I’ve been working on a secret project: a new book. From 2018 to 2024, I wrote a blog called Finite Eyes (the title comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson), where I explored ideas about education, teaching, learning, academic publishing, and open access resources. It was closely tied to my work […]
I delivered the following essay as a paper at the 2025 Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston. (There are actually a couple more paragraphs here than in the paper as delivered, since I cut it for the sake of time.) A paragraph or so is repeated from a chapter I […]
Francesca Wade’s new book, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, has been cause for some good writing about Stein recently. I have most appreciated Adam Thirlwell’s LRB essay “Devotion to the Cut” (more about Stein than about Wade’s book) and Ryan Ruby’s Bookforum review “In Search of Lost Stein”. Reading these pieces made me […]
Since the title of my recent book is The Last Vanishing Man (and the title story includes historically-accurate descriptions of stage illusions), it shouldn’t be a surprise that I love everything having to do with magic — the lore, the history, the illusions, the beliefs in some sort of “real” […]
This morning I was grading work for a 2-credit, half-semester course I teach called Cluster Learning Springboard. While going from one assignment to the next, I suddenly realized I was having an emotion I don’t usually associate with grading: joy. It was legitimately fun to see what the students had […]
“We’re in a bad time for everybody. There are very few models as to our way to be drawn upon in any community. There certainly are no states that one could look to and say, ‘A revolution has occurred here; they’re acting better toward people.’ And the religious are going […]
1. Take a moment, settle yourself, and note your immediate emotional response to these words: kindnessjoycontemplationgenerositylovepeace Now think about them in the context of your work. Would your work be better if there were more of these things? Do you feel that they are relevant to what you do every […]
This summer, I recommended to everyone I encountered that they take an hour and listen to this podcast conversation between Ezra Klein and Annie Murphy Paul about her new book The Extended Mind. The conversation has so much to say about how we shape our lives, workplaces, and schools that […]
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not! No power hath he of evil in himself… —Edgar Allan Poe Reading Sean Michael Morris’s blog post titled “On Silence: Humanising Digital Pedagogy”, I am struck by the anecdote he begins with, about returning to the dating scene for the first time […]
1. The toll of the last year on my teaching, work, and life is evident in silence. I last wrote here in November, shortly before my school began an extended winter break. Though I had time to write here, and I had ideas about things to write, it was difficult […]
Matt Brim’s Poor Queer Studies is the most exciting book about academia that I have read since Cathy Davidson’s The New Education, and for me personally it is even more exciting than Davidson’s wonderful volume because Poor Queer Studies is about the world I have spent much of my life […]
Buildings and bridgesare made to bend in the windto withstand the worldthat’s what it takes.All that steel and stoneis no match for the air, my friendwhat doesn’t bend breakswhat doesn’t bend breaks… —Ani Di Franco How Does Rigor Mean? Among educators, the word rigor often has a talismanic power. That […]