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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Those exist in the sciences, yes. Not in the humanities fwiw. That said, Elsevier is the devil.

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I say, uh, son, I say ... where WERE you when you were conspirin' with Fani Willis at a Hawks game on Febararry third?

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I thought Schmitt v. Acme was very well done but I have to admit that conservatives have a point when they complain that Hollywood almost always depicts Republican Senators as cartoon-character buffoonish incompetents. #liberalbias #evenworsethanacademe h/t David M. Luebke

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Ed Simon graciously invited me to write a thing for the first anniversary of the Pittsburgh Review of Books, so I did: pghrev.com/why-we-need-... (Also check out the essays by Hollis Robbins, Chris Schaberg, and Tom Zoellner!)

pghrev.com

Why We Need This Here Thing - Pittsburgh Review of Books

Please support PRoB so that we can continue publishing engaged, incisive, and smart cultural criticism for many years to come.

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

No, the Supreme Court will determine that if the next president is a Democrat he will not have any unilateral authority at all

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Another life snuffed out, another marital aid for Stephen Miller tiny.cc/tap9101

tiny.cc

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I'll take Things That Never Happened for $1000, Ken

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Ha, the Crooked Timber days! My five years with the blogosphere's most hostile commentariat :)

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Thanks! Yours was far and away the best review we received. The Chronicle of Higher Ed panned it not once but twice! It was surreal.

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Also: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Or Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Narrow majority of Supreme Court justices rule that Constitution is constitutional. Let the delirious celebrations begin!

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

It's amazing that someone as stupid and dishonest as Alito got into Princeton in the first place. If I were an alum, I would definitely be Concerned.

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

Thanks, Agustín! And thanks for answering the white courtesy phone, too. :)

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Yes, if we can just fix the problem of scholars having different ideas about what constitutes truth, everything else would be solved! Sigh. I do wish Richard Rorty were with us today to see this moment.

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

I *so* wish that awesome World Humanities Report had gotten even one percent of the attention it deserved. Kudos to Sara Guyer and CHCI for putting it together-- over six years! worldhumanitiesreport.org

worldhumanitiesreport.org

Home - The World Humanities Report

The World Humanities Report Demonstrating the vitality of the humanities throughout the world

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

My response to that "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences" is up. tinyurl.com/y39crkzp As I say on Facebook, I back-loaded the good stuff, like showing that the authors' account of the 2017 Hypatia controversy reveals them to be unreliable reporters.

pghrev.com

Report on the State of a Report (on the Humanities) - Pittsburgh Review of Books

On June 5, 2026, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article in a genre that has unfortunately become all too familiar in that venue titled “Has

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

OK, I have been roused from my dogmatic slumber, and I'll have a response to that awful report on the humanities and humanistic social sciences tomorrow in the Pittsburgh Review of Books. Thanks once again to editor Ed Simon!

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Yep, there was a time-- and it wasn't long ago-- when universities actually cared about taking a reputational hit from the AAUP. Gotta keep doing the work, though, even in the End Times.

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Comic sans should be the new default font for tongue-in-cheek Mayor's Orders. @ellecordova.bsky.social to the white courtesy phone!

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Much shorter than a Friedman Unit, though!

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Between the spike in suicides in ICE concentration camps and the outbreak of Ebola enabled by the dismantling of USAID, I'd say the Musk-Miller agenda is proceeding precisely as planned

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

He never pretended to be a free speech warrior (or cancel culture victim)

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

In the history of big media, has there ever been a bigger grifter than Bari Weiss?

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

BREAKING: Supreme Court issues shadow docket ruling holding that Trump's $1.776B slush fund for J6 insurrectionists is unconstitutional unless Alito and Thomas get a cut

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Hey, remember ten years ago when Trump destroyed the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts?

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Maybe it's just me but I have the funny feeling that yesterday's Christian nationalist rally in DC was way more antisemitic than a bunch of college students concerned about human rights in Gaza www.washingtonpost.com/religion/202...

washingtonpost.com

Trump-backed prayer festival on National Mall draws thousands: ‘We welcome Jesus!’

Critics of Sunday's

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

I wrote about academic freedom and democracy for the Pittsburgh Review of Books, but I didn't say the usual things you would expect a person to say about academic freedom and democracy. I said other things instead. Hence the title of the essay! tinyurl.com/2skc3aum Thanks to Ed Simon for the gig.

pghrev.com

Some Counterintuitive Things about Academic Freedom and Democracy - Pittsburgh Review of Books

Everyone knows, or else should know, that there is an intimate relationship between the state of academic freedom and the health of a democracy. Judith Butler

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Reposted by Michael Bérubé

Pittsburgh Review of Books @pghreviewofbooks.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

“Spewing arrant nonsense about the past century or so of work in the humanities has real-world consequences: who knew?” Michael Bérubé on why (Culture) War is a Racket. pghrev.com/culture-war-...

pghrev.com

(Culture) War is a Racket - Pittsburgh Review of Books

Salon recently published a very strange essay by Mike Lofgren entitled “How the death of middlebrow culture led to Trump’s barbarism.” Now, it’s not strange

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Except that there is, and we all know that Trump 2.0 was caused by an assistant professor of women's and gender studies using the word "Latinx"

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Pete Hegseth's next prayer will be from the Book of Armaments, chapter 2, verses 9-21. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ashg...

youtube.com

Monty Python - Holy Handgrenade

YouTube video by Weidmoo

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

It took me a while to get back to this! But despite your literature degree, you are mistaken-- well-meaningly mistaken, I hope. The antecedent of "this" is a post about how people generate social media outrage by taking social media posts out of context.

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

In "It's Not Free Speech" I called Twitter a "decontextualization apparatus." For some unfathomable reason the phrase didn't catch on! But yeah, it enables nonsense like this, on that site and this one.

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

I would sit down with my granddaughter for six hours and teach her how to use the can opener

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

OK but the Venn diagram of "photos of Hegseth" and "unflattering photos of Hegseth" is a circle

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Rug-on-Face-Man trying to compete with Dinesh D'Souza's famous line, "The American slave *was* treated like property, which is to say, pretty well." It's a high bar to clear.

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Watching "The Secret Agent" and remembering watching "I'm Still Here" and wondering whether we will have to wait 40 years for movies to be made about what ICE and DHS are doing right now

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

This message is approved by the U.S. Department of Excursion

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

I was about to say the exact same thing in the exact same words, so ... <same>

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Good to know we cancelled all those wasteful NEH grants and USAID so that the money could go to 5% of a missile aimed at a girls' school

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Michael Bérubé @michael-berube.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

I salute your superhuman perseverance!

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