Teaching C19 Under Occupation: Remarks Delivered on NTT Roundtable at the C19 Biannual Conference, March 14th, 2026, Cincinatti
What follows is a polished version of remarks I delivered at the Conference of Nineteenth-Century Americanists last week. Many thanks to Tara Foley,...
Midsemester Updates: We Moved!
Hi!Its been almost two months since my last newsletter. The long gap is explained in part by the busyness of a semester when I’m teaching new two new syllabi...
Towards Democratic Infrastructure: or A Humanities Professor Teaches Himself to Build a Tech-Stack to Maintain Free Inquiry in Dark Times
I had been drafting an email arguing for optimism about how clear the path beyond the current administration was becoming. Still, in light of the events of...
Dumb Skynet (addendum)
In rushing to get a newsletter out on a regular basis, I realize I may have flubbed the end of my Dumb Skynet argument a bit. I don’t think I adequately...
Dumb Skynet
This email is a bit speculative. It’s an attempt to articulate a framework for understanding anxieties about AI and the challenges it poses for information...
AI is not Efficient, it Means More Work for Teachers and Students
I want to expand upon the claim I made in my last email that, rather than offering efficiency gains for educational institutions, whatever potential AI has...
Some Basic Points About AI and Writing and Education
This is an attempt to elaborate on my developing stances on chatbot use for writing and education. Nothing is settled—everything is still so new and...
Follow Up on AI Use Environmental Concerns
I wanted to offer some clarifications and extensions of points I made last week, since I did not mean at all to absolve the AI industry of environmental...
Too many thoughts about AI in the classroom
My last newsletter dealt a lot with why the imperative to implement AI in classrooms felt so desperate and possibly delusional about the value of college...
College Without Jobs
An ongoing problem I have to face is how to adapt to the deployment of Chatbots in my teaching. Like many, I have a deep aversion and distrust of big tech....
Apologies for Duplicates
Many of you have received excessive duplicates of my first newsletter. My apologies. I didn’t know what was going on. I checked the email list import from...
Beginning Again
I have not been writing newsletters as of late. A few things happened that eliminated much of my free time, and then I grew to be disgusted with the Substack...
My Years of Theory: A New Series
Yep, I'm going to work through a bunch of heady abstract philosophy, starting with Being and Nothingness.
1957: Claude Chabrol brings out the queer subtext in Hitchcock and then flounders for a decade.
This is part five of my French New Wave Series, where I start going year by year through the major period of New Wave, starting with 1957.Part 1: French...
Summer Plans
We are just under two weeks from our wedding. It feels nice to be excited about the festivities and planned events, amid all that has gone wrong in the...
Agnes Varda and Alain Resnais invent New Wave in 1955, three years before Truffaut.
This is part four of my French New Wave Series.Part 1: French Cinema and the Aesthetic Problem of the 1950s before New Wave: What Was Realism? Here.Part 2:...
Post-War Realism Part 2: Robert Bresson and the Birth of Verite.
Apologies for the delay between entries in my French New Wave series, the end of the semester came and went, and kept me busy. It’s been over a month since...
Updates for Family/Friends
Sorry for taking so long in my French New Wave series between entries. It’s the end of my semester, and I’m a bit bogged down in grading, as well as needing...
ICE Terror on Campuses and in the Community
This is a short post, a break from my French New Wave series to offer some updates on the situation in DC and on college campuses, as I’ve experienced.We are...
Post-War Realism Part 1: Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean Cocteau
This is the second part of my series about French New Wave Cinema.You can read part 1 here.These first couple of essays try to set up the French cinema...