Love’s Work — Parapraxis The Generic Pleasures of Romance Anna Kornbluh

new in Parapraxis online!

Love's Work

the romance boom, psychoanalysis, Emily Henry, and creative labor

www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/lov...

Who Gets Guggenheims? - Public Books Unfortunately, 100 years of data show that those whom such fellowships might represent the greatest departure from their everyday experience—that is, those not at elite institutions—are least likely t...

Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe.

Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities

www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...

The Red May 2026 schedule is up, congratulations for ten years of annual vacation from capitalism.
www.redmayseattle.org/2026-schedule

Twenty-third Annual Conference - Historical Materialism Call for Paper is Online and submission form open! Planetary Warscapes Ablaze: Imperial Mutations in Infernal Times 5-8 November 2026, SOAS, Russell Square, Central London Deadline for abstracts: Fr...

The CfP for this year's Historical Materialism annual conference in London, under the title 'Planetary Warscapes Ablaze: Imperial Mutations in Infernal Times', is now online!

Mark it in your calendars, prepare your abstracts, book your travel!

Arlo Parks wants to soundtrack your walk home from the club | Xtra Magazine On her new album, “Ambiguous Desire,” the U.K. star swaps downbeat musings for dance music. But even her disco is deep

Parks cites writer and theorist McKenzie Wark’s 2023 book Raving, which examines this framework through a blend of theory and memoir, as one source of inspiration, particularly on her song “Jetta.” xtramagazine.com/culture/arlo...

Relatability An engaging account of how the New York School poets used art to imagine their queerness as something that might be shared with other people.How did Frank O’Hara and other New York School poets—a smal...

Cover drop! Extremely excited to have this incredible sculpture, Marisol’s Love (1962), on the cover of Relatability, out later this year press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Dennis Cooper, The Art of Fiction No. 213 “I think pornography is a very rich medium, and I’ve studied it closely and learned quite a lot as a writer from it.”

“The characters are the main entrance into the work because they’re shaped like humans and they’re lit more brightly than their surroundings.” —Dennis Cooper

Selma Dabbagh | Digging up the Dead The attack on the small town of Nabi Chit in the eastern Bekaa Valley on 6 March shows the value placed on human lives...

“According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, there were more journalists imprisoned in Israel at the end of last year (29) than in Russia (27) or Belarus (25); only China (50) and Myanmar (30) were worse.”

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

Jürgen Habermas, influential German philosopher, dies at 96 Jürgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died.

Habermas dead. Arguably outlived the public sphere. apnews.com/article/juer...

crucial coverage from The Guardian that features our collaborative, movement-building website
against-a-i.com

A queer phenomenology How I came to write a sequel 20 years later

I am offline next week. I didn't quite manage to write a newsletter this week. Here's something from last week. Or maybe it was this week. Time is as surreal as the times we are in. With killjoy solidarity to everyone surviving and fighting imperial war machines. FKJ xx substack.com/@feministkil...

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi | The dry and the wet burn together The war launched against Iran by the United States and Israel is a war of choice and of hubris. There is scarcely even...

‘If Trump’s intention was to remove Khamenei from the political landscape, he may instead have fixed him in it, recast in the eyes of his devotees as a figure of sacrifice rather than failure.’

@eskandarsadeghi.bsky.social on the US war on Iran, new on the blog.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...

AI=B+ - Public Books “The essays ChatGPT produced in mere seconds are quite plausible as the last-minute work of a rushed undergraduate.”

New at PB: English professor Ben Parker asks: How good is ChatGPT at writing, really?

Students begin Covid compensation claim against 36 more universities It comes after University College London settled a claim from students there over lost learning in the pandemic.

Imagine this kind of student organizing against Ed Tech / AI.

“I lost out on learning! Relationships! Oh and all of my personal data, too!”

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Thank you Dom! Hope you are well

Gender studies courses are shutting down across the US. The Epstein files reveal why | Joan Wallach Scott Texas A&M University is the latest school to end women’s and gender studies programs and teaching race. We know why

Joan Scott on why the attack on gender studies by powerful patriarchal men is not a coincidence, but an attempt to silence critique and analysis of their abusive behavior. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I don’t expect it to happen, but having unlawfully arrested and branded hundreds of your citizens ‘terrorists’ should really be a resigning matter for the Prime Minister in any free society.

"Only two English words rhyme with culture, and these, as it happens, are sepulture and vulture. We don’t yet call museums or galleries or even universities culture-sepultures, but I hear a lot, lately, about culture-vultures (man must rhyme)."

Raymond Williams

Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!

Network(ed) confession: disidentification, digitality, and the politics of self-representation in the work of Kathy Acker and Joanna Walsh This essay examines the intersection of life-writing, network systems, and literary experimentation. Confessional forms of literature have inevitably transformed with the proliferation of mass comm...

Overjoyed to have my first article published in Textual Practice today on life-writing, network infrastructures, and formal experimentation in work by Kathy Acker and Joanna Walsh.

It’s open access too! Read here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

'A consultation run by the City of London Corporation and published on Thursday found that nearly 90% of respondents backed trans-inclusive access to the ponds' 💪🏳️‍⚧️❤️

I hate to tap the sign but again: this is all made to make in-person education and access to knowledge transfer a preserve of the elite. Human education for the few, bots for the many.

Opinion | Is ‘Literary Fiction’ Just Another Genre Now? There is no real middlebrow any more.

Another turn on the Genre Turn (and a review of Jeremy Rosen’s excellent Genre Bending). www.chronicle.com/article/is-l...

“In my writing, I want to display a self that disintegrates. I can prop that up with theory, but something must compel me in the first place.” —Robert Glück buff.ly/hw5gXxh

Really enjoyed thinking with your work!

wow - honoured to be here

This essay is part of my ongoing PhD research into the legacy and afterlife of Acker’s oeuvre. I’m exploring how Acker’s innovative strategies inform experimental literature by women and queer writers today.

Network(ed) confession: disidentification, digitality, and the politics of self-representation in the work of Kathy Acker and Joanna Walsh This essay examines the intersection of life-writing, network systems, and literary experimentation. Confessional forms of literature have inevitably transformed with the proliferation of mass comm...

Overjoyed to have my first article published in Textual Practice today on life-writing, network infrastructures, and formal experimentation in work by Kathy Acker and Joanna Walsh.

It’s open access too! Read here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

OpenAI Reportedly Planning to Make ChatGPT "Prioritize" Advertisers in Conversation OpenAI employees working on ChatGPT report plans to unleash sponsored advertisements above organic results.

what a shocking turn of events
who could’ve seen this coming