iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Hopping back on here to say my new book is finally out! Tell your university librarian to buy a copy, please!

Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Academic friends: favorite books in C20/21 American lit, lit theory, race and lit, or related areas, published in the past few years? I have some use-or-lose startup funds that need spending by the end of the month

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Making a rare and cynical excursion to the barren plains of Bluesky to ask academic friends to ask their librarians to consider pre-ordering my (excellent, imo) new book, out in June! cambridge.org/ag/universitypress/subjects/literature/american-literature/los-angeles-literary-history

cambridge.org

Los Angeles | Cambridge University Press & Assessment

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

For months on end I forget this place exists. I'm guessing it doesn't feel like Twitter From Five to Eight Years Ago yet?

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

Everything about the music business in the late sixties sounds completely fake

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

No disrespect to Ira Gershwin but rhyming brunch with lunch is hack. You can't just go rhyming a portmanteau with one of the two words it's derived from.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

“You know, these plans are quite similar to the ones they have at the Reform conference”

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

One of the things I find hardest about severe episodes of mental ill-health is the number of people you have to lie to about why you’re canceling on them/late in doing something/forgetting to reply to messages/not doing your best work Exhausting!

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

In Sonic 3 (2024), End of the Line by the Traveling Wilburys (1988) is used as diegetic music in a flashback to 50 years before the present-day events of the movie. All the more galling given that a period-appropriate pop song (The Beach Boys’ Wouldn’t It Be Nice) is used elsewhere in the movie.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

I don’t even know why I still had an account on that exploitative and largely useless platform but as of today I don’t anymore.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

Pete Mandelson? The Hartlepool MP?

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

True admiration for Bruce Springsteen, the most “claims to be 5‘10” on Hinge but is 5’7” IRL“ guy in rock, making a tactical decision decades ago to flank himself with actual hobbits Steve van Zandt and Nils Lofgren

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

Arthur Miller died less than 7 weeks after the release of Meet the Fockers and we can't rule out the possibility that the two events were linked

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

In a month’s time we get a new Pynchon novel and I just think that’s neat

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

A wonderful former student of mine is struggling with medical bills. While access to healthcare without fear of financial hardship shouldn’t be contingent on being a good or talented person, Matthew is both. If you can spare anything, I know it will be deeply appreciated. gofund.me/46c876c0

gofund.me

Donate to Matthew Washington's Medical Bill, organized by Matthew Washington

Hey there everyone. My name is Matthew Washington. I am a recent graduate of … Matthew Washington needs your support for Matthew Washington's Medical Bill

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Academic request: do I know anyone, or do you know anyone, who has access to the journal African Identities?

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

I don’t speak to my father any more but alas I can never disown his description of TNG as “social workers in space” (he was a social worker)

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

PSA: due to [reasons] I'm exploring changing my surname to my mother's maiden name, and I'm choosing Bluesky as a consequence-free place to test out how it feels. Given my career choice, this is the only way I'm ever going to obtain Riches.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

[Youth Pastor turning to the Book of Genesis] “let me tell you about the original content creator”

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Menswear ads on instagram are either for $49 suits from a sketchy dropshipping operation called either Spvrluocyj or Bloodlust and Hinterland Supply Co., or they’re for high-waist trousers that cost five million dollars

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

They should just make one cleanser and one moisturizer and one sunscreen that are good.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

ill-advisedly ambiguous marketing copy from Spirit, here

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

An obvious point, made many times before, but surely concert ticket prices for established/legacy acts are unsustainable? I love live music, I have a decent salary, but I am simply not paying $140+ (for a crap seat), plus travel and accommodation for Elvis Costello or David Byrne.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Didn't expect to feel such joy and relief that, after 20 years of dross, pointless covers, and screeds about how Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and Bill Gates are trying to stop him touring, Van Morrison has made a mostly good album and returned to songs about remembering place names in Belfast.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

The year is 1955 and I am profoundly misunderstanding Bill Haley and His Comets

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

JFK is a scam to make you so flustered, frustrated and despairing after the three hours of waiting in lines, the missed flight, the bag recheck, the patdown, the being demeaned by 8-10 different staff members, that you’ll gratefully spend $53 on a burrito and a beer to make yourself feel better

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

[Henry II joins the Beastie Boys] His strong BELIEFS My cause of GRIEF Rid me of this turbulent PRIEST

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

Faced with a dilemma whenever I place an order in an American cafe and the person asks "what's a good name?" I don't really think Michael's a good name. Fine, serviceable, but nothing striking. Marmaduke is a good name, so is Alphonse, so is Caractacus, so is Cthulhu. They're not *my* name, but...

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Terrified by the 14-legged beasts apparently working at the NYT

NYT wirecutter email subject line reading "7 pairs of white jeans we’re wearing this summer"

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

More theory/crit audiobooks, please!

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

The secret to Bruce Springsteen’s appeal is the hope he offers to every scrawny pockmarked goofy goober with a bad beard and a dumb hat (which he thinks is cool) that they will actually achieve peak hotness somewhere between 35 and 75

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Discovering how much literally anything costs on my health plan:

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

Cinema has inevitably been an artform in irreversible decline since "Cheekiest Man on Earth" (1907)

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

Just found out there's another Dr. Michael Docherty based in La Jolla, CA -- the place where Raymond Chandler (the author I've perhaps written on more than any other) lived the last 13 years of his life

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

What an unexpected delight to receive such a positive and insightful review of my book from Sofía Martinicorena in the latest issue of Western American Literature. So heartening when someone really reads the work, gets what it's trying to do, sees what its value is. muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/artic...

With his work on what he terms “the recursive frontier,” Docherty dares to walk the most trodden of western paths and still offer a fresh argument that cogently reconsiders a central critical trope of US literary and cultural critique. The Recursive Frontier manages to expand the confines of the meanings of the frontier beyond its Anglo-white, exclusionary original formulation and thereby offers renovated critical paradigms to explore twentieth-century multiethnic fictions of the US West.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

Incredible scenes here in the intro to Barbara Dodds' "Negro Literature for High School Students" (1968), which to be clear is a deeply admirable and farsighted book, but they sure don't write 'em like that any more

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 01/06/2025

Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944)

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

You’re laughing. They yassified Ernest Hemingway and you’re laughing.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

I don't want fried chicken to make me confront my mortality

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

It gives me great satisfaction that the book manuscript I've been editing (and will be submitting to the press this week) contains citations for both Randy Newman and Henry Rollins (sadly not in the same chapter)

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

As a scholar of California I really ought to buy this baffling artifact

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

Truly cannot decide if Barbra's new album is "dream blunt rotation" or "nightmare blunt rotation" territory

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

"Beach Boys Party!" is the original "Basement Tapes" -- change my mind

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Seeing the literal actual Pope being described as a "shitlib" by Mike Cernovich is so (grimly) funny to me. Not just as an assessment of Prevost's stated views but the idea of even trying to fit the office of Pope into that framing. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Chicago Pope. A deep-dish man in a land of thin crusts. This tension may well define his papacy.

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

[the new pope is Steven Bartlett] "What we need to remember is it's the VatiCAN city not the VatiCAN'T city"

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

[George Benson voice] just give me the pope

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Time has not been kind to Blazin' Squad

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Michael Riches @michaelriches.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

New York, London, Paris, Munich Everybody talk about... pope music

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