iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

My uni just posted this essay on LinkedIn (recognition is neat) but cropped out the image of the effing dinosaurs (probably advisable), so there’s a nsfw 🦕🦕 surprise for anyone who clicks

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I wrote about those antediluvians in The End of Oak Street for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social. Thanks to @sayanniething.bsky.social for letting me get a little weird with the Michigan of it all! Some general spoilers, but only one specific one re: fate of the dog. #FossilFriday tinyurl.com/dinostories

tinyurl.com

We Tell Ourselves Dinosaur Stories in Order to Live | Los Angeles Review of Books

We live within a library of antediluvian narratives, with more accessioned every day.

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It could be a traditional panel or (ideally!) a seminar, a new format for ASLE in which participants convene at several sessions over several days. Like a conference within a conference. Get in touch if you'd like to be part of the proposal! 🦤

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

CFP! I'm putting together an #envhum proposal for ASLE (June 22-24, 2027, in College Park) that draws on the conference theme of terra/terror. It's inspired by the moving work of @dollyjorgensen.bsky.social, @sadiahqureshi.bsky.social, & Extinction Studies scholars. www.asle.org/calls-for-pa...

asle.org

ASLE » ASLE 2027: Landscapes of Extinction

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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

🏺 🗃️ Archaeologists/Historians - please shoot me your favourite examples & sources on ancient named animals, the older the better! Prefer farm animals but others also welcome 🐏 🐂 🐖 🫏... 🐕 #histsky (I already have Bramati 2025, & Alivernini & Bramanti 2023)

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Amazing! I’m exhausted just reading about all his extracurriculars. Thanks for sharing that thread.

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Michigan's own Tim Allen might not be all that pleased to be cheek by jowl with Karl Marx in this epigraph... so let it be known that I'm grateful for his very good work in Galaxy Quest—a nearly perfect movie ft. another Midwestern notable, Mr. Tony Shalhoub, of Green Bay, Wisconsin (Go Bears)

A screenshot of a tweet from Tim Allen dated November 13, 2020. He's written: "Carl Marx. Communist manifesto. Wikipedia." (The Internet gave him grief for spelling Marx's name with a "C.")

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Asher HELLbein @asherelbein.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

A great, thoughtful essay about an interesting-sounding book and a decidedly so-so movie, with a pitch-perfect punchline.

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Elaine Ayers @eayers0.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Even more essays in this Ocean Reveries series have been released - Jessica Riskin, one of my all-time favs, excerpting from her new book on Lamarck: "Even the very simplest plants and animals—tiny, fragile, translucent algae and monads—contained the power of life." pioneerworks.org/broadcast/je...

pioneerworks.org

The Sea Before Us | Broadcast

How the inventor of "biology" located life's beginnings in the sea.

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The Believer @thebeliever.net · 27/09/2026

“Though less enormous, less voracious, and lacking dramatic soundtracks to pave their entrances and exits, formidable flesh-and-blood, non-animatronic prehistorics do actually walk among us.” On gators: www.thebeliever.net/logger/21st-...

thebeliever.net

21st Century Prehistoric - Believer Magazine

Judging by the popularity of the Jurassic Park franchise—five feature films, with a sixth blockbuster scheduled for 2021, three “Lego” Jurassic Park shorts, various theme-park attractions, some…

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Paleontology has the K-Pg boundary, you have the K/Carl fault line…

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Will Tattersdill @tattersdill.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Alison is too kind and it's so exciting to see one's work being used so deftly (after a decade of it all just being in my head)!

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Thank you for sharing, Karl! (What esteemed company your name keeps, what with Marx, Sagan, and Kasell.)

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Los Angeles Review of Books @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"To exist alongside dinosaurs is impossible. Their narrative presence, then, brings other out-of-reach pasts into the frame." Alison Laurence reviews "The End of Oak Street" and "The Social Dinosaur": lareviewofbooks.org/article/end-oak…

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Asher! This is the most affirming feedback. Thank you for taking the time!

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Anyway, rest in perpetual presence to all the marvelous Karls and Carls with whom we're still in conversation despite the finitude of existence ✨

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

...because I knew Carl Sagan to be quite dead. So how the heck was he recording messages on quiz winners' answering machines? A prominent atheist calling in from the great beyond! Why was nobody talking about this?!? An absurd case of crossed cosmic wires.

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I've got Marx & Sagan in this essay & here's one more Carl—Kasell, the voice of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! For some time, I thought Kasell WAS Sagan (surely host @petersagal.bsky.social's surname led me there). This was quite troubling to me, as a child in the late 90s... tinyurl.com/dinostories

lareviewofbooks.org

We Tell Ourselves Dinosaur Stories in Order to Live | Los Angeles Review of Books

We live within a library of antediluvian narratives, with more accessioned every day.

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Absolutely. Dinosaurs are exclamations marks!

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The essay includes heaps of brilliance from @tattersdill.bsky.social's THE SOCIAL DINOSAUR (it's so quotable!) and multiple links to @restingdinoface.bsky.social's work (her new book TYRANT LIZARD QUEEN is out next month!). Plus the wildest epigraph pairing I'll ever manage. tinyurl.com/dinostories

An epigraph pairing of an unlikely duo. It begins:

Everyone knows that some time or other the crash must come, but everyone hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in secure hands. Après moi le déluge!
—Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867; trans. Ben Fowkes, 1976)

The perfect summer is waiting. The perfect summer is Pure Michigan.
—Tim Allen

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The flattened prehistoric past of Oak Street becomes meaningful (more meaningful, that is, than a typical antediluvian world) if we notice what is going on with depictions of the human past. The movie takes a marked interest in happy family photos, images that omit & conceal less happy realities...

The cattle dog bares its teeth against unseen predators. Behind him, a wall of smiling family photos.

Still from The End of Oak Street @ 1:23:21

A woman screams with motherly rage as she stabs a fleshy monster with a kitchen knife. Her own family watches approvingly, smiling from framed photos.

Still from The End of Oak Street @ 1:14:48

A terrified woman cowers on the kitchen floor, staring at some awful scene. Whatever it is, it's blocked from the our view by a aged wedding photo.

Still from The End of Oak Street @ 27:57

A young boy sits on his father's shoulders in an old family photo in the film's credits. "Dedicated to my dad Robert Allen Mitchell 1951-2024."

Still from The End of Oak Street @ 1:34:22

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Speaking of. I wrote this for my much missed cattle dog, Independence Day Laurence, who would've fought an Allosaurus for me. Also because I had to figure out why I (contra many!) appreciated Oak Street's anachronistic mess of monsters. @tattersdill.bsky.social's new book helped me find my answers.

It's an old photograph of a cattle dog named Independence (denoting the holiday of his adoption and, it turned out, his nature). He's sitting in the snow on a sunny winter's day. His coat is a mixture of rusty brown and blotches of gray with shocks of white fur throughout

Indy is (or, rather, he was) far from breed standard, narrower in all ways, showing more kinship with the ancestral dingo than most of his kind. He was often poorly behaved by the standards of suburbia. And he was a very good boy.

The Platt family's cattle dog, Starbuck, licks a woman's outstretched hand. Closed captioning reveals that she is giving him an ultimatum: "You can stay, but you have to be good."

Still from The End of Oak Street @ 1:53.

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

tinyurl.com

We Tell Ourselves Dinosaur Stories in Order to Live | Los Angeles Review of Books

We live within a library of antediluvian narratives, with more accessioned every day.

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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Attention Philly Families! It is critical that we show Drexel and city government that our enthusiasm for the Academy of Natural Sciences is going strong! Bring your kids, friends, & neighbors down to the parkway on Saturday from 2-6pm. It's a kid-friendly rally to support the academy!

dinosaurs and bugs happily party together at the Save the Academy family rally. Saturday September 26, 2-6pm 1900 ben Franklin parkway, come dressed as your favorite dinosaur, insect, animal, or just yourself! There's a duck billed dino, a triceratops, a brachiosaurus, a pterodactyl, a millipede, dragonfly, and beetle!

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Really enjoyed this, Brad, your reading of the beads especially. I used to live on Napoleon, on a stretch of parade route, and this took me back.

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Longreads @longreads.com · 22/09/2026

"Perhaps it’s easier for some to imagine relocating humanity to Mars than relocating sediment to save New Orleans." @brad.bolman.com for @pioneerwork.bsky.social: pioneerworks.org/broadcast/we...

pioneerworks.org

Where Cities and Oceans Meet | Broadcast

In New Orleans, water is coming. What should we do with the time we have left?

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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Not me carefully writing out every “aside” in this script for a talk

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Will Tattersdill @tattersdill.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is the kind of headline opportunity which only comes along once or twice in a subeditor's career

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

+1 (rooting for the project and the novocaine!)

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Not a memorial—a monument! "Laura Dominguez, a member of the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission & a historian at USC, said that... Los Angeles hasn’t typically built large monuments to historic figures; its leaders have long thought of it as a city of the future." www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/u...

nytimes.com

A Beloved Los Angeles Mountain Lion Will Live Forever in Bronze (Gift Article)

A sculpture of the mountain lion, known as P-22, will go up in Griffith Park, where he roamed until his death in 2022.

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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Attention Philadelphia! We're hosting a rally to demand that Drexel University maintain The Academy of Natural Sciences Museum open to the public. Join us on Tuesday morning at 10am in front of the academy. Please spread the word, we need all hands on deck! RSVP here: luma.com/1qwnrqz2

A dinosaur on a white background with the text SAve the academy of Natural sciences museum rally Tuesday Sept 8 10am in front of the academy 1900 ben Franklin Parkway. "Tell Drexel University "Keep the museum open!" with the logos for Philly Science Action, Skype a Scientist, and Green Philly

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Pre-ordered!! Bring on the scientifically-sound sapphic saurians.

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The Public Domain Review @publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Steven Connor on that “most untrustworthy” type of matter... sand — publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-du…

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Sometimes I doubt my book project: Do dinosaurs really function as spokes-creatures for consumption? Have I somehow Sokal hoaxed myself? Grateful for this reporting on a monstrous trend and vexed that this rex is being so defamed—I suppose that those who are extinct cannot legally be libeled.

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Oof, genAI dogs are not the move! If you do get around to it seeing it, I want to read your take on one slithery monster in particular. (I mostly loved it, but maybe that's because I grew up in the Midwest with a cattle dog who distracted me from the tired family dynamics you describe.)

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Two chapters in and I've dog-eared almost every page... Will's book is *very* good, no surprise there, and his ideas were rattling around in my brain through the entirety of The End of Oak Street (also, imo, very good). #FossilFriday 🦕 Ask your library to acquire a copy of The Social Dinosaur!

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Will Tattersdill @tattersdill.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

So here we go then: the result of many years thinking about how dinosaurs make science and the imagination work together. It's written for both literary critics and scientists and my dearest hope is that it will help foster an academy where we talk to each other more

Photo of a copy of 'The Social Dinosaur', out now from Bloomsbury omg

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Joseph Rezek @rezekjoe.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

This will not end up on Saturday night live, but it should

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

And I'm thinking about all the Classics PhD students who might be teaching fuller-than-usual Intro to Ancient Greek courses. (My grad student was fab, but he did make me cry tears of frustration, once, after introducing our class to irregular verbs.)

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Waiting with bated breath to read all the analyses of how, where, and why undergrad enrollment in Classics changed in AY 2026-27. Oh, the dissertations to be written!

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Fund the Humanities just because. Fund the Humanities for more vicarious intellectual intercourse on Main. Whichever.

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Oh! Archive as Avernus, that's so lovely. (And perhaps it offers new perspective on your childhood?) I've never been to the Ransom Center but I'll need to find a way to justify a trip to Austin, especially if Grim Cerberus guards the stacks.

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Alternately: a prestige TV miniseries about some underemployed postdocs who, owing to the state of academia, abandon their scholarship and make the dangerous journey beyond Avernus—so to find Tom Stoppard in the underworld and bring back his screenplay about Virgil writing The Aeneid.

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Alison Laurence @dinostalgia.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Grateful for all the good writing that this film is... engendering. Since so many of its best bits are borrowed from The Aeneid, I am desperate for some patron to get an adaptation underway: stories in a story, naturally, about Virgil writing his epic encomium. Pattinson plays Aeneas AND Augustus.

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EMILY WILSON @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

There is a lot to say about the Nolan Odyssey movie. But one point that I think has not been emphasized enough is: this is a film about living in LA, as Nolan, my erstwhile British compatriot and age mate, has done for years. I gather it’s a strange place.

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Erin Grievances @erinbartram.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

“In that moment, what hope did Edwin and his father feel? What shame? When Edwin drank down his sister, did he remember the girl she had been—the one we do not know—or only imagine a fiend?”

contingentmagazine.org

Against the Grave

Mercy Brown's tale has always been one of consumption.

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Contingent Magazine @contingent-mag.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

"The historical record can only create a woman-shaped grave for Mercy Brown. She only gains a narrative after she dies." Our latest, from Genna Duplisea.

contingentmagazine.org

Against the Grave

Mercy Brown's tale has always been one of consumption.

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