iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

another day, another meditation on what objects, if added to my enclosure, would enrich me most.

Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

1 like = 1 opinion whose optics will tempt my critics to call me a "heterodox liberal" despite my protests jk jk can you imagine

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

fellow readers of western massachusetts news, we have missed an opportunity. As J. Richman might have put it, "I was masking at the lesbian bar/ooo/ooo"

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Fellow authors, are you, too, receiving scam emails that represent themselves as coming from specific _real people_ working in publishing or media, as opposed to invented ones? I have gotten two in the last three days.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

When this comes up I always think of @seeshespeak.bsky.social’s essay on not-reading, an attack on the elite posture of being too busy and important to read: thepointmag.com/criticism/in...

thepointmag.com

In Praise of Not Not Reading | The Point Magazine

The campus where I work can hardly be labeled a bastion of literary enthusiasm. But, every spring, for a brief, three-day period, it does its best to pretend otherwise.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

a really nice thing to read is @levistahl.bsky.social's newsletter, This, Not That, which is thoughtful on a wide array of topics from surfing to detective fiction and the book links take you to The Book Moon (cc @kellylink.bsky.social @gavingrant.bsky.social): this-not-that.ghost.io/issue-22-hol...

this-not-that.ghost.io

Issue 22: “Heard you was staying on . . .”

Chilly, drenching rains inaugurated autumn over the weekend, just ahead of today’s equinox but I still don’t quite feel like letting go of summer yet. Music The Baja Sessions (1996), by Chris Isaak...

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I love the excitement about the first scarves day of the year, and want to add my joy at the first *slippers* morning of the year.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

see, there's this episode of The West Wing when, in order to deal with 9/11, some of the characters instantly became counter-terrorism experts. A few years later some of the characters in My PhD Program instantly became digital humanists. The wheel weaves as it wills.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

announcing, well, a natural sensation - the new volume "Sensoria," from @humansandnature.bsky.social collects reflections on animals, humans, sensation and the natural world, and I am honored to have an essay on natural history museums in the mix: humansandnature.org/shop/sensoria/

humansandnature.org

Sensoria: Attending to the Wonder and Vitality of Nature

Buy Sensoria: Attending to the Wonder and Vitality of Nature, an immersion in the sensual experiences of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

check to see if yr shul has the "break the fast with bikini kill" option

the seminal (as it were) riot grrl band onstage

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Steven (with a PH) @sjksalisbury.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Christening a baby is nothing like christening a ship. I know that now. Once again I can only apologise.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

[China Mieville is talking to the camera. China's words are obviously auto-transcribed] China: I'm Channel Maable

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

In the absence of Skype, is there a computer (non-phone) -based tool for making international calls to landlines? Thanks!

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

For absolutely no reason thinking of how “arching” as in “being arch-enemies to” became a verb in the Venture Brothers.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

some serious thoughts on erev yom kipur, of course, about the world, being a Jew in it, about how what other Jews do affects me, but also the memory of ending my fast by the shore of Echo Park Lake in L.A. with a Kogi truck pork burrito, gratitude, or something else, running down my chin.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

as Tobias suggests here, the trick is to not to offer defenses when they won’t really be considered.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

There’s more to be said about the relationship between Pinker-style stardom and the state of academia. Not because academia is Woke, but because star systems loosen rigor at the top while solid scholarship becomes a dead end lower down. Shoddy celebrities and broke PhDs proceed from the same machine

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D. A. Powell @dapowell.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

From Cape Cod poet John Bonanni's book Retrovirilogy (University of Pittsburgh Press) this haunting eloquent poem "Death of the Sperm Whale."

Death of the Sperm Whale

At the Whaling Museum in New Bedford,
my father & I walk into a life-
size ship of what a vessel might
have looked like for the long need
of whale slaughter. Everyone
is here on a Saturday. We walk
around the deck & duck our heads
in the same way any sailor would
& just like a real sailor, you, too, can touch
wood & you, too, can hit your head on the mast.
We roam to a Plexiglas table
to peer into the quarters below:
Small, claustrophobic. A group
of school children climbs aboard.
A chaperone tells them to stay together,
but they don't.
One child disappears
into the laughter.
Another child
won't stop crying.
He is afraid of the stairs.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Few know this, but the German "Stiftung" (Foundation) actually has Biblical origins, a way of honoring the foundational role played by Moses, who as everyone knows had trouble speaking, due to his stiff tongue.

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John W Buaas @johnwbuaas.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

“[O]bviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is.” Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

New pavement is great, but I’m enough of a Kantian to want lane lines too.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

big allergy attack caused by the sexual activity of plants led me to coin the new term "snyphilis" you're welcome.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

during tomato season I make and consume so much ratatouille it is as if Chez Panisse had developed its own version of Soylent, a replacement for all other foods, a convenience and a way of life.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I absolutely agree with Rebecca. Three books is the new minimum. Three books and 100 pushups and perhaps - si cela vous plait - a new translation of Celan's Todesfuge.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

testimony to the beauty of "Hallelujah" that even a novelty rewrite about the teenage mutant ninja turtles ("Cowabunga") cannot mask the grandeur of the notes, cannot keep me from imagining "Hallelujah" being drawn from my lips.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

there are, psychoanalysis teaches us, desires we cannot see, wishes we cannot touch, and we would be surprised by what our dreams conceal in order to guard our sleep. For instance, I had no idea I really wanted to see Christine Korsgaard's name printed on a page immediately above Soren Kierkegaard's

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Rebecca Colesworthy @rcolesworthy.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

OK dudes I got myself a hotel for a night in CT. Who’s coming to hang out at the cash bar with me and talk about books??

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

"What's your costume supposed to be?" "Oh, I'm well-known American historian Oscar Handlin covering over the controversial use of Warren Center funds to give everyone a summertime bonus."

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

love the phrasing "in order to have a fully panoptic view of the dining scene in L.A." because it suggests that the L.A. Times has an editorial tower with views into numerous cells in which sushi chefs, taqueros, thai cooks, and of course, Ludo Lefebvre, labor, having internalized being observed.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Got ready; couldn’t start the car; also words were decoupled from deep relation to the objects they index; somebody stole my Cratylitic converter.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

the advertisement for "vraylar" (evidently an antidepressant) claims to depict a writers' retreat, yet the attractive younger people featured therein seem to interact a lot in supportive ways rather than engaging in sniping, backbiting, or extramarital affairs. No-one even drops their agent's name.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

often someone reposts an already-reposted post, invariably about politics, creating something like a Russian Doll of commentary in which the intended ultimate point becomes lost in the nested political positions, utterly inscrutable to me; reading Talmud might be easier.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Not entirely pleased by the way "a jelly Firkin" sounds like something Falstaff might say, how about you?

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Establishing a “magnetic fields medal” for genx and elder millennial humanists because it’s only fair.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

went into a Constable exhibit today and was disappointed not to see 30 paintings of Rene Auberjonois.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This is like arguing we must ensure that our graduates are the best biomass they can be, for benefit of the worms who are the "ultimate customer" of the human experience. We need these people to not run universities.

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ʒᴉǝI @entheticus.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Just had a very @benwurgaft.bsky.social idea—“the finite lettuce representation problem”

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I had a totally different chronology for Amber, beginning with Dworkin's flight from the Courts of Chaos with the Eye of the Serpent and his begetting of Oberon with the Unicorn. Like 2000 years max.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

make a Hollywood classic into a recipe by deleting a word, I'll go first: Brining Up Baby

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I’m old enough, and privileged enough, to have gone to college in a “your major doesn’t determine your future” way, but as Tobias points out, in many cases your major doesn’t even determine the bulk of your education.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

“Isn‘t ‘CP Snow‘s’ an odd name for an Indian Restaurant?” “Oh, it’s the flatbreads, you see; they serve the two Kulchas.”

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The devil proposes that people can fiercely identify with and love any city in which they come into their cosmopolitan young adulthood. To test this theory, god made New Haven.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I don't have to gear up for Fall semester these days, but I do feel a little lull in my productivity as September begins, like a vestigial form of solidarity with colleagues who are once more unto the breach.

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

high school/college: listening to bands with names like “magnetic fields,” or “pavement” 40s: listening to ambient artists with names like “Xoloft Inflected Puberty Arc”

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Ben Wurgaft @benwurgaft.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I was away from cafe bluesky yesterday, but was aggrieved to find out that @annieabrams.bsky.social was mistakenly criticized for her criticisms of "alpha academy" and the AP system most broadly. I have personally learned a ton from Annie about the history and practice of US high school education.

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Shannon K. Supple @mazarine.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Happy (US) Labor Day to all the laborers!

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