dan-sinnamon.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Heyday is at the LA Times Festival of Books at the USC campus today and tomorrow! Come find us at our booth. Hopefully this rain will let up soon.... Our authors Obi Kaufmann and Rosanna Xia are on panels this weekend, as is our publisher Steve Wasserman! #LATFOB25

submitted 3 hours ago • 1 comment

I needed to write about something that’s giving me hope, so I wrote about Independent Bookstore Day which is this Saturday. lithub.com/something-go...

submitted 2 days ago • 28 comments

Opened my email just now to learn THE BARBARA JOHNSON COLLECTIVE received enthusiastic final board approval — it will officially be in the world soon(ish)!!!!!!! @nathankhensley.bsky.social is the best co-editor. Can’t wait for these brilliant, gorgeous, sometimes gutting essays to appear in print.

submitted 1 day ago • 5 comments

$30 million siphoned off the NEA & NEH to build the American Exceptionalism Wax Museum

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

The golden age of academic book design.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Watching people, not very clever in the first place, becoming AI versions of themselves

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

This is overstated. Most authors do not need anywhere near hundreds of thousands of sales to earn royalties. Only a few million dollar advance authors are in that situation.

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

my revised article arriving at manuscript central

submitted 3 days ago • 6 comments

Me: [copies and pastes long section of King Lear into Google Docs] Google: Refine with Gemini

submitted 3 days ago • 6 comments

Today’s one of my last classes at West Virginia University. This fall, I’ll be Associate Prof of English and Humanities at Reed College. I’m thrilled to start what has been my longtime dream job—astonishing good luck! And enormous thanks to those who helped me again and again. And at the same time…

submitted 4 days ago • 47 comments

If I can be forgiven for engaging in an act of punditry, here's a review essay I wrote on Abundance.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

10 years ago I wrote my MA dissertation on the politics of Yiddish and Hebrew. Ever since I've been looking for the opportunity to talk about Doikayt to a broader audience - here it is!

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

if you’re in ithaca, please come hear the unbelievably kind and brilliant steven read from his recent collection tomorrow 4/22 at 5pm at buffalo street books. www.downtownithaca.com/event/at-the...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

new alt-ac just dropped

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Our job is not and cannot be policing students so that they don’t cheat. The average classroom instructor is a near-fatally overworked, underpaid contingent thought worker. Our job is to help students understand why the learning is more valuable than anything the cheating can get them.

submitted 4 days ago • 3 comments

Writing an essay that interweaves the political projects and lives of Vladimir Jabotinsky, S. An-sky, and the Bund, to explain Netanyahu's Israel and to call up an alternative positive vision for world Jewry: the Bund's “Do-i-kayt” or hereness, fighting from where we are, home anywhere.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

"Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of hell." [Pope Francis, 18 April 2025]

submitted 8 days ago • 120 comments

My colleague Ben Robinson is the first IU faculty member to be investigated under SEA 202, the law that mandates faculty can be fired for the appearance of “political bias,” which ofc in this context means left wing opinions the administration does not like. 1/4

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

I wrote a piece in The NY Times about global economic stagnation and the way it is shaping politics today, less visibly perhaps than other factors, but more deeply.

submitted 5 days ago • 8 comments

There’s a Reason the World Is a Mess, and It’s Not Trump: Global economic stagnation underlies today’s disarray. (@abenanav.bsky.social) www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/o...

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

<meets J.D. Vance> <dies>

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

It's actually crazy that Alito dropped his dissent on Eastern and in it, in a footnote, he implies that Trump is Elijah resurrected

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Tradition states that last night Jesus emptied out all the jails. Spent Saturday night telling people “I don’t care what you did, people weren’t made for prisons.” The next day to prove His point He broke out of solitary. It is finished. Easter is incompatible with the carceral state. Happy Easter.

submitted 6 days ago • 32 comments

I'm calling for a 20-year moratorium on new novels to give me time to catch up on my reading list

submitted 7 days ago • 4 comments

Huge if true.

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

tfw someone is more successful than you just because of their accomplishments

submitted 7 days ago • 6 comments

The only appropriate response to this is impeachment and removal from office. Every moment the political press spends spinning out theories about 2026 and immigration polling is a minute they are not spending asking Republicans in Congress about their plans to enforce the rule of law

submitted 8 days ago • 267 comments

This is an extraordinary piece of journalism telling the story of how non-violent protest was beaten out of Palestinians, leaving them with only two options: die with or without a gun in your hands. harpers.org/archive/2025...

submitted 8 days ago • 3 comments

Tried to get a raise because the 67k a year I'm paid is 6k under average for asst profs in my dept, 8k under average for asst profs of English & History, and 12 k under all humanities profs at WVU--and bc the TT job I was about to be offered (20k higher pay & lower prep) was pulled thanks to Tr*mp.

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

I hate cars.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Been watching RuPaul's Drag Race straight through from Season 1 and at a certain point Ru's preference for young, dumb, pretty, skinny queens becomes hard to ignore

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

It was a lot of work to redesign my essay assignments for a large lecture course to provide an option for writing with AI that does not increase the grading workload of my TAs. Here is the AI option in my course on media, information, & communication over the ages: alanyliu.org/courses/engl....

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

"I will no longer be able to continue teaching." Hyeongseon Jeon, an assistant professor at the University of Houston, said he had his foreign visa unexpectedly terminated and now must return to Korea immediately. www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston...

submitted 10 days ago • 52 comments

dawg, there is no one I want to hear from less about how breathtaking our current shittiness is

submitted 10 days ago • 22 comments

The student paper at the college at which I teach reports a "tsunami of takedown requests" from international students terrified of being targeted for innocuous, legitimate op-eds & opinions.. Many ask in person--leave no trace in writing. Reminds me of my father's account of studying in the USSR.

submitted 11 days ago • 64 comments

I've been uneasy about Junot Díaz's treatment by the mainstream media for a while now, but seeing him get nixed from the Norton anthology was the last straw for me. I've put my thoughts down here. Thanks, as usual, to my editor, Len Gutkin! www.chronicle.com/article/juno...

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

The amount of people being weird to me about Ohio is... weird. Yall know Cleveland is rad and yall just jealous about our cost of living. The river hasn't been on fire in YEARS.

submitted 11 days ago • 15 comments

Someone asked what I was most proud of at my old job, and I think the answer warrants reposting here. First, the job: I founded the Office of Data and Evaluation at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was the agency's first full-time Chief Data Officer.

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

The right: take over universities, rewrite curriculum, force everyone to study christofascist ideology. The left: STEM STEM STEM (but only the stuff you can apply we actually don’t care about abstract math lol that’s practically poetry)

submitted 11 days ago • 14 comments

I'm convinced the closure of R.R. Donnelly (2016) was the absolute canary in the coal mine for how fucked up this industry was about to get.

submitted 11 days ago • 3 comments