Starting Fresh

Despite my best efforts, I haven’t kept this site regularly updated. As I wrap up a packed semester and look ahead to an Upstate NY summer, I’m committing to a monthly posting schedule. The plan, at minimum, is to share the books, films, and music I’ve been spending time with, plus a few sentences on the scholarship I’m reading. An “activity report” feels manageable and should keep me signing into WordPress often enough to keep the site in shape. The site itself is still under construction, but I hope to finish the updates and redesign before too long.

I also want to get some other writing up here in the coming weeks. I’ve given several talks recently on the impact of Large Language Models on humanities education, and I’ll likely share some of that thinking. I’m also planning a short essay on my first year in the Writing Center. We’ll see how this reset goes. Here is a first shot at an activity report for late April and early May: 

In Rotation

• Mahal (2022) Toro y Moi 

• Start Breaking My Heart (2001) Caribou 

• You Must Believe in Spring (1981) Bill Evans 

On Screen 

• El (1953) Dir. Luis Bunuel 

• Out of the Past (1947) Dir. Jacques Tourneur 

• The Secret Agent (2025) Dir. Kleber Mendonca Filho 

Been Reading 

• The Director by Daniel Kehlmann 

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico 

• Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler 

Of Interest

Teaching Ellison’s Invisible Man this semester, my students and I spent a lot of time on how strange and unpredictable cultural transmission actually is, taking our cue from Ellison’s own suggestion that “there is no true sociology of the dispersion of ideas.” That idea kept returning as I tried to keep up with debates about Large Language Models as cultural technology. Boris Maslov’s recent essay “An Incorporate Fellowship? Antiphon, Thucydides, Beccaria, and Elizabeth Petrovna on the Death Penalty” (Critical Inquiry, Spring 2026) is a welcome case study in how ideas travel through persons and texts, and should interest anyone thinking through the possibilities and risks of LLMs for cultural study.