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James

@jamesdraney.bsky.social
238 followers 580 following 187 posts

VAP in the Writing Program at Haverford College. Working on a book about the novel, interiority, and big data. tinyurl.com/yc6jdn9z

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Reposted by James
Public Books @publicbooks.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
“Part of making one’s work responsible to the present entails recognizing its value as work.” @cole-adams.bsky.social on continuing to work as the university crumbles: www.publicbooks.org/the-last-gra...
publicbooks.org
The Last Graduate Students? - Public Books
“I began writing this as a record of what it felt like to be a student then, as collective attachments to values—long recognized as fraying, with the knell of the next scapegoat, or horrifying…
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
yes, but obviously AI will never be able to dwell poetically, right?
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Adrienne Rich, from "Artificial Intelligence" (1961)
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Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 27/08/2026
MIT report is superb. It acknowledges disruption, concedes different disciplines will handle this differently, foregrounds people and social interaction — but also says something obvious I had just about given up hope institutions could say: aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/
3.1.1. Revisit course goals
Before considering how to construct Al-aware assessments, instructors should reconsider their goals for student learning- in every subject they teach. What should students know or be able to do by the end of the course?
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
@maxread.info on how how prompts are always more interesting/useful than output "...we tend to regard prompts as disposable inputs necessary for the production of valuable output, but they are often quite valuable themselves, as thought exercises and as documentation of a particular process"
patreon.com
Just send me the prompt! | Read Max
Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today's edition is about "LLM-assisted" text and the writing that goes into it. A reminder: Read Max is a subscr
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
La Sirène Supposée Savoir
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
This symposium on poetry and AI seems very cool. Proposals due mid-august
unive.it
Adversarial Poetry: Home
Adversarial Poetry - Home
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Will Davies @will-davies.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
A pretty significant test case, as to whether sheer weight of marketing can remake public space and social relations, in ways that nobody would consciously choose. So far, so good...?
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The Paris Review @parisreview.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
“I think the most I’ve ever written in one go is four pages. I can’t remember the last time that happened.” —Mary Gaitskill
buff.ly
Mary Gaitskill, The Art of Fiction No. 257
“I think that if humans are still walking around in fifty years, and still reading fiction, my work will last that long. Beyond that, I don’t know.”
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
It turns out that writing a book is, in fact, as hard as they said it would be
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Gloomy introspection is a helluva drug
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Sarah Brouillette @sarahbrouillette.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
if you are coming to SNS consider joining our keyword seminar :)
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Bro, Voigt-Kampff is so 2024. It's all about testing the reflex-arc response in the upper ganglia of the spinal column, bro.
nytimes.com
Student Cheating Is Becoming Impossible to Detect in an A.I. Era
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001) remains the greatest film of the 21st century prove me wrong
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
"A simple feedback loop--and information machines bypass humans, their so-called inventors. Computers themselves become subjects." -Kittler
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
My working hypothesis is that most people go to extreme lengths to hide their singularity. Sounding like a generic robot is therefore highly appealing, a kind of psychic balm.
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
reminiscing about a more human world (watching Clerks)
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
new university motto just dropped: "Aligning Students with Human Values"
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
so kids these days just don't use Microsoft Word anymore huh
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Reading Kyle Booten on "word gyms," digital interfaces that challenge writers to produce more interesting sentences
read.dukeupress.edu
Build Word Gyms, Not Word Factories | Critical AI | Duke University Press
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
typo of the day: selfphones
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Reading literary fiction to escape reality and reading science fiction to better attune myself to the rhythms and textures of my everyday world
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
Musil: "No one knew what exactly was in the making; nobody could have said whether it was to be a new art, a new humanity, a new morality, or perhaps a reshuffling of society. So everyone said what he pleased about it."
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
Any good writing about the software tool Grammarly? Looking for scholarly essays from either a rhet/comp or media theory perspective.
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Laleh Khalili @lalehkhalili.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
@moiraweigel.bsky.social wrote one of the most enlightening (and earliest) pieces on Alex Karp's fashy PhD. She now has written this luminous piece that gives a persuasive materialist account of the right wing assault on theory. Truly brilliant stuff. direct.mit.edu/octo/article...
direct.mit.edu
Hating Theory Today
Abstract. Drawing on nearly a decade of research, this essay investigates the hatred of theory on the political right. The phobic fascination with theory is over a century old. Yet, in recent years, i...
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
wait wut: “In the past there was a group called ‘Dire Straits.’ It’s a dire strait now, and it is going to have major implications for the global economy."
apnews.com
AP Exclusive: Europe has 'maybe 6 weeks of jet fuel left,' energy agency head warns
The head of the International Energy Agency has warned that Europe has about six weeks of jet fuel left.
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
Reading "Transcription"
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Alice G. Brand, 1987, "The Why of Cognition: Emotion and the Writing Process": "We may sometimes think of ourselves as if we are computers. But computers do not grow. They do not learn with practice or understand what they do. And computers do not feel."
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Kline: "New York City itself now constitutes a core problem in American art."
direct.mit.edu
New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art*
Abstract. Part of October's “Art Communities at Risk” series, Josh Kline's essay examines key structural problems in the American art industry through the lens of class, tracing their origins back to ...
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
I like @maxread.info's piece because it articulates what I've been thinking of as the Giuseppe di Lampedusa theory of LLMs and writing: that everything must change in order for everything to stay the same.
maxread.substack.com
Is ubiquitous A.I. writing "inevitable"?
On a weird few weeks of A.I.-writing scandals
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Looking forward to learning what Ben Lerner thinks about everything that's happened since 2019
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Reading something in which a writer refers to their personal life as their "private sector"
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
i'm always surprised people haven't done more with ngai's idea of stuplimity, "a strange amalgamation of shock and boredom"
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
great piece
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Nick Seaver @nickseaver.website · 27/03/2026
new publication alert: a little commentary I wrote about 🔎 clues 🔎 and the detection of AI-generated material is out in American Ethnologist (paywalled at the moment, but hit me up if you can't access it): doi.org/10.1111/amet...
Abstract

As Al-generated images and texts proliferate, people have developed techniques for
identifying them using clues like misshapen hands in images or distinctive words in text.
This commentary situates these emerging practices within what Carlo Ginzburg called the
“conjectural paradigm”: a mode of knowing that links contemporary Al detection to older
traditions of medical symptomatology, art historical connoisseurship, and detective work.
Yet unlike the stable or slowly evolving clues of earlier conjectural practices, the signifiers of
Al involvement are rapidly shifting. This instability has consequences not only for how texts
are read but also for how they are written. Authors now navigate a landscape of suspicion
where their words may be misrecognized as machine generated. Rather than resolving into
stable literacies, our efforts to recognize Al’s handiwork reveal the deeper uncertainties of
authorship and interpretation.
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
I keep coming back to the idea of cultivating interpretive powers. Not sure where it lies on the continuum between skill and virtue. But interpretation is definitely a mode of human freedom and therefore of human flourishing. @cnewf.bsky.social's lecture at Penn helped me think about this
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
I wrote about a party hosted by the artist Jennie Jieun Lee
nytimes.com
In the Catskills, a Lunch Where the Guests Glazed Their Own Pots
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The Yale Review @yalereview.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
"At a party, knowledge matters less; it’s a space governed by impulses, not thoughts. And yet the club can also be a site of discovery, where you step onto the electric wires of epiphany." Aria Aber on what the club taught her.
yalereview.org
Aria Aber: "What the Club Taught Me"
Aria Aber left the Berlin techno scene over a decade ago. In this essay, she traces what nightlife gave her—community, politics, embodied knowledge—and…
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
typo/parapraxis of the day: "faulty" for "faculty"
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
The thing is, I think these are all fundamentally correct & completely reconcilable political economies of the contemporary.
Technofeudalism (Varoufakis, Durand)
Too Late Capitalism (Kornbluh)
Muskism (Slobodian & Tarnoff)
End Times Fascism (Klein & Taylor)
Vectoralism (Wark)
Gutenberg Parenthesis (Sauerberg, Jarvis)
TESCREAL (Gebru & Torres)
Neofeudalism (Dean)
Tech Fascism (Duran)
Platform Capitalism (Srnicek)
Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff)
Klepto-Keynesianism (Seybold)
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 15/03/2026
‘I never see a news sheet or hear the news in the morning: that is a point of principle with me, a punctilio.’
lrb.co.uk
Stefan Collini · Capital Brandy: Eliot on the Run
Humankind,​ he told us himself, ‘cannot bear very much reality’. One way to escape having to confront that...
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Maxim Raginsky @mraginsky.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
The structuralist thesis about AI (as constructive realization of subjectless minds) was already put forward in 1994 by Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his book about cybernetics and cognitive science.
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
Barthes on his daily routine: write from 9:30-1; lunch; play the piano at 2:30; paint a bit.
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Richard Jean So @richardjeanso.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
New paper w/ @teddyroland.bsky.social on "How fiction powers generative AI systems." We designed a computational experiment to test the impact of the vast amount of fiction in LLM training data on how LLMs communicate, w/ implications for both AI design + literary theory. arxiv.org/abs/2603.01220
arxiv.org
Generative AI & Fictionality: How Novels Power Large Language Models
Generative models, like the one in ChatGPT, are powered by their training data. The models are simply next-word predictors, based on patterns learned from vast amounts of pre-existing text. Since the ...
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
St Louis is such a weird and interesting city. I'm still waiting for at least one reference to Provel cheese. So many missed opportunities in this show so far.
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
Thinking, for no particular reason, about the first line of Marie Darrieussecq's "Being Here is Everything": "She was here. On Earth and in her house."
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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
It’s almost like being a historical subject given the Big Data distant reading treatment sucks. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...
nytimes.com
When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities
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James @jamesdraney.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
New essay about some creeps, contemporary and canonical, in the history of the novel. I'm thinking about the nexus of the romance plot, commercial surveillance, and "the desire of the other." DM me for a PDF!
cambridge.org
The Creep’s Dilemma: The Novel in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism | PMLA | Cambridge Core
The Creep’s Dilemma: The Novel in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Volume 140 Issue 5
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