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I have a little idea about a future book that would be about the pop culture of the COVID years, but then every time I hear anybody talk about COVID, I reflexively cover my ears and start screaming, so I feel kind of ambivalent about that book project.

This feels like a tremendously underrated force in contemporary political/cultural discourse. If these guys were not trying to cobble together two or three potentially viral opinions a week, would their opinions be better?

Joke‘s on me because MOOCs failed at being remembered and but MOOC politics absolutely won the university.

Fidelity discourse about film adaptations — even when it's not transparently racist — is both anti-art and extremely boring. I hope that that's a lesson everyone is taking away from Odyssey-gate, but I am also 100% sure that it isn't.

It is genuinely bizarre that we’ve become acclimatized to right wingers throwing a tantrum every time a black person (particularly a black woman) is cast in something, but are also supposed to pretend that this is not racism but related to some other substantive concern.

I think it is once again that time

America just got an introduction to the nuanced vernacular of the Philadelphia "boo" during the Home Run Derby. I feel like there should be a style guide we could distribute.

Between this and his bit about not being able to get soy sauce at expensive sushi restaurants, I need to hear more Musk food takes. Where's he at on ketchup? What's his breakfast sandwich order?

It's hard, I think, for a culture whose go-to take is "This is the End of X" to deal with the actual end of something.

Somehow the wrongest, saddest, take in this cluster is Musk assuming backyard tomatoes taste worse than supermarket tomatoes. This man has never had a neighbor give him tomatoes and giant zucchini from their garden. This man does not know how to grow things.

Yes, but it had more outlets in the 2010s. You could be a maniac about GoT or Girls or True Detective or change the channel and do Mad Men or BB. Now, it's like, ok, The Pitt, you think you can handle six shows worth of manic fan energy? You can't? Well, too bad.

This, from @samadams.bsky.social, is a terrific essay about how the episode dump model destroyed the temporality that defined TV as a medium. It's also, implicitly, a good explainer of why TV fandom seems so deranged rn — ppl are starved for shows that reward investment. slate.com/culture/2026...

I’m fucking dying

The Truth is Inside You

jeevan 4 eva

You can feel this show sometimes lurching toward being worse than it is, and, at each of those moments, you can plainly see its entire ensemble of actors — particularly Regina Hall and Chloe Sevigny — simply refusing to allow that to happen.

Anyway, exhausting logistics and depressing trends aside, the post-AI / reading crisis environment seems to have rendered the task of the college-level literature classroom both more straight-forward and more urgent. Perhaps it's a doomed mission, but at least it feels like a *mission* again.

Moving toward in-class exams and id's the way Walt's essay suggests is a fraught business, but I don't think it feels like abandoning the project of writing instruction in a literature classroom. Good writers are good readers.