Submissions are strongly encouraged for this coming week! I will be traveling Tuesday, at what looks to be a pretty dry academic conference Wednesday and Thursday, and then traveling again on Friday so my reading time is going to be a bit curtailed.
That the ivory tower is a tower, and not the source of a waterfall or a pile of spent nuclear rods at the bottom of the sea.
"Your Work is Not Academic", Kendra Albert
But we should also be honest: that sucks and we hate it.
"The Secret History of the Red Book of Hamlet", John Phipps for the Financial Times
Submitted by v. Some other bangers from this article:
Ainley’s hornily free-associating letters seem to imply a physical affair at times.
He had settled in a winged leopard-print armchair, like a portrait of himself.
The more I thought about it, the proximity of normcore and pettiness seems not a coincidence.
"Pettycore", Whitney Mallett
The day after Mexico’s leftwing ruling party Morena won a landslide victory in presidential, congressional and state elections, one executive stayed in bed all afternoon eating ice cream to try to cope.
"Mexico’s elite struggles to comprehend left’s landslide election win", Christine Murray for the Financial Times
Submitted by Chris. Feels important to note this is the lede of the article.
When such a secret is shared, a certain bond of guilt is formed.
Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman
I threw this into my comprehensive exam reading list anticipating more of a methods-oriented read, which was foolish of me. After all, it's a Verso book written by architects, which is to say it is adjacent to a text on methods but attempts to justify its own existence by engaging in wildly opaque theory-speak. This isn't to say it's a bad text or entirely un-helpful, just a reminder that architects operate on a wavelength that I am perpetually 1/16th of an inch (or, because using imperial measurements with architects is probably a faux pas, 1.5875 millimeters) away from connecting with.
They are young and therefore bulletproof until they find out that they are only young, and today's foible can become a catastrophe when a Bruce comes out of the woodwork.
"How the Fix Gets In", Ray Ratto for Defector
Submitted by Katie, who also offered the parenthetical in this sentence as a runner-up:
While the line "also known as 'Bruce'" may cause some amusement (the alias seemed clever enough in that it is completely panache-free but not so perfect that he got to the plane in time), the story here is how Porter was driven to throw his participation in games not to cash out but to extricate himself from a jam of his own making.
Nothing could be less hassle than succumbing to what the philosopher Alphonso Lingis calls “the sliding suctions of octopus eros.”
"My Octopus Girlfriend", Sophie Lewis for N+1
Via a reposting of it on Bluesky, re-shared by Maeve. Some other contenders:
There is a surprisingly capacious canon of transfixed worry about the labial lability of the octopus in terms of what it seems to be saying about your household, your democracy, your wife.
This all-too-common line is almost as stupid as it is violent.
First name is Billy, last name 5000, username is Billy5000.
There are maybe more perfect sentences in this film (which is great and I really hope either gets wide distribution or director Julian Glander puts it online), but learning that "Billy 5000" is not a nickname but the protagonist's actual name (and learning this while the character is on a phone call with a customer service representative) was just delightful.
I saw this movie at the Tribeca Film Festival (and yes, was low-key starstruck after the screening seeing cast members Jack "Planet Money TikTok Guy" Corbett and Grace "I can't explain her videos to you but they're incredible and deranged, also I think she's on The Daily Show?" Kuhlenschmidt in person). The festival apparently has some dumb Web3 sponsor this year, and I probably laughed way too hard when a commercial for this sponsor played before the movie. To be fair, the narrator of the commercial said "art" at precisely the same time an image of a Bored Ape NFT appeared, and that is extremely funny! I felt vaguely like I should apologize to Julian Glander for laughing louder at a Web3 ad before his movie than like, some of the legitimately intentionally funny things in the movie, but also maybe that's weird and parasocial of me and it's fine.