iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

"An essential state role, parallel to provisioning basic services like education and healthcare, is endowing a wide open aesthetic field of form and meaning and collective sensibility." www.artnews.com/art-in-ameri...

artnews.com

How Defunding the Arts Wrought Civic Disintegration

What Was America?: Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era tackles United States’ most ambitious cultural project: the bicentennial.

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Dan Sinykin @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Working on this reported essay, just published, increasingly took over my life for the last two months. PEN America did a terrible disservice with its sloppy reporting about American Jews and Israelis in publishing in July. Josh Lambert and I tried to do better. jewishcurrents.org/what-pen-ame...

jewishcurrents.org

What PEN America Got Wrong About Antisemitism in Publishing

Misleading anecdotes, flawed data, and oversimplified analyses are at the heart of a narrative of Jewish exclusion promoted by the free expression…

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Relmans @krisremels.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Ik ben het eerlijk gezegd wel stilletjes beu om om de zoveel dagen weer een witte man in brede theoretische termen te horen vertellen dat zo'n mening als die van Cofnas moet kunnen, terwijl de mensen die effectief geviseerd worden (zwarte academici) nergens aan het woord komen.

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Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

RE: freedom of speech, academic freedom, and race science. In this (long) thread, I’m going to 1) establish my bona fides on academic freedom and race science, 2) show why academic freedom and freedom of speech are different and… 1/34

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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

“if we don’t stand up for the free speech of racists, it puts everyone’s free speech in danger.” - guy who only ever talks about free speech when it’s racism

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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

1950s Philosophy tells us to distinguish the content of speech from the act performed by saying it on a particular occasion (for example to create fear or hate). Defences of free speech can therefore be Trojan Horses presenting hostile aggression under the guise of contributing to public discourse.

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

At 45k followers I will reveal which white men would have had permanent academic jobs but for EDI and which are just failures.

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PVermeulen @pverm23.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Essentieel draadje voor wie de drang voelt om de Cofnas-verdedigers als ernstige mensen te behandelen. Niet doen.

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 15/08/2026

I know you're not allowed to say this during the current debate, but the reason the left dominates academics, art, comedy, and music is that the right has stupid, discredited ideas, they're not funny, and dull resentment does not make for good art. No grand conspiracy required.

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PVermeulen @pverm23.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

"Every day, scientists are allowed to publish sentences like, 'Many assume there is a close connection between human history and culture (Donaldson 2019),' and yet English departments are the problem?"

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Cas Mudde @casmudde.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

The Spanish government of Pedro Sanchez is the biggest threat to the European mainstream: a left-wing government that implements left-wing policies that work, including on immigration. They show that “the narrative” is false and humane immigration is possible. This is why they all jump on Cueta.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I guess I am comfortable saying that in cases where people you formerly respected, or presumed you did, are now actively choosing to sunset their own minds & surrender them to machines invented by incels and billionaires, then yes there should be a stigma for that. This is what society is for

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Leander **BUY THE LONG GAME** Schaerlaeckens @leanderalphabet.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I wrote about being at the FIFA World Cup final and the entire sordid scene. I spoke to a few people who bought five-figure tickets. I tried to make sense of the senseless. @defector.com (This is a gift link, but you should subscribe to Defector, the rare outlet that would commission this.)

defector.com

FIFA Got What It Came For | Defector

A WELL-KNOWN VENUE IN THE MEADOWLANDS THAT FIFA WOULD THANK YOU TO CALL “NEW YORK NEW JERSEY STADIUM” BECAUSE IT DIDN’T GET PAID BY THAT STADIUM’S CORPORATE SPONSOR — The grass told the entire story. ...

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

[Looks around literally fascist society]: ‘The fundamental equity issue in higher education is not enough fascists teaching at universities. (I am not a fascist.)’ K.

It’s worth noting that I do not think any of this is solvable. Conservative academics made up about a third of faculty just a few decades ago, but there is no pipeline of conservative PhDs to hire anymore. I just think we all should be honest that this *is* in fact a problem!

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

With all due respect, I'm not sure someone who only spent a few years as an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College before leaving academia to work for the Contrarian Hot Takes Industry *really* has his finger on the pulse of what's currently going on in the Humanities.

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Total woke cultural victory. We're bringing pronouns back. It is now illegal to be a white male. We're doing May Day parades just for HR ladies.

Nolan's Odyssey getting good reviews from critics and audiences per Rotten Tomatoes.

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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

📢 Once more for the people in the back: - Most [more than 95%] of archives have not been digitized. - Most of humanity's knowledge and memory is *not* reachable by LLMs. - Believing that AI can provid you with comprehensive, definitive, "intelligent" results is folly.

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Blue sky nice ghost @rajandelman.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Haaland... destroy him

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Steve Hoffstetter on the Belgian match...

Belgium may have beaten the hell out of the US in the World Cup, but when this is all over the Belgians have to use their longer paid vacations to take their higher standard of living back to their much safer country where they’ll have to spend their much longer life expectancies thinking about it.

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Andy Hoberek @thathoberekguy.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Werner Herzog and his crew did not drag a 320-ton steamship up a Peruvian mountainside so you could tell me AI is “inevitable.”

Scene from the production of Werner Herzog’s 1982 Fitzcarraldo

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Matt Baume 🏳️‍🌈 @mattbaume.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Happy Pride to this Caravaggio self-portrait that made one man so gay he had to go to the hospital

Caravaggio's Baccus painting, featuring a lush fruity spread and leaves bedecking a pasty twink who only works out his arms

Article screenshot that says:

The most extreme examples of
Stendhal syndrome share a sensation of
self-fragmentation. Magherini
describes the case of a 53-year-old
German man who was hospitalized
after repeatedly viewing Caravaggio's
Bacchus at Uffizi Gallery. The patient
felt "an attraction closer and closer to
an intimate sexual arousal of
ambiguous nature that invaded him
and made him feel good and bad."
Unmoored and distressed, he sought
medical attention. After treating the
subject's initial episode, Magherini
writes that he came to recognize his
latent homosexuality. Another case...

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

World Cup Analysis: Belgium is perfecting the ennui of Total Stultify Football with such control they hope to elevate ties to an artform "as exciting as waiting for a bus in a city with poor public transportation", to reflect the socio-economic status of the average human in the age of billionaires.

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Finding various lefty people in the humanities kinda annoying but not thinking it is worth burning down every free institution in the west to prevent such people emerging nor allying with the fascists in the process of doing as much? This is a superpower.

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

A basic fact, but worth affirming: The existence of the scholars who wrote this report invalidates the conclusion of the report.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 10/06/2026

You can have viewpoint diversity. Or you can have peer review. But you cannot have both. And without peer review, you cannot have credible knowledge at all. shorturl.at/2Ji1X

Screenshot from “Cultural Knowledge”
Substack essay on viewpoint diversity. The text states: “Substituting ‘viewpoint diversity’ for ‘peer review’ as the criteria for evaluating scholarship would, simply put, destroy the possibility of producing credible knowledge at all. Indeed, the destruction of such a possibility is likely the unspoken goal of ‘viewpoint diversity.’”

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Since life is keeping me busy I don't have time to do much writing and what not now, so just to keep my blog active I fired off a quick post about the latest report on the humanities. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-...

sootyempiric.blogspot.com

The Null Hypothesis Regarding the Humanities

Unfortunately life is keeping me too busy right now for blogging, or really much else. But I just thought I would weigh in on the State of t...

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Karakter - Tijdschrift voor Wetenschap @karakterasl.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

De nieuwste Karakter is uit, met bijdragen van o.a. @rbae.bsky.social en @mathijsvandesande.bsky.social over thema's als de kern- en atoomklok, internationaal ruimterecht, hard determinisme, arbeid en zingeving, toegankelijkheid in de kunsten, revoluties, de energietransitie en ongelijkheid!

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blair @blairaf.com · 29/05/2026

One of the more misogynistic takes currently trending in the AI policy space is "women use less AI than men because they have less tech literacy" Ok but have you considered that women use less AI than men because we have more tech literacy?

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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

It's a huge mistake to "adjust to" or "adapt" to generative AI. There's rarely been a more clearcut situation to reject vehemently for so many reasons. One reason beyond those that apply now is the future capacity for proactive manipulation and distortion. We need less outside interference not more.

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Gareth Watkins @garethwatkins.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Yeah, I don't think we need to dismiss Hemmingway as “macho face of 20th Century prose” any more. Masculinity has become so cartoonish in the 2020s that just having read a book, much less writing them, means you're basically an honorary woman.

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Chuck Tingle @chucktingle.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

and yet one of these does not appear on the guardians 100 best novels of all time list. INTERESTING

image showing cover of the great gatsby with a 3.93 goodreads rating next to cover of the great gatsbutt with a 4.24 rating

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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

my firm take is that any man loudly worried about fertility rates is a fucking creep

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profchander @profchander.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

100 best novels of all time: 100. art 99. refuses 98. the 97. quantitative 96. logic 95. of 94. ranking . . . 1. giovanni’s room

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

On the "don't know how anything works" scale, believing that U.S. bases in Germany are more of a favor to the Germans than a method of American power projection isn't at the very top, but it's up there.

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The Onion @theonion.com · 13/04/2026

Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto theonion.com/man-who-threw-molotov-…

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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

I don’t want to be controversial but I do think it’s turned out that the possibility of nuclear war is a bigger threat to the future of humanity than the woke mind virus

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Heather Houser @heatherhouser.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

UAntwerp Dept. of Literature seeks full-time doctoral researcher in contemporary anglophone fiction under my supervision. Fully funded up to 4 years. Deadline: 30 April 2026 @uantwerpen.be www.uantwerpen.be/en/jobs/vaca... #academia #literature #affectstudies #familystudies #envhum

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Martin Paul Eve @eve.gd · 18/03/2026

I ended up reading some of his blog posts. He seems to argue that one reason why he must banish "wokism" is because left-wingers are intelligent, so they need to be "liberated" from "falsehood". Doesn't seem to consider that perhaps the intelligence might be linked to the views...

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

IMHO, it is important that Woke 2 be deemed "excessive" by historians, "sweeping too broadly" with "punishments too severe." It cannot be merely a course correction, it must be an overcorrection. Nothing less will serve as an adequate deterrent against the fascists and their collaborators.

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tamara nopper @tamaranopper.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

Relevant to AI writing, Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, and Sonia Sanchez noted that many want to be writers but don’t wanna write. As Morrison said, “Writing has become almost a celebrity thing in the sense that people don’t want to write; they want to be authors. And that’s quite different.”

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

some of you are looksmaxxing when you need to be booksmaxxing

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

I think the greatest gift college professors in the humanities can give to students right now is a seminar room where, for 80 minutes twice a week, nothing that happens to them is a sales pitch for an AI product.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

there’s a word for something most people generate about once a day and it’s not “book”

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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Woke 2.0 back with a vengeance. You love to see it.

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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 30/01/2026

disturbingly plausible

Fascism is a literally suicidal ideology, one obsessed with purging the body politic to the point of total self-negation. What’s funny about Suicide Rightism is how direct it is about all this. You don’t need some big theoretical analysis; there’s no level of abstraction to move through. It’s just pretty straightforwardly pro-suicide. I don’t think you have to be a professional psychologist to understand why dramatic, attention-grabbing suicide might be appealing to semi-employed guys who spend 14 hours a day watching Asmongold or whatever. Its promise is that all the pain and frustration you feel can be visited on the people you believe authored it--and then ended. Not to put too fine a point on this, but this is school-shooter ideology.

And as the D.H.S. tweet of the penguin meme makes clear, the Suicide Right case for Trump is that he gets this. The reward for supporting him is oblivion. He and I.C.E. and the C.B.P. are the armored bulldozer giving you the chance to kill immigrants and liberal white women and male nurses before you put a gun in your mouth. His administration is the plane, just waiting for you to get inside. I guess 2024 was a Flight 93 election, after all.

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