The Gayest Love Story Ever Told…
The past month has been excessively busy with work, and so I’ve found it difficult to get much done in the way of writing. I have, however, been able to do a little reading. Right now, I’m struggling to get through Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told (Little, Brown and Company, 2025). It’s a mix of memoir, auto-theory, and epistolary essay (Atherton Lin addresses it to his partner), and it recounts the struggle that the author (who’s American) and his partner (who’s British) face in trying to be together after falling in love while the…
Keep readingUniversity Work: Tuesdays and Thursdays
In a recent episode of the The American Vandal, Christopher Newfield suggested the political importance of lifting the veil on academic labor, and that one of the ways we could do that is simply by being more open and honest about what our working conditions are like. And it’s true: my colleagues and I rarely talking to each other about what it looks like to do the work we do, and we rarely share that information with others outside the university. That secrecy likely hinders the quality of our work, and it makes us vulnerable to the kinds of narratives…
Keep readingFour Recs: Podcasts and Newsletters Edition
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. The start of the academic quarter has been busier than usual. Rather than a full post, here’s a list of podcasts and newsletters that have been in my rotation lately. Casey Johnston — She’s a Beast I subscribed to Johnston’s newsletter after reading her memoir A Physical Education over the summer, and it had a significant effect on me. Much of Johnston’s frustrations and struggles with exercise and diet resonated with me, and the book turned me on to weight lifting. Happy to report that I’m having a blast with it. (I’m eating…
Keep readingOlder Posts
“–with friends like that, who needs enemies?”
The title of this post is a quote from the position paper issued by a collection of academics in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and the US, working in various disciplines (cognitive science and computer program through cultural history and gender studies), that delivers a vehement critique of AI and AI rhetoric. The quote itself appears…
No, It Isn’t
I just finished reading Kate Manne’s “Yes, It Is Our Job As Professors To Stop Our Students Using ChatGPT.” Manne takes Tressie McMillan Cottom’s claim in a recent New York Times interview that “Kids aren’t supposed to be able to resist a highly sophisticated, research-informed platform designed to make you use it. It is incumbent…
Jameson’s Classroom
My reading has been pretty eclectic this summer, but one common thread has been the work of Fredric Jameson. Oddly enough, and perhaps to my detriment, Jameson did not feature much in my graduate education, but I’ve been trying to rectify that now. Anyway, I just finished his The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought…
Steven A. Ruszczycky, PhD 