At least 117 people, Dan. That movie would be a bummer though.
Host, The American Vandal Podcast | Prof of American Lit & Twain Studies + Director of Media Studies @ Elmira College | Resident Scholar @MarkTwain.bsky.social | Political Economy of Mass Media TheAmericanVandal.substack.com MattSeybold.com
7,962 followers 1,831 following 4,232 posts
view profile on Bluesky
At least 117 people, Dan. That movie would be a bummer though.
The windows, the combo of mobility & intimacy, but most of all the versatility. So many modes of delivery/participation work well in this space.
It comes with a list of eight pre-approved catering companies.
I am a education interiors nerd & this room at Emory is one of the best I've ever seen.
Starting my entirely paper seminar with an essay about how leftist radicals are counterproductively defensive as regards new information technologies. Out with it, I say!
For Labor Day, Mark Twain's paean to the Knights of Labor: Power, when lodged in the hands of man, means oppression - it means oppression always: not always consciously, deliberately, purposely; not always cruelly, or sweepingly; but oppression, anyway, & always, in one shape or another. 1/15
Back to school smoothie.
Good News: The bubble’s not gonna kill us all. Bad News: The bailout might.
Sure.
Blueskyism is at least 50% wanting to post somewhere that doesn't suppress links.
The question is not - as it has been heretofore - What shall we do with him? For the first time in history we are relieved of the necessity of managing his affairs for him. He is not a broken dam this time - he is the Flood! END
Without this education, he would have continued as he was, a slave; with it, he is sovereign. His was a weary journey, & long: but at last he is here - & he will remain. He has before him the most righteous work that has ever been given to the hand of man to do: & he will do it. 14/15
He is the most stupendous product of the highest civilization. Contrasted with his education, the education possessed by kings & nobles who ruled him for 100 centuries is nursery twaddle, beneath contempt. His education is the sum of human knowledge in all the ages of the world. 13/15
How will he use his power? To OPPRESS. He will oppress the few, they who oppressed the many; but he will imprison nobody, he will massacre, burn, torture, exile nobody, nor work any subject 18 hours a day, nor starve his family. He will see to it there is fair play, fair hours, fair wages. 12/15
And we need not fear this king. All the kings that have ruled the world heretofore were protectors of cliques & classes & clans of gilded idlers, selfish pap-hunters, restless schemers, troublers of the State in the interest of private advantage. But this king is enemy of them that scheme. 11/15
Not it's age-worn sham & substanceless specter, no - when these rise, call the vast spectacle by any deluding name that will please your ear, but the fact remains, a NATION has risen! The working millions, in all ages, were horses - today, they ARE master - the only time ever, a true king. 10/15
& printers, & hod-carriers, & stevedores, & house-painters, & brakemen, & engineers, & conductors, & factory hands, & drivers, & all the shop-girls, & all the sewing-women, & telegraph operators: in a word, all the myriad toilers in whom is slumbering the reality of that thing you call POWER. 9/15
When this or that trade revolted, tens of millions in other trades went about their affairs - it was not their quarrel. And the capitalists did sneer. But when all the bricklayers, & all the bookbinders, & all the cooks, & all the barbers, & all the machinists, & all the miners, & blacksmiths 8/15
After a few days it sunk, vanquished, mute again, & laughed at. In these later decades, single mechanical trades have banded together, & risen hopefully & demanded a better chance in this world's fight When it was bricklayers, other trades looked on with indifference - it was not their fight 7/15
In all the age of the world, the huge inert mass of humbler mankind - compacted crush of poor dull animals - was equipped with unimaginable might, & never suspected it. Once in a generation, a little block of this inert mass stirred, & rose with noise, & said it would no longer endure misery. 6/15
Until today it was real; but from today, in THIS COUNTRY, it is forevermore ashes. Greater than any king has arisen upon this soil. Men may sneer & make wordy argument, but he will mount his throne & stretch out his sceptre & there will be bread for the hungry, clothing for the naked, & hope. 5/15
Laws & constitutions have ordered it otherwise. But in political societies, it is the prerogative of Might to create Right - & uncreate it, at will. For uncounted ages, the scattering few have held in their hands the power to say what's right & what's not. Was that power real, or fiction? 4/15
This has been going on for a million years. Who are the oppressors? The few: king, capitalist, overseers & superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: nations of the earth; valuable personages; workers; they that MAKE the bread that the soft-handed & idle eat. Why is it right? 3/15
Give power to whomsoever you please, & it will oppress; even the horse-car company will work its men 18 hours, in Artic cold & Equatorial heat, & pay them with starvation; & let the horse-car company stand for a thousand other corporations & companies & industries which might be named. 2/15
For Labor Day, Mark Twain's paean to the Knights of Labor: Power, when lodged in the hands of man, means oppression - it means oppression always: not always consciously, deliberately, purposely; not always cruelly, or sweepingly; but oppression, anyway, & always, in one shape or another. 1/15
I have an opinion piece in the New York Times today on how the labor movement has failed to step up to the moment in countering Trump, even as Trump unilaterally strips public sector workers of collective bargaining. Labor will die as a movement if this continues. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
A large team of researchers from Microsoft, OpenAI, & NVIDIA attempt to legitimize oligopolistic collusion during imminent energy shortages, moving datacenter stabilization ahead of utility consumers. To quote Paul Krugman: This is the way the bubble ends. Not with a pop, but with a brownout.
John Wood Jr. giving us an always useful reminder that advocates for bipartisanship, depolarization, etc. are almost always just opposed to you having any ideas which they don't agree with.
Not necessarily foreign even.
Not particularly leftist. The mistrust of government & public institutions made journalists in this tradition susceptible to libertarian fantasy.
I mean, I could care less about the football part, but with $500 mil, you could create a sustainable tuition-free SLAC & start showing what’s possible without neoliberal rationality.
🤔 If every humanities prof bought ten tix at $2 a pop…
Watching Zodiac today, I had two epiphanies: 1. Fincher is our most underrated late capitalist director. 2. Contemporary nostalgia for corporate journalism is based entirely on one good decade that was actually just a side effect of late ‘60s anti-establishment counterculture.
I’ve considered that, & could still be the way to go, but as webmaster of formerly thriving WP institutional site that has gotten killed by sloppification, IP theft, bot attacks, etc. since mid-2024, I must admit, Substack’s free security is an underrated feature.
This is the one Labor Day graph that tells you the actual problem in America. The problem is not that America lacks abundance. The problem is that a handful of oligarchs are hoarding America’s abundance. www.levernews.com/the-labor-da...
There are no pure platforms. If Ghost were to introduce more tiers or a commission option, they could induce a mass migration, I bet. What I will say for Ss is that, like Bsky, they do not throttle links & the platform is active. As of recently, more AV listeners are using Substack than Spotify.
Off-boarding to Ghost (the only option I know of which is outside the VC-funding model & supports podcasts) seems easy enough. But whereas Substack/Stripe takes 15% of however much people donate, Ghost’s flat fee for a newsletter my size comes out to upwards of 35% at current size.
Thanks. I appreciate this. The shitty thing is that regardless of what I do, this will cost me money. Because Substack’s model, acknowledging its drawbacks, is more cost-effective for those of us who have a fully free newsletter with few patron subscribers.
"Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South", published in 1900, is the first novel by African American novelist, journalist, and editor Pauline Hopkins (1859 – 1930). It focuses on African American families in pre- and post-Civil War American society. #Lit #BlackSky
The “[can] literacy survive the current fascism” part is what I think about everyday now.
Just try to make this cohere with the argument made by Chicago admin (& elsewhere) that they can fix the budget crisis with more austerity to arts, humanities, etc. It’s ideological defunding. It always has been.
Catching up on Chris’s analysis of UChicago situation today & trying to wrap my head around this graph.
The best part of grilled steaks is when my wife turns the leftovers into breakfast tacos.
🙏
For real. Amazing project: theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-jameso...
The Jameson Tapes episodes of The American Vandal podcast are very much worth listening to.
We also have some limited ability to influence how unified the pro-democracy coalition is. Remember, competitive authoritarian regimes rely on divide-and-rule tactics. The sooner the opposition unifies, the better the odds of dislodging autocratic rulers.
I woke up a year ago 100% certain that I had to make a documentary about the Winston Salem chapter of the Black Panther Party. So I did. We aim to release it early next year. This weekend I’m at Blackstar, looking for inspiration. If you’re in town, DM to meetup.
That’s one I haven’t read! Fantastic.
I know this essay works because everybody chooses a different pull-quote. open.substack.com/pub/theameri...
Apple Intelligence has figured out my schedule, so at the appropriate times it sends me directions to work…the grocery store…and my own house. 😐 Thanks.
I tell you when it’s over, Summer.
Do you have a favorite “What is modernism?” essay or chapter? I like the “Rescuing Literature From Itself” chapter in *Discovering Modernism* & Poirier’s “The Literature of Waste,” among others.
Give me…gentler fascism…or give me death!
Many institutions who don't have R1 status may not be hit as directly by the federal funding cuts. But stuff like this👇 is disastrous. ILL and archival digitization projects by major universities have made it possible to do serious research (as faculty OR student) at a SLAC. Both are in danger.
The Financial Times published my letter about Peter Thiel, "The Sovereign Individual," and the nation-destroying aspirations of crypto. on.ft.com/47mldxs
"What the Times profile obscures is that these companies plan to make American schools the site where reactionary policy-makers like Stephen Miller and Christopher Rufo can find common cause with the technolords of Silicon Valley who threw their wealth behind the MAGA movement last year." Exactly.
Has anybody taught with Mint Editions before? They are almost Dover-level cheap and have incredible selection of titles.
This is what everyone is guessing! I hadn’t seen the video before @annakornbluh.bsky.social guessed it earlier today. It is amazing. I have no idea which video the student is referring to, since I have taught several.
Oh hell, yes: "I ask my fellow educators to consider some measures for reducing our complicity in efforts to steal our students identities, attention, and right to education, even indenture them to train algorithms" #againstAI
No, but you're not the first to guess that!
This is what everybody keeps guessing, but I have never taught it (nor seen it before today). I don't know the answer. I've taught several music videos over the years.
Yes. Came to her through Nicholas Carr’s work. Very compelling stuff.
Thanks! 🙏
On the syllabus.
Right next to the AAUP report you co-authored, I hope!
I kept classrooms pretty Luddified for a long time, then I went very tech permissive, motivated initially by costs for students, then exacerbated by the pandemic. Started pivoting back the other way in 2023.
How to resist the broligarchs who have long hated education: "OpenAI is the most prominent of many EdTech enterprises, most owned by venture capital and private equity, whose mission is to automate and gigify education, to surveil students, mine their data and modify their behavior."
Annie McClanahan in Zone Books. I think I'll buy that.
Concerned that we are losing the necessary ratio. 15% of teachers/faculty should be irretrievably strange eccentrics. Every learning experience should have some element where in later life you can reflect with former classmates about how bizarre at least one (1) class per year was.
The video is so much better than one of the (perhaps unfairly) most maligned songs in pop history.
Holy 😳 I could easily spend a week on that. The ‘80s section literally triggered me tho.
Have never taught that. I don’t know which video they are referring to. Alas.
It was not. Sorry. I don’t know what it was. (I actually have used lots of music videos over the year. But never Billy Joel. Though now I’m gonna watch that video, which I have no memory of.)
It’s a great pairing.
💯 the gradual dehumanization which parallels technological progress is the power of the novel. And also the reason to teach it now!
Have never taught whole novel. Have taught excerpts in a Twain seminar. It is long & weird, the former of which students don’t like, the latter of which they do. I focused on the SciFi opening & the apocalyptic end, but that meant I lost a lot of the social development satire in the middle.
To be fair, there is clearly a contingent of students who get stoned before my Media Studies classes. They think I don’t know. But I know. I just don’t think it’s doing me any disservice.
RMP is a scourge, but I cherish this more than any teaching award.
Regarding the tragic death of Adam Raine, there are already narratives forming that blame vague "dangers of AI" or a broader moral panic. But this is not a story about the faceless perils of superintelligence. It's about a $500 billion tech company's core software product encouraging child suicide.
Did the AI companies have a bet for who could get sued for the largest amount of damages this week
Wrote a little about this schmuck here.
A news item on how AI is making college less important for young job seekers. "Universities used to promise that if you do a degree you'll get a job, but-" No; that's what pols and pundits *demanded* that universities promise. And, now they're run by people who promise this, we see it doesn't work.
Chalupas floating on a stream of speculation.
theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/against-te...
The Atlantic: for people who want a more pretentious version of complaining about the Cracker Barrel logo.
I want you to remember this the next time Caitlin Flanagan publishes some bullshit about colleges being “too liberal.”
Finally, I think I have discovered the definition of *middlebrow*
This is how campus becomes thunderdome.
The National Humanities Center stands firmly in support of the Smithsonian Institution, its administration, and its museum professionals. Please read the complete statement on our website.
I enjoyed your embodied company, Dan, that one time. They’ll come ‘round.
Oh, yeah, well legit accommodations, of course, & grad students maybe better at self-regulation…I guess.
Also, in my survey course, I’m going full self-directed reading, inspired by Mary Isbell podcast. Which, I’m realizing, is a great way into talking about our own library resources, as well as digital archives.
Genuinely curious about “complexity”on screens front. I’m banning all mobile tech in classroom (which I did last year), leaning into handwritten notebook/journal assignments (inspired by @isanchezprado.bsky.social). But also doing some collective annotation & discussion board stuff in Perusall.
Congrats, Dan! Me too (re: Canvas). I’m gonna go full print in one class (an upper-level modernism seminar). The other two will still have some digital components, but exclusively using Perusall & CUNY Learning Commons (Public EdTech).
Officially off Canvas this semester. (Screens a little more complex...)
The most eerie detail from the show for me is the mural in the conference room. Maybe those were common in Parks offices throughout the state, but there was definitely one in the West Lafayette office where I picked up my checks.
