iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 30/09/2026

A great team of editors on this, looks like it will be a fantastic volume

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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

CFP: Generative Digital Humanities, a volume on AI and DH in the long-running Minnesota Debates in DH book series. To be co-edited by @zentralwerkstatt.org, @laurenfklein.bsky.social, @lnakamura.bsky.social, and myself. Deadline Nov. 1. Please share widely! dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-gen...

dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu

CFP: Generative Digital Humanities | Debates in the Digital Humanities

Transforming scholarly publications into living digital works

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 28/09/2026

I am FAILING to protect my sabbatical peace where is my bunker

lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 28/09/2026

Woke up fighting mad about it all and how institutions fail on so many levels to do what’s right or just or even to do their basic jobs or follow the law

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 27/09/2026

Incidentally, this funny little poem is one of the few times that the word “paperback” or “paper-back” appears in the New Yorker before the 21st century, even in the context of book reviews — which also tells us something

lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 27/09/2026

More on paperback format: in 1957 John Updike published in poem in the New Yorker about paperbacks in which various imprints ”agree” that “classics much / too little known / when books were big / and bindings sewn” ”sell better if / their spines are not / austerely stiff.”

A RACK OF PAPERBACKS
Gateway, Grove,
and Dover say,
"Unamuno
any day."

Beacon Press
and Torchlight chorus,
“Kierkegaard
does nicely for us."

"Willey, Waley,"
Anchor bleats,
"Auden, Barzun,
Kazin, Keats."

“Tovey, Glover,
Cohen, Fry"
is Meridi-
an’s reply.

"Bentley's best,"
brag Dramabooks.
Harvest burgeons
Cleanth Brooks.

All, including
Sentinel,
Jaico, Maco,
Arco, Dell,

Noonday, Vintage,
Living Age,
Mentor, Wisdom-
page on page

of classics much
too little known
when books were big
and bindings sewn —

agree: "Lord Raglan,
Margaret Mead,
Moses Hadas,
Herbert Read,

the ‘Panchatantra,’
Hamsun's ‘Pan,'
Tillich, Ilg,
Kahlil Gibran,

and Henry James
sell better if
their spines are not
austerely stiff."

—JOHN UPDIKE

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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

So much of schools "responding to rape" is preventing the legal system from doing so. This is a report on seven adults who committed serious felonies for which there is a legal system to remind them and their pals that they are felonies.

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Hard to explain to those who didn’t experience it just how saturated the culture was in all things Garfield in the 1980s/early 90s.

My favorite babysitter bought them for me! I was more of a Calvin and Hobbes fan myself but I owned many of these too

The comic is, of course, often about how fat Garfield is. These books are coming out in trade paperback at the same time that series like Vintage Contemporaries, often associated with a cool kind of literary minimalism, are attempting to resuscitate the trade paperback format for literary fiction.

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 23/09/2026

Another somewhat random trade paperback fact: did you know that the format for the original Garfield comic strip books — wide and thin, horizontally oriented like the comic strip — is called the “Garfield format”? The Garfield books were mega-bestsellers in trade paperback in the 1980s.

Two Garfield books on a table: Garfield at Large, the first book, with a red cover; and Garfield: bigger than life, the third book, with a green cover. The books are wide and thin and published in paperback.

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Spending a lot of time with the Publisher’s Weekly archives (sometimes I think/fear this project should just be called “A Deep Dive into the Publisher’s Weekly Archives with Lindsay”) and this is of the weirder quotes about trade paperbacks I’ve come across. So specific! So weirdly gendered! So 1955

The differences between the new paperbacks and the standard mass-market items are tremendous. The retail prices of the new-look books are four times as high, while their editorial content makes them out of place in the 100,000 outlets that are claimed for regular paperbacks. They would be as superfluous in most of these 100,000 stores as 1 3/16-inch chrome nuts in a lingerie shop.

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 22/09/2026

Looking forward to this tomorrow!

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Laura Dietz @loradeets.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Join us for a free online research seminar Weds 23rd Sept 13:00 UTC with @lindsaythomas.net - Quantifying the Long Novel #publishing + #DH + novel data = a great lunch hour! Hosted by UCL DIS and the UCL Centre for Publishing @uclpublishing.bsky.social #SHARP www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanit...

ucl.ac.uk

Research seminar: Quantifying the Long Novel: Popularity and Prestige in the 20th Century

This talk is by Dr Lindsay Thomas, Associate Professor, Department of Literatures in English, Cornell University.

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Gabriel Hankins @gabrielh.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Feminist / book history / reading cultures people, please send your students to our ACLA seminar on Embodiment Hunger and reading in community! We have folks for one great day of conversations and would love more -- www.acla.org/seminar/7c63...

acla.org

View Seminar | American Comparative Literature Association

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 06/09/2026

Sometimes you’re in Provincetown in a used book store overhearing John Waters tell a story about helping Cookie Mueller bury her dead dog on the 4th of July. Perfect PTown evening

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 28/08/2026

Thanks to @tanjagrubnic.com for organizing this stellar panel! Can’t wait to talk about slop, the novel, and (un)wellness

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Jay Shelat @jshelat1.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Friends, my book—No Place for Home: Terror and Race in Literature After 9/11—has a cover! I’m so pleased with what Rachel Moeller and the design team at @uminnpress.bsky.social came up with! The book will be out in Spring 2027 and that I’ll post a pre-order link once it’s available! 1/2

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 30/07/2026

I am so sorry for your loss. Our Muffet showed up in our backyard in Miami 9.5 years ago as a stray and has been bossing us around ever since. She has not quite forgiven us for moving to a place with winter but she does enjoy murderously dispatching any poor mice who happen to wander into the house

A beautiful brown and tan tabby cat with green eyes lays on her side on a stone wall in the sun

The same brown and tan tabby cat sticks her paw out between the vertical slats of a deck

lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 27/07/2026

It’s an amazing event that I look forward to each year. It felt especially restorative this year. Thank you, Milwaukee, and Happy People’s Holiday. See you next year

lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 27/07/2026

I don’t live in Milwaukee but some dear friends do and for the past 3 years I have participated with them in Riverwest 24, which happened this past weekend. It’s so much more than a 24-hour bike ride, tho it’s also that. It’s a neighborhood celebration full of fun & parties & activities & food

The start and finish line at Riverwest 24 2026, before the ride began.

Chinga la migra screen print that I made. It got a bit smudged bc I had to put it immediately into my backpack and continue biking. Riverwest 24 is awesome bc it’s full of activities like this, called bonus checkpoints, where you can earn extra points by completing activities, usually organized by community groups. This year I screen printed, got and gave a manicure, painted a rock, told a knock knock joke, played name that tool bingo, received narcan training, helped to alert bikers to oncoming traffic, and more. I also biked about 60 miles and slept only a little and drank pickle shots and got sprayed with water by children and ate free pancakes and cheered on my friends and their kids. An amazing time as always.

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 17/07/2026

Thank you for writing this infinitely patient and, certainly as compared with the report, very well-informed response, Gabe.

Renata Gomes @renatagames.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Reposted by lindsay thomas

YO SOY PARAGUAYO ESTOY AQUI PARA ELIMINARLO

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 02/06/2026

Sounds like an Onion article but sadly elite administrative impunity is the norm in higher education

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Anyway, none of this is related to my research, and this thread doesn’t really have a point. I was just very affected by this little piece of ephemera and by imagining how impossible something as simple as a library seems for those incarcerated in today’s concentration camps

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Maybe the postcard writer was writing for information because they worked in the library. I don’t know — I haven’t been able to find much information about them yet. But in 2004, Andrew B Wertheimer wrote what looks like a really interesting dissertation on community libraries in the camps:

proquest.com

Here is the main library building at Manzanar. Incidentally, this picture was taken by Dorothea Lange.

The main library building at Manzanar. It’s a long, squat temporary looking building in the middle of the desert. Someone is going in or out of the entrance, and some people, at least a few are children, are walking by. Tall mountains loom in the background.

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As you probably know, Manzanar was one of the concentration camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII. The people imprisoned there built a library, as they also did in other camps. This is the cover of the library catalog (which exists online, but sadly the catalog itself doesn’t)

Cover page of the Manzanar Libraries (And Visual Aid Program) catalog.The text on the bottom reads “War Relocation Authority, Manzanar, California.” An orange page with hand drawn lettering and a drawing of books and a globe encircled by film coming out of a film reel.

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There is nothing else, at least that I ran across, about the writer or this query in the rest of the collection.

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I don’t think Modern Library ever published an edition of Hearn’s book but someone responded to this query. Written in the margins of the postcard are the notes, “Please include this answer” with an arrow to the q about the Bible, and then, in a different color: “Mailed [??] ML brochure 5/15/44”

They also put in a request for a book to be included in the Modern Library series: Lafcadio Hearn’s “Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation,” first pub. in 1904 but, the writer notes, is “probably out-of-print” by 1944. They also note that it’s “still the best authoritative book on Japanese psychology”

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The writer, who has a Japanese name, asks for info about the new at the time Illustrated Modern Library series, specifically about the Bible. “Is this a complete Bible? How many illustrations?” (They really wanted to know that, as the question is underlined twice)

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 23/05/2026

Another grim day for libraries. But I was in one today, doing some more or less boring research about paperbacks, when I ran across a postcard written by someone interned at Manzanar War Relocation Center to an editor at Modern Library in May 1944 asking for some information.

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It continues to break my brain (and soul) that nothing has happened. Nothing! NOTHING

Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 23/05/2026

Reposted by lindsay thomas

www.theringer.com/2026/05/22/n... jesus THANK YOU

1. "They were blocking my path." Not an excuse!
2. "They were touching my car." Not an excuse!
3. "They disagreed with my politics." Not an excuse!
4. "They were rude to me." Not an excuse!
5. "They kept asking me hard questions and filming me with their phones, and I'm a powerful man who's used to being treated with deference." Buddy! You cannot ram your Cadillac into a pedestrian just because you're an easily flustered rich guy! This is so obvious!
At least, I used to think it was obvious. That was before the president of Cornell backed his car into a group of students and got away with it scot-free.

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 23/05/2026

I look forward to receiving it (non-derogatory)!

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 22/05/2026

It has been a hellacious year but a really nice thing about being DGS is you get to hood some people and shake some hands and announce some names and cheer on the accomplishments of many amazing students

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More Perfect University @mpuniversity.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

UPDATE: Despite a growing demand across Cornell's campus for President Kotlikoff's resignation, the Board of Trustees concluded their investigation and cleared Kotlikoff of any wrongdoing. Students for a Democratic Cornell are demanding an independent investigation.

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 15/05/2026

Yes they clearly do not see *themselves* as accountable to anyone or anything, least of all students or flimsy values such as integrity and respect

Matt Reece @mreece.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Reposted by lindsay thomas

For those keeping score at home, in the last few years we’ve learned that a university president can lose their job for arguably questionable citation practices in their early work, but not for intentionally hitting students with their car. I wonder if there were any other salient differences 🤔

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 15/05/2026

Exactly right, Tim! I knew the “independent investigation” convened by the BoT would be pointless but I am still shocked at how nakedly the university isn’t even trying to pretend they care about the students or about the fact K lied to the entire university community about this incident

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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Every time I get asked about trust in higher ed, I will now be obligated to bring this up. Wheen we talk about impunity from consequences, it includes things like this.

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Brian Phillips @brianphillips.lol · 15/05/2026

The president of Cornell hit some students with his car, lied about what happened, and cast himself as the victim. Cornell's trustees, palpably aghast at the idea that a powerful man could be held accountable for his actions, have issued an official statement saying fuck the students

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lindsay thomas @lindsaythomas.net · 15/05/2026

We just received the most simultaneously banal and disgusting email about this, which, of course, blames the students and praises our president for his magnanimity in choosing not to punish them. 🤮