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SonakshiS

@sonakshis11.bsky.social
654 followers 529 following 80 posts

www.sonakshisrivastava.com Reader, Writer, Translator, Zinester Senior Writing Fellow @Ashoka University Works @Usawa and @Asymptote 🔎 Discard Studies, Ecocriticism, Reading & Critical Theory "the world's my oyster, which I with whimsy will open"

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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 01/10/2026
‘James I was given an elephant by Philip IV of Spain with instructions that it was to drink only wine between autumn and spring.’ Malcolm Gaskill on zoos and menageries: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
lrb.co.uk
Malcolm Gaskill · Squawking at the Gate: The Last Menagerie
The spirit of modernity would influence zoos for generations. Dialogue between reformed conceptions of society and the...
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Linda Andersson Burnett @lindaaburnett.bsky.social · 9h
There is still time to register for @sadiahqureshi.bsky.social seminar "Empires of Extinction in the Anthropocene" on Tuesday, 15-16 CET (abstract below). For Zoom link please email: instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se #skystorians #histsci #envhist
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Dan Hartland @danhartland.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Here's @stephenrcase.bsky.social on Justin Feinstein's latest: "a quick, compelling read [which] remind[s] us of the panopticon we live within." On AI and on writing about/as/through AI:
strangehorizons.com
Your Behavior Will Be Monitored by Justin Feinstein
If you want a depiction of the near future told in a smart, believable, multi-modal fashion, Your Behavior delivers.
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 18h
this would be an incredible film if you started it with all the normal serial killer hunting tropes
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SpookJ 👻 @snoopj.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026
Happy "Charles Darwin is poorly today" Day to those who celebrate 165 years ago today, Charles Darwin was having a rough one
Photo of Charles Darwin's hand-written journal entry from 1 Oct 1861 and digitized text of same

"But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything."
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Ervin Malakaj @ervinmalakaj.bsky.social · 18h
Friendlies, my second book comes out April 2027! Reach out if you are planning your lecture series for the spring/summer! I'd love to come by in person or virtually. Please let your libraries know to get a copy and help me spread the word. 🌈 @sunypress.bsky.social sunypress.edu/Books/F/Frag...
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rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
shirley jackson you tell em www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...
ar and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise
—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or—kindest of all—goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.
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Daisy Rockwell @shreedaisy.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Delighted that my translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Our City that Year is in this excellent long list from @womenintranslation.bsky.social ! 🧿
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Edge Effects @edgeeffectsmag.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Extinction unfolds across multiple temporalities and is mediated through a variety of cultural forms. Today on Edge Effects, Yota Batsaki unpacks the afterlives of the chestnut that once dominated the overstory of the American landscape. 🌳📚
edgeeffects.net
The Understoried Afterlives of the American Chestnut - Edge Effects
Richard Powers' elegy of the American chestnut in The Overstory reveals how the afterlives of plants complicate our stories of extinction.
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Nimrod Journal @nimrodjournal.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Reach for your tools of the trade! We’re open for business. nimrodjournal.substack.com/p/tools-of-t...
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Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory @memoryplace.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
How do spaces become places for siting artworks? Artist & academic Robyn Backen explores how artworks respond to architecture, atmosphere, social activity & histories — & how a site becomes part of a work’s meaning. 📅 Tue 13 Oct, 15:00 UK 📍 Stirling + online Register: forms.gle/F13arkiQbPY3...
docs.google.com
How do spaces become places for siting artworks?
Robyn Backen, artist and academic at Sydney College of Arts, University of Sydney, considers the relationship between art, space and place. Her practice includes ephemeral and permanent built works th...
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Jen Calleja @jencalleja.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
On the left is Kermit the Frog under the date September 30, and on the right is Kermit the frog with his mouth open showing vampire teeth under the date October 1
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SonakshiS @sonakshis11.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
What does strength mean in a world torn apart by it? Steinunn G. Helgadóttir’s The Strongest Woman in the World moves through climate change, polar bears, capitalism, mortuary cosmetology, and veganism. Happy publication day, Larissa Kyzer, for this sensuous translation! My review: l1nq.com/duc2f8k
asymptotejournal.com
Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: The Strongest Woman in the World by Steinunn G. Helgadóttir - Asymptote Blog
Helgadóttir’s novel is not only about how the strongest woman in the world came to be so, but also why.
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NiCHE Canada @nichecanada.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"In choosing this idyllic life, Maurice and Alec prioritise real and simple joys over worldly and material comforts, thus stealing their metaphorical apricots." - Chetana Gavini niche-canada.org/2026/06/25/t... #envhist #envhum #queerlit #queerecology #queerjoy #literature
niche-canada.org
"Two Men can Defy the World": E.M Forster’s Happy Ending in the Greenwood
Forster’s Maurice subverts tragic queer tropes, allowing its lovers to find eternal sanctuary and hopeful futurity within the mythic greenwood.
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Hyperallergic @hyperallergic.com · 27/09/2026
With some of the oldest surviving tarot decks on view, the Morgan’s exhibition traces how a Renaissance card game became something far more powerful.
hyperallergic.com
Tarot for a Broken World
With some of the oldest surviving tarot decks on view, the Morgan’s exhibition traces how a Renaissance card game became something far more powerful.
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Hyperallergic @hyperallergic.com · 29/09/2026
Newly restored in 4K, the film “Nitrate Kisses” feels prescient as groups are once again being scapegoated for public health crises and financial instability.
hyperallergic.com
The Rough-and-Ready Brilliance of Barbara Hammer’s “Nitrate Kisses”
Newly restored in 4K, the film feels prescient as groups are once again being scapegoated for public health crises and financial instability.
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David B Hobbs @deebeehobbs.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
we as a profession owe David Lodge deep thanks for bursting the dangerously inflated Stanley Fish Bubble
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Matthew L Reznicek @drreznicek.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I argue the nineteenth-century realist novel forces readers to confront both the individual and the socio-structural components of health in a way that enables our "seeing a people; seeing the whole, seeing the social, the system within which individuals move." www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...
politybooks.com
The Social Determinants of Health: Looking Upstream
The Social Determinants of Health: Looking Upstream, This timely book takes seriously the idea of understanding how our social world – and not individual responsibility or the healthcare system ...
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Kathryn Vomero Santos @kathrynvsantos.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I loved writing about Safiya Sinclair and her poetry of linguistic rebellion for the catalog accompanying To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare, an upcoming exhibition curated by the amazing Patricia Akhimie for the Folger Shakespeare Library. I can’t wait to see it in person!
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Ryan Boyd @ryanboyd.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
New at @publicbooks.bsky.social: your boy reviewing an incredible new collection of Great Depression worker stories. Turns out the 1930s have a lot to tell the 2020s.
publicbooks.org
Long-Distance Talkers: The Great Depression Speaks - Public Books
During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration conducted thousands of interviews among American workers. Anne Trubek's “American Made” gives them new voice.
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Fine Books & Collections @finebooks.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Details of First U.S. Exhibition Devoted to Medieval Blockbooks www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-n...
finebooksmagazine.com
Details of First U.S. Exhibition Devoted to Medieval Blockbooks
Graphic Devotions: Late Medieval European Blockbooks will explore the pivotal period 1450 to 1480 in European book history when growing demand for books spurred innovation and experimentation in their...
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Eriko Christy @erikochristy.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
what a strange coincidence that every woman has friends who have been sexually assaulted (and quite possibly has been herself) and no man seems to be friends with any rapists!
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British Centre for Literary Translation @bcltuea.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
📚️ Join Josephine Murray for Translating Children’s Illustrated Non-Fiction Books 📚️ 🗓️ Wednesday 14 October ⏲️ 5.30-7pm 📍 Online Register: www.bclt.org.uk/events/trans...
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The Dial @thedialmag.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
We are failing to see the dire consequences that AI has brought to education, Dónal Gill argues. AI in the classroom tells students they don’t need to struggle — that focus, reason, creativity and problem-solving skills are not important. www.thedial.world/articles/new...
thedial.world
Jonathan Swift v. AI — The Dial
Three hundred years ago, the satirist warned of a world in which reading and writing are replaced by the flashy simulation of human knowledge. Can he help us fix it?
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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
🏺 🗃️ Archaeologists/Historians - please shoot me your favourite examples & sources on ancient named animals, the older the better! Prefer farm animals but others also welcome 🐏 🐂 🐖 🫏... 🐕 #histsky (I already have Bramati 2025, & Alivernini & Bramanti 2023)
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Fabrizio Baldassarri @fabribald.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
#Cucumbers are the less strange of all strange plants, whose behaviour would only be difficultly confined to vegetation (nutrition and growth), as since Virgil's Georgics, it would be "coiling through the grass, swells into a paunch" #vegetation #plantlife #appetite #histplants #histsci #histphilo
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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I don't know how this happened but a rogue AI swarm has hacked my chapter draft and added a long, theoretically-dense digression on a subject that is tangential to my argument
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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Great moments in Scottish engineering history: James Watt tries to work out how his phone attaches to his selfie stick.
Statue of James Watt. In his right hand he holds a telescopic stick with a frame at the top; in his left he holds a flat object about the size of a large smartphone. He is scowling at the possibly-not-a-smartphone as if he is tempted to yeet it into the sea. On that basis, it probably _is_ a phone.
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Abe El-Raheb / Editor & Writer @eldashraheb.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
From Ivan Turgenev’s Home of the Gentry #booksky 💙📚
education: Vladimir Nikolaich could speak French beauti-fully, English well and German badly. Which is as it should be: decent people are ashamed of speaking German well, but the art of dropping a German word into one's conversation at certain, usually humorous, moments - c'est même très chic, as our St Petersburg Parisians express it. From fifteen years of
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Moby Dick @mobydickatsea.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.
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Gita Ralleigh @gitaralleigh.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
🙄 😩💀 www.the-tls.com/regular-feat...
Screenshot stating that an article titled ‘AI and the crisis of the author’ was removed because AI was used in its preparation.
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bitbybit.bsky.social @bitbybit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This article always cracks me up: the-toast.net/2014/12/08/d...
the-toast.net
How I Defeated the Tolkien Estate - The Toast
The story of how one brave soul defended his right to translate the Red Book of Westmarch in court against the powers of the Tolkien estate.
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sword tree @sword-tree.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
My first crush's phone number. Land line. I remember because I got excited when I saw it on the caller ID. I saw it almost as often as my stalker's number on that little display screen; I can't recall those digits. maybe that's dread editing memory's record.
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Matthew L Reznicek @drreznicek.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Favourite work on Victorian social policy/infrastructure?
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ASLE-UKI @asleuki.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
📢 The deadline for ASLE-UKI Research and Event Support Grants is 1 October 2026! Further details along with the application form can be found here: asle.org.uk/awards/grants/
asle.org.uk
Research and Event Support Grants | ASLE-UKI
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The Believer @thebeliever.net · 26/09/2026
“‘Now I can die happy,’ the chemist told his hosts, having been shown the Mixtec ‘milking’ method, ‘knowing that the snails are being taken care of.’” On a method of making purple dyes that pre-dates the founding of Athens: www.thebeliever.net/logger/vinta...
thebeliever.net
Vintage Tech: Tyrian Purple - Believer Magazine
It’s sometimes easy to forget that our technologically complex world wasn’t created out of whole cloth. Or that it wasn’t always here. Without an awareness of the past, “the sense of time falls in…
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The Believer @thebeliever.net · 27/09/2026
“Though less enormous, less voracious, and lacking dramatic soundtracks to pave their entrances and exits, formidable flesh-and-blood, non-animatronic prehistorics do actually walk among us.” On gators: www.thebeliever.net/logger/21st-...
thebeliever.net
21st Century Prehistoric - Believer Magazine
Judging by the popularity of the Jurassic Park franchise—five feature films, with a sixth blockbuster scheduled for 2021, three “Lego” Jurassic Park shorts, various theme-park attractions, some…
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Wasafiri Magazine @wasafirimag.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
What will it feel like on the day Palestine is liberated? @monakareem.bsky.social imagines the ecstatic, utopian feeling of experiencing Palestine's liberation at last in this speculative story. With an illustration by Simone Khanyi Hadebe. Read: buff.ly/cIRw6E7
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Ronita Chattopadhyay @ronita.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Beautiful. All three of them. @stdougherty.bsky.social
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The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) @themerl.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This giant lad was painted by Thomas Fairbairn Wilson (MERL 64/47). Wilson was a 19th century livestock painter, who painted many a big animal in his time. Such as this handsome and remarkably proportioned sheep from the Bowes Museum collection (ANT.237)
A sheep with a very large body and tiny legs. It's in a pen and being marvelled at by onlookers – presumably up for auction.
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P.G. Wodelouse @pgwodelouse.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Monday
Yer man wakes up to find the eponymous monster facing towards him on his pillow in Possum
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The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) @themerl.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
never skip leg day
An oil painting of a giant white ox, with a massive body and extremely tiny legs. He stands solemnly in a field beneath a moody sky, as if presiding over some kind battle.
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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 26/09/2026
‘“Hard borders” are a creation of the modern age. Until the late 19th century, borders almost everywhere were more or less open, often fuzzy or undecided.’ Ferdinand Mount on immigration and emigration in the English imagination. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
lrb.co.uk
Ferdinand Mount · Modest and Misunderstood: Wretched Strangers
In the great immigration panics of today, sympathy is focused on the home team. We are the ones who are being hurt. It...
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Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Hell I'll take any excuse to share my favorite Gerard Manley Hopkins poem and one I have had memorized for 30 years and say to myself in bed when I'm awake at night.
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
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NiCHE Canada @nichecanada.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
In Episode 6.5 of NiCHE Conversations, @sabinelebel.bsky.social joined @jessicamdewitt.bsky.social to break down why people latched onto these orca memes and what they tell us about human relationships with the more-than-human world. www.youtube.com/shorts/g2Q1Y...
youtube.com
Orcas Target Luxury Yachts #envhist #envhum #climatechange #orcas #multispecies #ecogrief
YouTube video by Network in Canadian History & Environment - NiCHE
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Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
My latest books cartoon for @theguardian.com
Title: Gentlemen! Are you in want of a wife? Allow our algorithm to assist!

Image: a series of yes/no questions for that lead to different outcomes. 

Questions include “are you rich?”, “are you dashing?”, “are you a rake” and “are you a vicar?”

Outcomes include “You win the most beautiful daughter of the richest man in the county!”, “You remain a bachelor”, “You marry a dowdy cousin” and “You rescue a 23-year-old from Spinsterhood”.
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Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
My latest @newscientist.com cartoon. many more here: www.newscientist.com/author/tom-gauld/
Image: A graph with lots of red dots clustered together in a curve. The are all looking upwards at a single red dot wearing sunglasses. 

Caption: Mike was an outlier and would probably be excluded from the study, but all the other data points secretly thought he was really cool.
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Maria Popova @mariapopova.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Love anyway www.themarginalian.org/2024/03/22/l...
themarginalian.org
Love Anyway
You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that…
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Maria Popova @mariapopova.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Auden on writing, enchantment, belief vs. doubt, and the most important principle of creative work www.themarginalian.org/2016/05/10/w...
themarginalian.org
W.H. Auden on Writing, Belief, Doubt, False vs. True Enchantment, and the Most Important Principle of Making Art
“We must believe before we can doubt, and doubt before we can deny.”
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Asian Review of Books @asianreviewofbooks.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
📰 Today, Jonathan Han reviews “In the Shade of the Green Willow” by Zhang Ruzhao and translated by Beata Grant, published by Shambhala Publications. buff.ly/IizwA28
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