Is Full the End of Associations?When I started this blog nearly a decade ago I called it “Associations.” The term invoked the “what” and the “who” of the endeavor. What: […]

Not Me On Social MediaWriters, like runners, revel in long stretches of solitary time Still. I promised myself that when my book was published, I’d not make a break […]

Forgetting as Step in the (Writing) ProcessLast November I finished a book. I resisted returning to it because I didn’t want to make any changes before receiving feedback. But when January […]

I read the The New Yorker to find out what to read. I take my direction from the magazine’s always on-point book reviews. But Louis Menand’s December 20th review essay, about the dire state of the humanities, […]

I read in reverse. Here are two examples:

Ocean Vuong’s poetic On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous got me through the endless month of pandemic March. But inexplicably I turned its mystery into my mania. “Magical […]

I am a tryhard. A tryhard wants to fit in and stand out at the same time. They want to be noticed but not remembered. Being a tryhard can be exhausting and sometimes leads to serious regret. (See my class picture […]

“Visiting Day,” last week’s entry, was revised eight times. Eight times (8!) I returned to that short piece, tweaked and tightened until I forgot why I wrote it in the first place.

Long gone now, that first […]

A rite of passage followed me back to the city. Visiting Day at summer camp came and went. But I can’t let it go this time.

The day started out as it always does: we do what we’re supposed to do on Visiting […]

March 15, 2019:

This is the brief talk I gave as part of a panel welcoming students accepted or wait-listed to The Graduate Center at CUNY.  Here I describe a class I’m teaching now, focused on the “academic […]

This is the talk I gave at the Critical University Studies Friday Forum at The Graduate Center , CUNY on Friday October 20th.

I’ll open my talk with something participatory. If that’s upsetting to you (as it […]

Is activist scholarship like all scholarship: meant to be judged?

I’m wondering because, thanks to my CUNY colleagues, more than ever I feel connected to the activist field of Critical University Studies. […]

Dear Readers,

Tomorrow my writing class meets. I can’t wait. I teach literature too and love wrestling with how reading works in our world.

But it’s a week into worry for what might happen to this country […]