for AY 2026–27 and would be glad to bring it into conversation with departments, programs, centers, classrooms, workshops, and reading groups. Drawn from my forthcoming book, *Breathing in Common*, the talk asks what it means to sustain life in common when air itself has become a site of governance, risk, exposure, and abandonment. Thinking with contemporary art, disability justice, abolitionist medicine, and COVID-era aerosol knowledge, I trace how breath functions as shared infrastructure under empire, and how queer and trans artists of color theorize collective survival through opacity, luminosity, care, and improvisation. I’d be especially glad to connect with those working in feminist studies, queer and trans studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, medical humanities, environmental humanities, art history, visual culture, and abolitionist thought. I’m open to virtual, hybrid, and in-person invitations. For in-person events, I’m happy to participate, provided thoughtful safety precautions are in place. If you’re organizing something for the coming academic year, please feel free to DM me or email me. I’d also appreciate shares to colleagues, programs, and organizers who might be interested.p

Selfie featuring author in a red shirt that says Museums Are Not Neutral in white lettering

Academic/art friends & comrades, I’m beginning to circulate a new talk for AY 2026–27 drawing on my book in progress, *BREATHING IN COMMON.* I would be glad to bring it into conversation with departments, programs, centers, classrooms, workshops, & reading groups. Please help me circulate this note!

Bright teal-y blue background with black and white text that reads: Support Hampshire College Staff and Faculty! DONATE TO OUR EMERGENCY RELIEF FUND Hampshire College is closing, and hundreds of staff and faculty are facing sudden job loss.

As you know, Hampshire College is closing, and hundreds of our wonderful staff & faculty colleagues are facing sudden job loss without severance.

Hampshire staff & faculty have launched an Emergency Relief Fund—if you’re able, please donate or share!
www.helphampshireworkers.com

"Saying yes as loud as they said no, this band sounded like they were building things, the way children build pillow forts and draw dream houses."

As a former StoryCorps facilitator, this is fucking disgusting.

End the project already, Dave.

You created a good model: you encouraged people to sit and do oral history for 20 yrs.

Turning StoryCorps into a surveillance capitalism nightmare is not worth the money to keep the project going.

Gift link: share.inquirer.com/rUIphW

Why Yale’s term paper on what’s wrong with college gets a ‘D-’ | Will Bunch An Ivy League university's report on the loss of faith in higher ed ignores what really killed the American Dream of college.

That Yale report on what's wrong with U.S. college saw some trees (high cost, unfair admission, etc.) but missed the forest: the 60-year right-wing crusade to undermine higher ed, from slashing budgets to stifling speech

How to really fix college. My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/yale...

Green and white image talking about the D65 board planning to "reallocate" middle school librarians. The call is for library supporters to show up to the board meeting tomorrow, Monday April 20, at 6 pm. It's at the Joseph E Hill Education Center at 1500 McDaniel Ave in Evanston. You can also email a statement to qureshia@district65.net

Illinois folks: District 65–that's Evanston and Skokie–is planning to "reallocate" middle school librarians. In the midst of a literacy crisis and ongoing attacks on books, show up in support of librarians if you can tomorrow.

1/2

The Starving Artist Trope Is a Policy Failure ...and the system is working exactly as designed

"The nonprofit model denies ownership. Gig precarity strips away security. The missing enterprise infrastructure prevents agency. The starving artist is the predictable product of these three losses reinforcing one another."

open.substack.com/pub/emilkang...

The Starving Artist Trope Is a Policy Failure ...and the system is working exactly as designed

"The nonprofit form was designed for charitable service delivery, and when you force artistic practice into it, you get organizations that grow while the people inside them stay poor."

open.substack.com/pub/emilkang...

Harvard's ties to slavery in Antigua are even more extensive than I thought, and I'm Antiguan. In fact, my mother's family is from New Winthorpes (& nearby Barnes Hill), having been forced to move from Winthropes in 1942. Mary Geo Quinn, the 'Winthorpean' poet quoted in the piece, was my cousin. 1/

Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired? The school’s $100m project to examine its slave ownership in Antigua is mired with controversy as academics allege obstruction

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Um.

Rümeysa Öztürk, Tufts University grad arrested by ICE agents last year, returns to Turkey - The Boston Globe The government and Öztürk’s legal team have jointly moved to dismiss her immigration proceedings.

America is losing a talented researcher today.
Rümeysa Öztürk, whose abduction by masked men prompted a search and her eventual release by ICE, has returned to Turkey. She wants to resume a career without "state-imposed violence and hostility."
www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/17/m...

"There is a solution. And the solution is to concede that we are confronting a social, economic, and political problem; not a technological one.… It is not my job to compensate for a person's erasure of me by making myself more present."

Things I talk to my #MLIS students about:
*my salary (as an adjunct & as a librarian)
*my student loans (how much I owe & the PSLF process)
*vocational awe (RIP Fobazi)
*Melvil's legacy & why it matters
*the job hunt (I show them my academic interview day schedules & they're horrified).
📚