iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Hannah Walser @hkpmw.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If “irreparable harm” means anything, it means being sent to a country you’ve never seen, where you may well be imprisoned, tortured, or killed, under a policy that (the cert grant implicitly acknowledges!) may well be illegal

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I am once again tapping the sign

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Happening shortly! Come help me think about surveillance humanities!

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Oh no, this is paperclip maximizer's most likely form, isn't it?

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

No matter how many times I read it, my response to the line "open minds as open as a trap" in Seamus Heaney's spectacular poem "Whatever You Say Say Nothing" is, roughly,

A toddler who also looks like an enraged old man wearing a Pittsburgh Penguins jersey brandishes both of his tiny fists in celebraion at a hockey game.

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Julie Greene @greeneland.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Check out this new podcast— WORKING HISTORY—bringing labor history to you and connecting it to the present. A collaboration between Southern Labor Studies Assoc, LAWCHA, LABOR, and ILWCH. Dropping tomorrow! On apple and spotify. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

podcasts.apple.com

Working History

History Podcast · Working History is a podcast brought to you by labor history organizations and journals, where we discuss labor issues past and present.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

if you don't think humanistic learning has value in its own right, no amount of instrumentalization is going to save it that epochal decline coincided with the hegemony of the "employable skills" pitch, including earnings data and all the trimmings, ought to have taught us that

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Scott Selisker @sselisker.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Sample chapter up! "Ways of Reading the Character Network" from my forthcoming book. Expands my Bechdel Test article, w/ more angles on vernacular criticism (manic pixie dream girls, sidekicks of color, minor-character elaborations), character, humanities v. dataviz. academic.oup.com/book/63155/c...

academic.oup.com

Ways of Reading the Character Network

Abstract. This chapter elaborates on contemporary reading practices that center the character network: vernacular criticism like the Bechdel test and other

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Missing the days when the primary objections to the Apple Watch were aesthetic

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This is just down the hall from the office I briefly had as a grad student, and making "The printed word endures" part of the view pleases me

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Manic Pixie Soccer Mom @meganc.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

It's so interesting that no one at Anthropic or wherever is worried about AI going rogue and canceling everyone's mortgages or deleting medical debt, you know?

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

My book is among all the good things in the U Toronoto Press back to school sale! Code: B2School2026 utppublishing.com/doi/book/10....

utppublishing.com

Watching Women - University of Toronto Press

Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State, 1905–1924

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Dr. Megan Faragher @meganfaragher.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

It’s a really great book!

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Would absolutely pitch in to keep my hometown newspaper, the Toledo Blade, newsing.

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

While trying to remember a detail from my own book (😭), I have discovered that @meganfaragher.bsky.social wrote a particularly thorough and thoughtful review of Watching Women for JMPS! (😭😭) muse.jhu.edu/pub/2/articl...

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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

If you pre-order @timnitgebru.blacksky.app’s book right now maybe it will go to number one on the NYT best seller list and we might finally have a sensible AI conversation in the mainstream media for once in our lives www.simonandschuster.com/books/Deep-U...

simonandschuster.com

Deep Unlearning

Timnit Gebru, one of the fiercest voices in the world speaking truth to power, chronicles her journey as a refugee and Black woman in STEM—deliveri...

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

"Human writing remains valuable because of responsibility, situatedness, accountability, risk, memory, and relation, not because of a mystical monopoly on pattern generation. Human writers...stand inside history with names, bodies, obligations, and consequences." preelit.com/2026/07/11/o...

preelit.com

ON AI, LITERATURE AND THE MYTH OF HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM - PREE

If we are thinkers, if we are writers, if we are people who claim to care about language and public life, then our task is not to guard a shrinking shrine of purity. Our task is to shape conditions un...

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Manic Pixie Soccer Mom @meganc.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Of course men are peasant-maxing by never showering and drinking raw milk instead of doing useful shit like shearing sheep and weaving nice cloaks. Typical.

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Hannah Alpert-Abrams @halperta.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Even if it were true that postdocs benefit from a bespoke mentor-mentee relationship, it wouldn't negate their rights to labor protections. But guess what! It's not. We wrote about this in the Postdoctoral Laborers Bill of Rights (2019): halperta.com/white%20pape...

halperta.com

Postdoctoral Laborers Bill of Rights

Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Heather Froehlich, Amanda Henrichs, Jim McGrath, Kim Martin. “Postdoctoral Laborers Bill of Rights.” 2019.

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Bodie A. Ashton @manwithoutatan.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I cannot think of a situation in which a positive “bespoke mentor-mentee relationship” not built on exploitation would be harmed by union protections. I have, however, seen a fuckload of postdocs and grads who needed those protections and didn’t have them.

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Having recently karaoke'd 9 to 5, can confirm: you better go in PREPARED

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

In interviews, Toni Morrison had a way of conveying "You should have known better than to ask that, but since you were not raised right, you're going to get an answer that's an education." Turns out, so did Dolly: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgs...

youtube.com

Barbara Walters' memorable interview with Dolly Parton (1978)

YouTube video by ABC News

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Rahawa Haile @rahawahaile.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I want to add that Dolly wrote this song less than a decade after eugenicist Harry M. Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands was published, pathologizing Appalachia during the country's "War on poverty." That "Despite your contempt, the things I love are worth loving" part runs DEEP.

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👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻 @oldenoughtosay.com · 25/08/2026

if you're in line to donate money to the Imagination Library, please stay in line

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I Travel Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 25/08/2026

The largest and oldest Black studies departments in the country have been closed, but a bunch of people decided the eugenics guy was the crucible for academic freedom.

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Laid out what it means that we're doing an all-analog class this semester, and I swear a couple of students were actually acting out the "Jack Nicholson emphatic nodding" meme in response.

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

universities are not run by leftist profs they are run by corporate profiteer board members siphoning public $$ to tech partnerships "An Inside Higher Ed analysis of SEC filings turned up dozens of presidents paid handsomely for sitting on corporate boards." www.insidehighered.com/news/governa...

the 10 presidents in Inside Higher Ed’s analysis who earned the most from outside board service in 2025.

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Tyler, from the Internet @tylerfromtheinternet.com · 13/08/2026

there's a lot of dunking on kids and "kids today" in the comments, and can I just cordially request that as millennials we, uh, don't fucking do that? it's the worst trait of gen x and boomers. we could just NOT do that. this isn't a story of "kids today" its adults Big Brothering society.

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

organizing students, faculty, staff, and alums to make affordable college a national priority, right now by protecting Pell grants, which face a steep budget shortfall this year sign up for the town hall to find out how to organize locally emergencycampaign.org

emergencycampaign.org

Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education

Join the Emergency Campaigns to Support Higher Education and advocate for affordable, accessible, and relevant higher education for all.

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Phillip Maciak @pjmaciak.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

When AI boosters or even adopters talk about it in this way, it gives away a meaningful problem. These are not programs designed to help you more easily access knowledge; they're programs designed to help you avoid accessing knowledge at all.

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

The Toledo Museum of Art (@toledomuseum.bsky.social) does a feature where they send you a "weekly art minute" that's usually a short piece about collection works that are not on public display and I really enjoy that as a way of making more of the collection visible!

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Recommend this very thoughtful piece by @ericrettberg.bsky.social on "the utterly preposterous and contentious battle between teacher and student that the belief AI detectors can stop the deluge of student AI use has produced," which showed up right in time for fall syllabus work

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Increasingly common experience as someone who thinks a lot about surveillance and AI: having to break it to people that the specific futures they are worried about are actually the present

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Alex A. Pagliuca @alexpagliuca.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

If this gets instituted, we’re going to see a study in a few years that says, “Black children, and children of color, were pepper sprayed at nineteen times the rate of white children,” and mfers are going to act surprised, despite how clearly every data point says this will be the case.

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Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them) @bookjockeyalex.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

*whispers* you know we can do this cultural debate about art thing all the time, right? Websites and news organizations used to have culture critics on staff whose entire job was writing about books, movies, and TV. People read them and then discussed them. We have the technology to do this again.

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Dr Selena Wisnom @lswisnom.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

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Ryan Boyd @ryanboyd.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

The waste of teaching talent caused by universities’ obsession with low-wage contract work (which drives people out of the profession long-term) is almost unimaginable. A societal disaster.

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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

When you say “AI models went rogue,” you manage to skip the part where OpenAI manually removed its cybersecurity blocks and ran tests on a machine with a live network connection. Remember that when they insist they’re the “AI safety” people.

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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 21/07/2026

One of the things I try hardest to teach students — and model myself — is saying “I don’t know” when I don’t know something. And being open to feedback. These are key skills for education and for improving at anything.

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Just spent some time with the #AP English Lit exam and teaching materials and we have not talked enough about how AP pedagogy is probably contributing to the decline in humanities majors/enrollments. Because if this was what I expected college English to be? I would never have majored in English.

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

the best day for the presidents of every R1 to hold a press conference screaming that higher ed is our second largest export and destroying it is economic sabotage and soft power detonation was Jan 21st 2025. the next best day is tomorrow.

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Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado, PhD @drcaromaldo.blacksky.app · 19/07/2026

I really hope that people in positions of reviewing the tenure files of colleagues think about the EXTRAORDINARY amount of labor that GenAI has added.

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WIRED @wired.com · 17/07/2026

Yesterday, WIRED learned that Madison Square Garden was suing us for our accurate reporting. We stand by our work. That’s why we’re removing the paywall from two of the MSG stories they don’t want you to read, making them free for everyone.

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Reading for today included this truly remarkable meditation by Nyuol Lueth Tong on nation, home, form, and the idea that "A country that does not study itself becomes mere territory; a poem that does not study its own means becomes mere gesture." lareviewofbooks.org/article/coun...

lareviewofbooks.org

How Does a Country Sound? | Los Angeles Review of Books

Reading Robert Frost in a newly independent South Sudan.

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

As always: if there's any class of people who do not have due process rights, then *nobody* has due process rights, because the government can just claim someone is in that class and there's no process to establish otherwise.

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The PS1 startup sound as a lesbian @janus.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

everyone seems to be responding positively to this and i hate to burst anyone's bubble, but i recently went to a Luddite festival in NYC and this is something organizers specifically warned about: don't let capitalists sell your hatred of capitalism back to you

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Dennis Hogan @dennismhogan.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Official editorial communication: The New England Review of Boats, a handmade regional zine about the vessels and people who go down to the sea for adventure, work, or pleasure--seeks submissions for its inaugural issue.

SUBMIT YOUR WORK TO THE NEW ENGLAND REVIEW OF BOATS!
The New England Review of Boats—a handmade regional zine about seaborne vessels and the people who go down to the sea for adventure, work, or pleasure—seeks pitches and submissions for our inaugural issue.
What we are looking for:
Pitches for short, light, or humorous essays (1200-1500 words) about boats or ships or any aspect of the watery part of the world, whether contemporary or historical.
Art: paintings, drawings, photographs or scrimshaws depicting ships, sailors, or creatures of the deep.
Brief reflections, anecdotes, or dockside gossip.
Evaluative reviews of recent books, films, or music about boats, or, preferably, of boats or ships themselves.
Interviews with salts, seamen, and fisherfolk young and old, or first-person accounts of seagoing life.
Testimonials from people possessing specialized knowledge about ships, shipping, sailing, and seaborne logistics.
Items highlighting New England’s maritime culture.
Any other material about any part of the maritime world within or outside New England.
Short or artistic pieces can be submitted complete. For longer essays, pitches of 150-200 words are preferred, but full drafts will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Please direct submissions, pitches, and inquiries to editorial@nereviewofboats.com by July 31.
NERB is an entirely volunteer-run publication. While contributions are accepted and published on a voluntary basis, contributors will be invited to join the editorial collective at a launch party this fall.

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