Anne Trubek in Notes from a Small Press, on her abandoned career in academia:

Eighteen years later, at a department meeting, she told me I had always been difficult. I had started off that way. Remember, she said, I demanded an office with a window as a condition of accepting the job, forcing her into the storage closet. Nothing had been said about this in the intervening years—during which another colleague had moved to an office out of the suite, because the dysfunction amongst the four of us was so high she could not bear it.

As someone who myself spent years dreaming of becoming an academic—and didn’t—but did marry one—this whole piece captures so well the romance and claustrophobia and insane competition of that world. The best evocation of it I’ve encountered since the vivid (and weirdly similar) Vladimir by Julia May Jonas.

Jeet Heer in his rebuke of Harvard’s slavering embrace of post-conviction Jeffrey Epstein:

The modern neoliberal university is a shark that must constantly consume donations in order to stay alive.

Great article on dark online patterns that trick you into not unsubscribing. I always thought my online literacy protected me—that dark patterns, awful for others, were merely a hassle for me. But last year, after I “unsubscribed,” the Wall Street Journal took me for over $300.

This new study on the climate impact of the LAPD and LASD helicopter fleets (famous nuisance and menace) is a great reminder that climate justice is additive: what’s better for climate is so often better for justice, too. (From the great Heated newsletter)

I’ve long felt the dichotomy between reading for status/progress/duty and reading for pleasure. Aiming mostly these days for the latter, I appreciated this recent Anne Trubek essay, “Why I’ve Been Reading”. (Her whole Notes From a Small Press newsletter is consistently great.)

I finally put up my essay “Night/Light” up on my website. (It went out in Lightplay last October.) It’s about a night walk, the thin blue line movement, poverty, an old folk tale, reptiles. Mostly it’s about the mystery and fear of not knowing our neighbors. I think it holds up.

The representative aspect of fiction is entirely valid, but there’s still the transgressive impulse. What if I want to be somebody else? What if I want to be a dog or an alien? What if I’m young, and I want to be old? For me, these voyeuristic, playful, self-transcending strands of human imagination are a huge part of what fiction is about.

— Mohsin Hamid, BOMB interview

This whole part of the interview takes on the conceit that autofiction—writing about one’s own experience—is the only ethically sound type of fiction. My own wrestling matches with this question have been interesting, though inconclusive. I continue to wrestle. And I appreciate Hamid’s own novels, the different examples he sets for how to write playfully, transgressively, ultimately creating real art. That said, I don’t know that anyone is arguing against writing as a dog or alien. Rather, I think people are explicitly saying don’t appropriate the experiences of people with less power than you. For me the bigger question might be, what does it mean to appropriate? Is “don’t appropriate this subject position” the same as “don’t write characters from this subject position”? I of course want and love transgressive fiction, but I don’t want it to transgress against people, and especially not against oppressed people. Hmm. It’s all food for thought. I like to believe these tensions and moral quandaries are productive and challenge us to write better, less lazily, more imaginatively, more ethically and experimentally.

Anyways the whole interview is jammed with rich and nutritious food for thought.