I defended my dissertation on Friday (on a Zoom, which was a bit anticlimactic, but I did have an IRL audience of three people who had helped me with my slightly over the top A/V setup). Many thanks to subscriber friends who joined the public portion. I passed!

Well, pending some manuscript revisions I'm making this weekend I will pass. The revisions are mostly concerns about my tone; my committee is worried that if I am too snarky/doing swears in my prose it will be a problem for me on the academic the job market. I personally am skeptical about the future of US academia as a whole, let alone jobs in it (also: any committee that doesn't like my tone would probably reject me on the basis of a first-round interview), but they're trying to be helpful and I am complying to the best of my ability.

In any case, it is a relief to have the end in sight and a bigger relief that I already have two jobs that I started late last year. Thanks to longtime subscribers who have followed this process for the last few years!

A minor housekeeping note for submissions: I'm trying out receiving newsletter replies in the Buttondown interface to avoid losing track of submissions in my general-email inbox. This sort of works, except that it only displays email addresses and not display names. If I'm sent messages without a signature I can deduce the name through various methods (firstname.lastname email addresses, email addresses tied to specific websites that I can check, paying subscribers whose info I can look up in Stripe), but that doesn't cover all cases. If you are unsure whether I can piece it together and are submitting by responding to the newsletter, just let me know how you'd like to be credited.

Each Christmas my grandmother gave me a set of gloves and a ski mask / as if to suggest that I begin robbing convenience stores.

"The High Numbers", David Berman in The Believer

The sudden invention of phantom procedures is one of the more despicable attempts to disguise my firing as a matter of protocol rather than politics.

"How Gaza Broke the Art World", David Velasco for Equator

"Most quoted on socials" is not always a proxy for perfection, but I saw this sentence referenced a lot on the timelines and it is admittedly very good:

The art world, with all its progressive scaffolding and humanist ornamentation, practically designed to celebrate and aestheticise every rebellion, couldn’t metabolise Palestine.

What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.

Barbara Kruger responding to a request for comment about a trademark lawsuit filed by Supreme against a competitor

It's been over a decade since Kruger issued this comment (via emailing a a Word file named "fools.doc" in reply to Complex) and I'm still amazed that the owners of Supreme didn't immediately shutter their doors and die on the spot from shame, which is what would happen to me if Barbara Kruger called me a "totally uncool joker."

Perhaps all they are preventing is the possibility of their own credibility.

"On Becoming a Cop-Hater", Joan Didion

As quoted in an essay by Scott Saul for Dispatches.

I submitted my dissertation manuscript on December 5th! I will find out by December 12th whether or not it is "defensible"! Thank you to all the people who have sent encouraging comments over the last few weeks and months. I am excited to read fiction and magazines again.

Why it matters: The intoxicated suspect was a raccoon.

"Raccoon gets drunk at Ashland ABC store and passes out in bathroom", Sabrina Moreno for Axios Richmond

I turn in my dissertation manuscript this Friday, which means last week was mostly editing my own sentences. Given the deadline, the I'm aiming for "defensible" sentences in the manuscript more than perfect, so it's not been a very inspired week. Thanks for all of the submissions covering my limited free reading time.

If you cut me open, I’d be just styrofoam and bird feathers.

Rachael Cain as quoted in an article in Gothamist

It really is the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: “We will create God and then ask it for money.”

"OpenAI Has a Business Plann", Matt Levine for Bloomberg

Submitted by Wesley.

babies are born worshipping unknown gods

@reki.gay on Bluesky

Submitted by Kelsey. This has been memed as an official Dwarf Fortress bug report comment, but the actual bug report does not use this phrase. All credit to Reki!

I say my dog because this experience taught me something about fascists: if you don't admit to owning the world's stray dogs, they'll shoot them.

"My Life Under Fascism, or Franco Killed My Dog", William Gibson for Space Junk

(Light spoiler for those who might not want to read an essay involving a dog dying that the dog doesn't actually die! This does not really detract from Gibson's point, I think.)

The good news is I am currently writing the conclusion to my dissertation, which is to say the end is in sight! The bad news is now I must uh, draw conclusions, and the conclusion cannot be "I am so burned out by academia, why must we pretend this matters at all please just pass me and let my weary soul rest."

It’s the least we can do, I think, piece together the story from the rings and scars of the fallen.

"What Time Is It?" Claire Kovac for Jeff Sharlet's newsletter Calling All Syllables

We simply do not know what our writing does.

"There is No Software", Friedrich Kittler

There's noise, so much noise, but there's also signal and the signal was that they were here that they were everywhere.

We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when interacting with children.

"Debt, Violence, and Impersonal Violence: Polanyian Meditations", David Graeber

Gun culture has made it impossible to slap people like Moe Howard so the progression from chucklehead to numbskull is never halted.

A correction: last week’s newsletter cited a Substack note sentence that was in fact a quote from Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, not an original statement from the author. We regret the error. Thanks to Saga for bringing this to our attention.

what am i to do with all this sand in my chest

“A Conversation with My Mother About the Bloodstains on My Shirt”, Darius Simpson

Submissions are carrying this week as I was finishing revisions on one chapter while writing the last full chapter of the dissertation. I still have to wrap the chapters in an intro/conclusion and add an appendix and give the whole thing an overall edit (while remixing parts of one chapter into a journal article), but getting All The Chapters done feels like a pretty good milestone.

Apparently, the tallest ghost in the world was shorter than six feet.

"The Last Resort", Ash Sanders for The Believer

I have met crows that should be in jail.

“walking through los angeles when the crows are screaming and going through your garbage”, Kaleb Horton for his newsletter

Submitted by @symbo1ics.bsky.social. I was not all that familiar with Kaleb Horton’s work while he was alive, and I regret that now. His passing has put a lot of his writing on my timeline. What a tremendous voice of California.

And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.

"Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause", Ta-Nehisi Coates for Vanity Fair

Still working through the whiplash of Vanity Fair publishing this from Coates and days later announcing a plum job for Olivia "History of Wild Violations of Journalistic Standards" Nuzzi. Every day is a winding road!

Very submission-heavy week—the current dissertation chapter is in some ways not as intense of a writing task as the previous two now that I know it doesn't have to be 20,000 words, but has involved a lot more writing whole paragraphs and then realizing they will send me well beyond scope and scrapping them (well, pasting them into another document in case I need them later). Also: what a week, fuck.

That is like an onion asking "How do I take care of a star?"

"The Fly”, Alien: Earth

I submitted two dissertation chapters this past week, which was a little anticlimactic but still relieved. Thanks to the sentence submitters who kept this from being a very bare bones newsletter entry.

And, you know, I hate competing symmetrically with government approved monopolies.

Someone I interviewed for my dissertation

I’m in pretty deep on dissertation writing for the next few months, which means less time for recreational sentence reading. Submissions appreciated—not just from a “having material for the newsletter” perspective but from needing reminders of other things in the world while I toil in the scholarly prose mines.

Events in the real world may supersede our feelings of moral superiority.

“Thinking Ahead to the Full Military Takeover of Cities”, Hamilton Nolan for his newsletter How Things Work