iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

yes, resisted the urge to say “good” timing 😭

010

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I could imagine it would be up your alley!

000

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Looking forward to reading this impeccably-timed new book by @abbieboggs.bsky.social

Disembodied hand holding a copy of Abigail Bogg’s new book “Degrees of Empire: Noncitizen Students and the Making of US Higher Education”

2130

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

yes, it's not that you argue that "protest culture" itself is new--but fighting over whether protests are over-glorified and over-indulged is just as old as that protest culture. Your essay joins a long tradition!

000

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Also, in what timeline is France having a “protest culture” a “recent” thing.

2280

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I gave a talk on Paul Robeson to my kid’s fourth grade class once, and made the mistake of playing Robeson singing “Joe Hill,” and for the rest of the class, all the kids wanted to know was the precise details of how Joe Hill was killed. 🙄

071

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Not PopCon directly conflicting with SAM 😔

130

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Have been around higher ed long enough to recognize that sometimes important work does require bureaucratic expansion, but also, lol that they began by hiring a VP and buying new software, lol, classic move.

130

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

speaking of actually-existing cancel culture...

010

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And not at all exaggerated!

000

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Okay, I think the only thing on the merits I will say about this mendacious report is that it was written in the year 2026, a year in which Donald J. Trump is the president of the United States, and in which there are currently only 7 tenure-track jobs in musicology being advertised.

181

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

something about SchenkerSpectacle just really triggered a certain kind of academic in ways that I would not have predicted. Would sincerely love to read someone get into why it emotionally resonated so much with them, beyond whatever technical merits they think they were arguing about.

160

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

(this all because someone on Twitter tagged a bunch of us with defunct accounts there, trying to spark a discussion.)

250

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It would be very easy to write a long thread detailing all the things the authors--Simon Morrison and Kit Fine--get factually wrong, the oversimplifications, the fallacies, the unacknowledged ideology. But unlike the authors, I take freedom of expression seriously, and it deserves more space.

1110

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The issues are complex enough that social media isn't a great place to discuss them, but also not sure of what the proper venue would be; again, it doesn't need more attention!

160

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Just to acknowledge that there is an addendum to the Vanderbilt anti-woke humanities report that focuses on music, written by a very distinguished musicologist, and it is unsurprisingly both malicious and poorly-reasoned. I'm torn; I don't want to give it oxygen, but also find it quite toxic.

5152

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Dennis Hastert, Jim Bakker...who's the third going to be?

000

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

At least I get to show them my beard-less, pre-children self in front of Esterháza.

040

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

On our tour of umpteenth german musical establishments, I paused dramatically and said, "but on Wednesday, after going through Leipzig, Berlin, Mannheim, and Bayreuth, we get to...Esterháza!" But there is no reaction because they are normal people who vaguely know there is a composer named Haydn.

170

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

and totally unrelated, not at all a pattern, that last spring's PSSA scores are still in a mysterious holding pattern in the bureaucratic skies. 🙄

020

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Gotta take any journalist job you can, I know, but I really feel for whoever's it is at the NYT to dutifully write up a detailed summary of SNL each week.

050

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I’ve had recurring nightmares based on Return to Oz for about four decades now.

060

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I have to say, I think Philly would be a happier, healthier place if they got rid of all the professional sports teams.

190

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Either that or a time traveler is about to appear and murder me, Hitler-as-a-baby style.

020

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Have yet to see protein/alcohol crossovers? Seems like a Miller Lite+protein would do well.

120

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I just still don’t understand how the traffic mitigation for the Market St. bridge closure included turning these blocks of Walnut into a three-lane highway and getting rid of the bike lane protection.

020

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I usually try and time my sunday grocery shopping for the game, but somehow today I managed to go precisely during halftime 😭

000

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Our kids are typical in that they that find “old movies,” even action ones, unbearably slow and boring, but I made them watch Speed and they were absolutely hooked. Doesn’t miss a beat.

110

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

And surely there could have been a more elegant solution to powering the lights than a forest of individual solar panels?

010

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I absolutely love the Schuylkill River Trail, I cheer on every new part that opens, but..am I the only one who thinks that it is quite ugly? Like mini-freeway ramp clogging up the river.

220

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

So glad we got our 10yo a phone so she can text important questions during class.

0100

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Of course, I’m a little worried that somebody just duly wrote down, “CPE Bach=softboi” in their notes and will later use it in a grad school entrance exam or something.

490

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I know that my students are zoning out on me because I referred to CPE Bach as an eighteenth-century softboi and nobody blinked an eye.

1212

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The eternal dilemma; do I take the godforsaken early train that gets me to campus two hours before class, or the reasonable train that gets me to campus 18 minutes before class, if there are no delays.

360

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My wife and I, using four separate devices, attempted to get reservations at Mawn anywhere in November the moment reservations opened up today at 12:00pm. We failed.

000

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This is niche west philly content, but: the whole faking-being-Palestinian thing was mostly a reflection of one bad actor, but it’s definitely also a reflection on her organizing community, and if I were them I would not be continuing to plant more stories in the paper about it! 🤯

010

Reposted by Phil Gentry

Abbie Boggs @abbieboggs.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Shipping from Fordham now. My thanks to @isaackamola.bsky.social and Grace Hong for their generous reviews of the manuscript and these blurbs! Use EMPIRE26 for 25% off too! Degrees of Empire - Abigail Boggs share.google/IFCGRIBTTh2G...

Powerful, timely, erudite and rigorously researched, Degrees of Empire is incredibly prescient in this moment as the Trump regime targets international students for deportation. Readers of this book will come away with an understanding that such authoritarian orientations are inherent to the structure of international education. Indeed, Boggs gives us a framework for understanding the entire sweep of US empire.—Grace Kyungwon Hong, author of Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference

Abbie Boggs offers a profoundly structural but simultaneously humane account of the American university. In organizing her study around the figure of the noncitizen student, Boggs reveals how tensions and contradictions between university, state, capital, and empire evolve over time, shaping the very fabric of the institutions we inhabit.—Isaac Kamola, Professor of Political Science, Trinity College, Hartford

023

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

But then I slipped up and said “can’t wait for this season to be over” and apparently that was a tell.

070

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My neighbor talked to me about baseball tonight, and I did such a good job imitating being a real man (“yeah, that Harper!”) thanks to little bits of sports stuff I see on Bluesky.

170

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My gentle giant of a daughter is doing a girls-only basketball program (trans inclusive, thank you very much), and after years of her enduring shitty boys in coed leagues, it warms the heart to see her play without all the noise. 😭

060

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Very depressing. I realize social media serves a similar function, but another nail in the coffin of real life communication and relationships.

110

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I noticed about 10 years ago that bulletin board spaces were disappearing from our campus. I have never confirmed it as an actual policy, but I assume a larger implicit strategy of controlling information, shielding from liability, etc.

130

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I know that I overdo the "everything starts with McCarthyism" thing, but also, if you want to understand what Senator Eric Schmitt was attempting to do there, I strongly recommend Nathan Glazer's analysis of it, back in 1953. www.commentary.org/articles/nat...

What, of course, emerges in all three passages—and in scores of others that I have not quoted—is that Senator McCarthy is engaged in a process of continuous distortion. But Senator McCarthy’s peculiar contribution to the use of distortion in politics is the invention, or at any rate the very original elaboration, of what Richard Rovere has called the “multiple untruth”—the misstatement inserted in a parenthetical remark, a subordinate clause, or even an adjective. The virtue of this technique is that it is possible to pack so much distortion into a given quantity of words as to make it certain that any effort to correct every point of error will only bore the reader.

At this place and at this time it would not be an exaggeration to describe Senator McCarthy as, the inventor of a new technique of distortion.

_____________

In the few passages we have here taken from the record, we discern at least four quite different kinds of distortion.

First, there is the simple creation of fact to serve the needs of a particular moment. Second, there is the misreading of documents.6 Third, there is the effrontery when caught, which is in effect a repetition of the original offense: Senator McCarthy is never on the defensive, he always repeats his charges. But fourth, Senator McCarthy, when caught and brazening it out, rapidly covers his tracks by altering his previous statements—while insisting that they are still the same.

072

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Would be curious how they did in sales; I don’t have any inside information, but just from their online materials I don’t get the sense that there’s gonna be any new editions or further online support or anything like that.

120

Phil Gentry @pmgentry.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Yes, many of our period courses overlap like one and a half of the volumes, and similarly don’t want to ask them to buy two.

120