iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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s. e. smith @sesmith.lol · 03/10/2026

Talking about the trades? Read this instead of The Atlantic!

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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 · 28/09/2026

There are number of pieces from @annakornbluh.bsky.social's Against AI site (in the "Deep Backgrounds" and "Teachable Readings" sections) that might be useful? against-a-i.com

against-a-i.com

AGAINST AI -

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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

Hmmm, no. (Go Heaney; go Wings)

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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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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Oh, and you have a "beyond the US/UK" requirement too. We were pushing for that a few years back and then we lost 60% of our faculty to retirement, attrition, and not replacing lines, and staffing/scheduling made that too complicated...😒

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

We are doing an overhaul of ours this year with something very similar in mind! (Plus an emphasis on sustained long-form reading, because we need that more than ever too...)

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

It's a nice way to find out!

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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

It calls out one of my favorite thought experiments from the book: what would have happened if you asked 1904 suffragists to solve problems routinely being faced by suffragettes in the 1910s?

Text from page 98 of Watching Women reads "It is worth remembering what an aberration in feminist political tactics the suffrage militancy of the 1910s was. Had you asked a suffragist group composed largely of middle- and upper-class women in 1904 what their strategy would be for physically incapacitating a large number of police officers who had invaded a suffrage meeting with the in-tent to arrest the leaders, using only the implements group members typically carried on their persons at such occasions, while simultaneously moving the police’s targets out of the venue and away from the scene, they’d moving the police’s targets out of the venue and away from the scene, they’d likely have been too astonished at the question to venture an answer."

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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 · 07/09/2026

To be fair, these are at least more interesting than "I wrote a novel with AI, do you want to teach it in your classes?"

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Married to an astronomer, and he gets these a lot; I’m an English professor so the version I get is “my manuscript reveals the secrets of the universe IN POETRY,” and yes, sometimes the poets are engineers.

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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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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I live in an actual desert and Amazon is trying to put one here and can assure you that in AZ it’s very much about water. What people object to isn’t universally the same; local conditions matter even if tech oligarchs are universally vile.

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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 Scare You 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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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

A few that no one has gotten to: Who Killed Piet Bardol?, The Old Drift, The Tusk that Did the Damage (tho Loot might be the obvious Tania James), Dead Astronauts, Ngugi's Devil on the Cross, A Small Place, Poetry: What Work Is, Solie's Wellwater. @taoleighgoffe.bsky.social's Dark Laboratory.

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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

There are some in the "Assignment Ideas" section of the Against AI website: against-a-i.com/assignment-i...

against-a-i.com

Assignment Ideas - AGAINST AI

Image: The Shipwreck, J.M.W. Turner

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Tyler, from the Internet (Haunted) @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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Steph Brown @stephjayb.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

There is a guy here who rides his unicycle down the mountain highway and going 45mph around curves on a unicycle does for some reason feel like uniquely Tucson behavior.

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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

Nothing! But I get their emails because I always buy my brother's kids a yearly membership. In HS, they were open late on Friday's and we'd go and play "prize to whoever finds the creepiest baby Jesus." Which in hindsight feels very Catholic-school-coded, but fun if you need a break...

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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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