Profile avatar
erikthesimpson.bsky.social
English professor, Grinnell College. Romanticism, history and future of the book, digital humanities, paper engineering, jazz saxophony. I do not speak for anyone but myself. If that.
50 posts 475 followers 456 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 24 Comments 24

“A 400-year-old institution should be making decisions with a time horizon of centuries, not news cycles. Making a principled stand now … is the single best thing Harvard could do to earn its continued place as a symbol of genuine excellence, free inquiry, and commitment to the public good.”

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

My first Blue Bot: @dallowayaside.bsky.social, Mrs Dalloway in Parenthesis. Thank you, @bluebotsdonequick.com!

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

My alma mater sent out an alumni mailing today with a feature on the decorations in the baseball coach’s office. Nothing about federal funding.

submitted 49 days ago • 1 comment

Hi and welcome new followers! We've migrated over from the Other Place. Follow us for announcements of upcoming sessions of the workshop, and other interesting book history news.

submitted 58 days ago • 4 comments

I wonder whether I am about to become the first person to teach Charles Baxter and “Baxter’s Procrustes” on the same day, in different classes. #baxterfest

submitted 58 days ago • 0 comments

Remember when there was bipartisan agreement that TikTok should be banned because it could hypothetically give sensitive information to a foreign power?

submitted 62 days ago • 1 comment

From @aaup.bsky.social, what to do if ICE is on your campus.

submitted 63 days ago • 6 comments

Calls and text messages have flooded me in the last 72 hours from friends and colleagues in Sierra Leone and elsewhere: Are my meds going to be cut off? Am I going to die? I don't know what to tell them. I don't know what to tell anyone. Hope is my whole jam, but I feel very distant from it.

submitted 66 days ago • 102 comments

I just learned that “The Tide Is High,” the first pop song I really loved, was first recorded by the Jamaican band The Paragons, and it is fantastic. With surprise violin solo! m.youtube.com/watch?v=2SwK...

submitted 68 days ago • 1 comment

Author copies are here! What a weird wonderful feeling to get your 1st book in print! Binding Media. Hybrid Print Digital Literature from across the Americas can be preordered now and will be officially out in March from @stanfordpress.bsky.social www.sup.org/books/bindin...

submitted 73 days ago • 20 comments

New from 404 Media: meet GeoSpy, a powerful AI tool that lets cops (& stalkers) geolocate photos in seconds. Trained on millions of images, it picks out soil, architecture, etc. GeoSpy closed public access after asked for comment, now marketing to police www.404media.co/the-powerful...

submitted 75 days ago • 23 comments

AI-fabricated 'junk science' floods Google scholar, researchers warn phys.org/news/2025-01...

submitted 76 days ago • 1 comment

I can't think of another technology that has been deployed and promoted to emphasize what it does worst. It's like they invented the world's best ice-making machine, jammed it into everybody's ovens, and wondered why people started complaining that their bread doesn't taste as good as it used to.

submitted 78 days ago • 0 comments

The Man on the Inside necklace is the Vertigo necklace, right? There are great Vertigo references all over the place if you want to follow that trail.

submitted 79 days ago • 0 comments

Yes. This is the work now.

submitted 83 days ago • 0 comments

I've been playing around with AI tools. This week, I saw that the latest version of Claude can handle literary quotations in a way I haven't seen before. I'm going to keep exploring and start writing--thinking about practical, everyday humanities teaching. eriksimpson.net/ai/colleague...

submitted 83 days ago • 0 comments

There’s a woman at the Huntington whose boots, on the wooden floor of the art gallery, make the exact sound my cat makes when she is about to throw up. I thought you’d want to know.

submitted 88 days ago • 0 comments

If these are to exist at all, there should be a setting that prevents you from ever being shown or sent anything that comes from them. Anything else demonstrates bad faith to me.

submitted 92 days ago • 9 comments

That is what we call a high-variance outlook

submitted 94 days ago • 0 comments

In retrospect, maybe should have left it off

submitted 94 days ago • 0 comments

a short thread of Nicolas Cage resembling various philosophers 1. Spinoza

submitted 107 days ago • 89 comments

Dinner for the Romanticism seminar means it's time for Frankenstein's creature cookies.

submitted 110 days ago • 0 comments

Oh dang

submitted 115 days ago • 1 comment

What unique knowledge and insight is lost when a 24 year NASA librarian is let go and the job "moved online to a chat service"?

submitted 122 days ago • 1 comment