Carrie Shanafelt

https://c18.masto.host/@carrideen

Assistant professor at Yeshiva College in #18thC & #19thC #Literature. #Bentham & #queer #aesthetics (wrote Uncommon Sense, UVaP 2022), national #debt and #slavery, #Bronx #cats #boardgames #film

Chair of Columbia Seminar in 18thC European Culture, Treasurer of the #Johnsonians.

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ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5962-4542
Website: https://carrieshanafelt.com

Author: https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5744/
Writing: English, Spanish
Reading: French, German
Learning: Mandarin, Japanese

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Published at

2026-08-28T21:26:06Z

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Last Notes

2026-04-05 18:10:47 UTC

I haven't seen a post of this here with alt text, and I promise that those using a screen reader also need to experience this thing of great beauty from the print Onion that comes to our apartment.
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/116/353/434/282/098/247/original/220bd7814c6b649b.jpg

2026-03-21 23:29:14 UTC

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I know this feeling. Getting tenure after working for nothing else for 20 years turned out to be more like stepping on a rake than climbing a ladder.

2026-01-03 15:32:51 UTC

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In the Haupt Conservatory inside the Haupt Conservatory, I just assume there is a tiny Haupt Conservatory within which is a microscopic Haupt Conservatory.

2026-01-03 03:05:26 UTC

Holiday Train Show!! At the NY Botanical Garden!
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/115/828/929/768/012/402/original/0cf63f452fdaad4a.jpg
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/115/828/929/919/553/376/original/3c23de1363e80aad.jpg
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/115/828/930/108/836/675/original/556efdd8afd28b7e.jpg
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/115/828/930/314/025/295/original/95786d2c1deb6494.jpg

2025-12-09 00:51:17 UTC

Two of the 12 students in my 18th-century novels class showed up today with copies of Penguin's Frances Burney's Evelina, sold as Evelina, with covers labeled Evelina, but every page inside is Trollope's The Duke's Children. What a mystery! Was this the futile last-day-at-work protest of a Penguin printer? FWIW, both students read quite deep into Trollope, wondering the whole time when this Evelina chick was going to show.

2025-12-08 03:43:59 UTC

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I have a Blu-Ray, but I really don't watch it; I just keep my eyes peeled for announcements that someone in NYC is screening it. The new 4K print is outstanding!

2025-12-08 02:59:35 UTC

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I teach film, so this is way too easy--I watch lots of movies repeatedly, but, to pick one: https://64.media.tumblr.com/42c294723c5629fdf2fc02c13c92fda7/tumblr_n4kfe72gpQ1rdfgw4o1_500.gifv

2025-11-29 16:35:35 UTC

I realize not everyone has access to a perfect black cat at all times, so here is Camilla to brighten your #Caturday
#CatsOfMastodon
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/115/633/950/215/819/419/original/a41ab7003aa1ce0f.jpg

2025-11-05 02:56:22 UTC

If billionaires aren't taxed more and don't spend their money here, but do most of their polluting here, why would we want to live anywhere near them? I am a billionaire NIMBY. If you like them so much, you take them into your neighborhoods and find out what they're like.

2025-11-03 23:24:10 UTC

The moon is looking good tonight.

2025-11-03 17:42:08 UTC

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Voyage of the Dawn Treader was my favorite of the series, and later I wondered if I had some latent sadism in me! The bit about Lucy hearing what her friends say about her behind her back is brutal as well.

2025-11-03 17:30:13 UTC

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When I was a kid, I liked how it treated kids with moral seriousness, as people whose actions matter. But I think it hindered me from feeling I could be playful, exploratory, etc. Edmund is basically convicted of treason at, what, 8 years old, and sentenced to a gruesome public torture and execution? I'm teaching it in a college course on literature for children, and my students are sort of enjoying the amoral imaginative freedom of earlier books--despite being religiously observant.

2025-11-03 17:04:14 UTC

Did you read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a child? Do you think it had a positive or negative effect on your emotional life? Feel free to say why in a comment!

2025-10-26 01:55:33 UTC

Two girls enjoying a #Caturday night in
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/115/437/967/888/938/555/original/94e5440b7e085f52.jpg

2025-10-13 23:33:06 UTC

It's been too long since our Boardgame Rehoming ceremony. Let's get to it!
The games we are giving away are listed in this Google Sheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gk0PEoxL3u7HxAv6I_3qhe2IJQhQManLEwlGSDgdwUQ/edit?usp=sharing
If you live in the 48 contiguous US states, we will send you 3-6ish games (depending on sizes) for the cost of USPS shipping plus a little for shipping materials.
If you live in NYC, you can come get them from our apartment. (We can't hand-deliver them to everyone.)
Claim 3-6 games by responding to this thread with your choices.

2025-10-05 14:51:33 UTC

Over the weekend, I wrote to the nearly 200 members of c18.masto.host who joined us in 2022-2024 and then stopped logging in over a year ago. I've gotten several emails back saying that after committing to Bluesky, social media as a whole came to feel like a bad idea. It is my hope that keeping the lights on here and providing a space where we can have meaningful, fun, interesting conversations can help us rebuild community here. (Please support your local instance!)

2025-10-03 18:31:35 UTC

As a former "gifted" elementary school student, I'm 100% in favor of Mamdani's proposal to end the gifted programs in early public education. When you're separating 6 and 7yo's and saying "These kids are special and high-achieving," you are selecting almost entirely for kids with learning support at home, and allocating extra resources to them, while draining resources from the kids with less support.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/nyregion/mamdani-schools-gifted-and-talented-program.html

2025-09-21 05:12:41 UTC

My in-laws do not know not to send us flowers. Yes, there are the normal concerns about cat-friendly plants and so forth, but the biggest problem is that Dolores is obsessed with them. She gets so excited around them that she has to be supervised. #CatsOfMastodon
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/115/240/558/556/046/046/original/a5d5e6cf7fcd058f.jpg
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/115/240/566/960/672/248/original/19f048c7a5dcea6d.jpg

2025-09-14 22:51:20 UTC

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If I want to time-travel to everything I was thinking about in 1997, I put on this album.

2025-09-11 14:12:31 UTC

When you text a domestic violence survivor who you haven't talked to in several years, please consider saying your name in the text message in case you aren't in their contacts anymore and don't want to cause fear and distress! That would be great! Thanks!!

2025-09-02 15:20:16 UTC

Paper proposals are due October 15 for our Slavery and Abolition in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy workshop at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia! Aminah Hasan-Birdwell and I are so excited about this event next May 13-15, and we are in the process of securing travel support for participants. https://forms.gle/f9UkAQPeBuU8TWsp8
#Philosophy #slavery #18thcentury

2025-09-01 23:04:36 UTC

On a walk in the park today, I was musing to myself how great it is to watch even really little kids in NYC with enough room to just take off into a field, like this two-year-old, windmilling his arms as he... oh my God, he isn't stopping--does anyone see--oh wow, six relatives now in pursuit as he tears away toward the forest. Big sis has him by the hair! Then--pop! he's off again, angling toward a hole into the deep woods, his arms spinning and every woman he knows at full tilt...

2025-08-30 04:18:44 UTC

Fully half of the academic jobs in my field this year require me to prove that I have joined and am active in a local church and I am begging Christians to please chill out. It is a job. I am not applying to be your cousin.

2025-07-15 21:35:56 UTC

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It's wild that when this happened to me at the (notoriously difficult!!) Chinese consulate, I had to get out of line, but they had an inkjet printer so my visa application went through. At the DMV, when I didn't have enough ridiculous documents, they just sent me home without a RealID and gave up.

2025-07-12 02:52:16 UTC

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If AI on Pixel was actually a valuable service, it would cost money. You would have to opt in.

2025-07-12 02:51:16 UTC

I replaced my beloved Pixel 7 with a Nothing 3a today. I couldn't handle the weekly updates bragging about how AI will now control every part of my life. Nothing's AI tools seem to be tools--in their own toolbox, built to do specific things if you use them. But overall, it is pretty great to have a phone that incentivizes putting it face down and walking away from it.

2025-07-02 16:56:35 UTC

Next May 13-15, 2026, Prof. Aminah Hasan-Birdwell and I will be hosting a workshop on Slavery and Abolition in 18th-Century Philosophy at Emory U. in Atlanta, Georgia. https://forms.gle/wTC7DqNgHQE3dpT58 We expect to have about 15-20 participants, and we are seeking funding for travel support for participants who need it. There will be a remote option for those who need it as well (the US being what it is). Please share this with colleagues who may be interested! #Philosophy

2025-06-27 14:12:54 UTC

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So we have a clear pipeline problem in the study of writing about slavery. English departments and history departments are far more advanced than philosophers because they've had a few generations of concentrated study, and there have been excellent secondary works on the topic for almost 100 years. But philosophy is still very resistant, as a discipline, to treating 18th-c writing about slavery, especially by self-emancipated people, as philosophy.

2025-06-27 14:08:41 UTC

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When I was an undergraduate and graduate student, slavery was not a topic you could study in philosophy. I took several courses on Black literature in the English department, but anything from before the 19th century was folklore--because we were focused on creative writing, not theoretical argument. Rigid disciplinary boundaries are unnatural to the eighteenth century in general, but for African diaspora writers, they erase almost everyone.

2025-06-27 14:01:44 UTC

I'm two weeks into the Institute on slavery and early modern philosophy that was supposed to be funded by the NEH in DC but is instead an unpaid association of scholars getting on Zoom to discuss readings every day and share our expertise and analysis with one another. There are grad students as well as long-tenured philosophers, a few historians and English professors, many for whom this topic has never been offered to them as an academic course of study, and some who are already in the field.

2025-06-25 15:48:15 UTC

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OMG CNBC is shitting their pants about this, looking absolutely gutted. 100% of the blame is going onto voters for not thinking about the perspective of billionaires. Citi Bank rep crying about how so many people are thinking of fleeing the city and now they'll have to. One of the hosts asks, but are those rich people fleeing high taxes or poorer people who can't afford to live here? Citi guy says, ominously, "I guess we'll find out." (Spoiler: most NYC res are not actually billionaires.)

2025-06-25 15:22:47 UTC

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The only people who don't get it, who don't see the connection between, say, open and lifeguarded public pools and lower street crime, are people who would never get in a public pool, or would never sit on a subway next to someone who uses a public pool. People who don't see that having childcare and enough food prevents crime are people who have never had hungry kids, have never worried about having hungry kids. They only think about the crimes they'd do themselves (weird sadistic shit).

2025-06-25 15:17:57 UTC

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New Yorkers, as voters, understand this better than most US residents because we live in public. We share space together all the time, in our apartment buildings, in parks, on the street, on transit. None of us wants to be victimized or terrorized, and none of us wants our loved ones to be in danger. We tend to be pretty nice to each other, because we've all been on the receiving end of someone else being nice. More resources for everyone make being fair and kind easier to accomplish.

2025-06-25 15:15:02 UTC

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And what does it say about Democrats that they no longer understand someone who says you fight crime by making people's lives survivable? That doesn't even register anymore? You don't *eradicate* crime 100%, but it's crucial to remember that most people don't get involved in crime because they're evil sadistic maniacs. That's just the billionaires, who never face consequences! Most people who do crime do it because they can't afford to live or thrive otherwise.

2025-06-25 15:09:15 UTC

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I don't like making predictions and I don't claim to have special insight, but one true thing I can tell you for certain is that Eric Adams is as likely to be mayor of NYC next year as Curtis Sliwa is. Now would be a really good time for Dem centrists to figure out how to tolerate the people with the ideas and communication skills to win elections with sincerity and progressive policy and not just lefty-looking stunts followed by cowardice.

2025-06-25 15:05:04 UTC

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Harris could have won the presidency except for a lot of actual racism and misogyny on one hand and this centrist undermining on the other. The party is obsessed with disciplining candidates into their talking points and cutting them off from all the minoritized people who together make up a solid majority. In Mamdani's case, you've got people on TV suggesting he will lose to Eric Adams or turn the city into a hellhole. You've got one chance at not making a fool of yourself on this!

2025-06-25 14:57:25 UTC

Today the DNC is cranking up their concern trolling machine in the name of Islamophobia, refusing to take responsibility for putting their weight behind a billionaire-funded sex pest who hasn't lived in NYC since the 20th century for mayor. We've seen them do it for racism, misogyny, antisemitism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism--anything rather than admit that candidates with obligations to fascists and billionaires aren't inspiring or motivational.

2025-06-12 16:49:40 UTC

NYC-area cat people! One of my best friends is going through an incredibly stressful time caretaking for a severely ill parent and is hoping to re-home her two lovely hilarious tabby cat brothers, Sal and Pablo. They're neutered, nine years old, perfectly healthy, handsome, active, and kittenish. They love to play and cuddle and greet guests eagerly. My friend, in upper Manhattan, is rarely able to be home with them and knows they need cuddles and company.
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/114/671/409/398/164/756/original/5f0687d644dac594.mp4

2025-05-15 00:38:35 UTC

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When I saw they were adding AI-generated ads, on top of the past few years of largely-dogshit original content, I remembered to check how much I'm paying for it. $25 a month? For garbage whose style guide is "you can scroll on your phone the whole time this is on in the background and not miss a thing"? Because of this crap I have to teach film students how to look at the screen while watching. Some of them cannot do it; they've never actually watched a movie.

2025-05-15 00:34:09 UTC

Sometime in the past year, we just stopped using Netflix for anything. We watched GBBO in the fall, and the weirdly interim season of Squid Game, and then... nothing until the threat of removing Bandersnatch this week made us finally watch it. It makes me sad as someone for whom the DVD mailing envelopes were sanity and joy during a difficult stretch of my life--late school, visiting professorships. I loved watching commentaries and getting rare gems in my mailbox.

2025-05-07 14:16:41 UTC

On this last day of the spring semester, I can't get out of my head the WSJ video essay about the University of Austin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQBFhvr9cTQ
Between this and the NYMag article about ChatGPT, it seems clear that universities have done an extremely poor job at explaining what college teaches or why. It's not a debate club for teens who have read two op-eds on each topic. It's not a social club for rich kids with some useless hoops to jump through. It can be life-changing, brain-altering. 1/

2025-04-04 21:07:25 UTC

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Aaaand of course we got the email today that DOGE has illegally defunded us.

2025-04-02 13:38:57 UTC

I would be a lot more excited to announce today that I have been accepted to participate in the NEH's Slavery and Early Modern Philosophy institute at Georgetown University this summer, but it also comes at a time when the NEH and all its staff are under Sauron's eye at DOGE.
If you are in the US, please take a moment to contact your representatives in defense of the (incredibly cheap and effective) work that the NEH supports. https://p2a.co/1gzPVYl

2025-03-11 17:37:25 UTC

Just a reminder that I am the philosophy reviews editor for the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I get a lot of requests from authors to find reviewers for their books, so if you would like to be on my radar, please let me know.
Even better, if you work in philosophy or religious studies and you would like to propose a review essay about a recent book in 18th-c phil to me, please get in touch! I do make efforts to ensure our reviewers get physical books whenever possible.
#Philosophy

2025-03-10 18:39:55 UTC

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"We noticed that you paused on the shocking and potentially criminal image we showed you! Here's 400,000 of them! You'll never see anything else ever again!"

2025-03-10 18:34:00 UTC

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Freaks me right out.

2025-03-10 18:29:13 UTC

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One of the many reasons I deleted my Facebook was that the reels thing they were pushing did this to my feed in a way that got really creepy. First it was pushing gymnastics videos, and I watched one. Cool gymnastics thing! So the algorithm then seemed to think I was into teen-girl-creeping content and, the more I studiously avoided and blocked reels, the more insistently they got pushed at me. It's like a pedo-seeking missile.

2025-03-07 13:23:53 UTC

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At my new job, I found myself this week telling a story about a class I took in college about methods of resonating one's voice in the body, one of the hardest classes I took in school, that required hours of stretching and meditation and constant practice. My students were floored. This was offered at my nerdy engineering school? Yes! And one of my classmates became quite famous, as an actor they love. College in the 90s was about trying a language, doing a semester of ceramics, broadening.

2025-03-07 13:20:04 UTC

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But worst, she continuously contrasted "honors students and Hispanic immigrants," insisting that national statistics tell us that Hispanic immigrants don't study literature or philosophy "because they have to work for a living." She said this in front of our student department assistant, a Spanish and English double major honors student, and a DREAM Act beneficiary from Venezuela, and one of the most brilliant undergrads I've ever taught, with dozens of job prospects.

2025-03-07 13:15:59 UTC

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The provost who oversaw the first generation of cuts was so clearly ignorant about what literature and philosophy study is that we invited her to a meeting with humanities faculty. She said, "I'm from England so I haven't taken history or literature since I was 13. I knew I would be a scientist." But she wasn't a scientist. She was the provost of a major American university. She cited her son's fear of foreign languages her justification for letting our language programs die out.

2025-03-07 13:11:15 UTC

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I am extremely proud of the work my colleagues and I did to offer a meaningful education and opportunities for students who would have done anything for learning. Even in the midst of a poisonously racist and anti-academic culture, students in classes would have measured up to anyone's undergraduates. They were so hungry to learn that they created clubs to learn everything the administration took away as courses. They didn't need credits; they needed to learn everything they could.

2025-03-07 13:07:41 UTC

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I knew it would happen. The year I was hired (2015) they cut several foreign language majors (which our students often studied with a desire to become language teachers). Several majors became minors. Faculties that used to be 10 or 20 on a campus dwindled to 1 or 2, as death, harassment, and overwork took out the rest. I sat on search committees that hired excited junior scholars who quit the academy altogether within a few years, jaded and frustrated.

2025-03-07 13:01:39 UTC

Just heard that at the university where I was tenured in Philosophy and Literature, there is no longer philosophy or literature. Fairleigh Dickinson University is cancelling these majors:
Art
Chemistry
Creative Writing
Entrepreneurship
Environmental Studies
Fine Arts
Government and Law
History
Literature
Management
Marine Biology
Mathematics
Philosophy
Social Studies
Sociology
Theater Arts

2025-03-07 01:19:30 UTC

I'm showing The Last of the Mohicans in class next week, in lieu of the even more problematic novel, but honestly, the rhododendron pulls me out of it every time. Why are the upstate New York woods chock full of rhododendron in 1757???
Can you think of another film in which the botany errors distract you?

2025-02-16 14:41:55 UTC

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Ooh same. If all my friends are boosting the same thing it can be a lot. But I don't think there is a way here to track if you have or haven't seen something, and the means of doing that seems potentially very bad.

2025-02-16 14:27:23 UTC

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When people do that, I just turn off their boosts. My timeline is a lot happier without the boost-spamming, and usually people who self-boost all the time don't boost much worth seeing in general.

2025-02-04 16:31:23 UTC

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I wrote a whole book about this, so I won't repeat myself, but this is probably just a point on which we disagree. The wisdom of Hume and Kant won't be killed off by me or Lu-Adler or anyone else.

2025-02-04 16:25:23 UTC

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I'm not one to critique morality. I critique racism as producing bad philosophy. Racists are not thinking well or clearly about human beings. It isn't ad hominem to indicate incorrect and oppressive thinking. It's not like the critique is of something Kant said to a friend once--it's to his philosophical writing, which is incorrect on race.

2025-02-04 16:17:03 UTC

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I, for one, am rather tired of the sanctification of certain figures as impervious to interrogation--see the incredibly vicious responses to anyone discussing Hume or Kant's racism. We should question everything! But *everything*, though, without swaddling certain figures in cloaks of innocence they themselves never asked for.

2025-02-04 16:13:45 UTC

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To me, "question everything" seems like a gentler version of Marx's "ruthless criticism of all that exists" and the whole arc of critical theory that springs from Marx--which I think most academic philosophers (in the US especially) are generally hostile to.

2025-01-29 19:20:22 UTC

One of my independent study students (in a group of four) has said a few times, "This is the only class I've ever had that feels like what I thought college was supposed to be like."
It keeps ringing in my head because it's something I hear from professors all the time, that the thing we're doing doesn't often feel like the thing we thought being a professor would feel like, which we all suspect of being the usual case somewhere else. 1/5

2025-01-28 18:02:09 UTC

Last night, one of my students thought he had read a specific poem by a poet we're about to read, but I didn't recognize his description of the content of the poem. So he opens up Google and types in the poet's name and the topic, and it just spat out a fabricated poem in her style. This is what's really unnerving--"AI" is not adding value to a search service that works; it's flooding the search results with so much crap that you can't even verify a date or the existence of a text anymore.

2025-01-26 18:14:03 UTC

Our weekly gaming group, begun with far-flung pals during the pandemic, got to have brunch together at the same table for six today. We finished by eating a six-pack of pineapple cakes that @npub16vc…j4r6 sent me and so gratified by the physical presence of friends who are all meeting at least one other person in our group for the first time.

2025-01-24 15:33:45 UTC

It's here, it's here! I've been waiting since last summer to share this special issue of the Journal of Modern Philosophy on Imperialism, Racism, and Slavery in the Modern Period, guest edited by Julie Walsh and John Harfouch. https://jmphil.org/issue/318/info/
My article, "Ottobah Cugoano on British Slavery, National Debt, and Speculative Finance" is here. https://jmphil.org/article/id/2500/ But don't just read mine--so much exicting work here.
JMPhil is an open-source journal--no credentials needed. #philosophy

2024-12-31 23:38:05 UTC

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I put onion slices in the hot oil before I put the batter in so it caramelizes under it!

2024-12-31 23:28:10 UTC

We're gonna need all the help we can get. Happy new year!!
https://cdn.masto.host/c18mastohost/media_attachments/files/113/750/020/428/482/054/original/410f75cca6bc4418.jpg

2024-12-28 19:29:39 UTC

Our friend @npub1yqa…fmfr is in this CNBC segment about the growth of D&D! It's mostly people who are excited about gaming communities talking, but of course there is the weird fundamentalist capitalist production overlay. (Srsly, doesn't this feel exactly like a segment about something interesting with "and that's bc JESUS IS LORD" after every interview, except it's little dollar signs and highlighted profit data?) https://youtu.be/ey3YyfV6IDk

2024-12-27 20:23:27 UTC

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OMG, so many "Hey prof I'm thinking about rewriting that paper from October and resubmitting it some time in the next few weeks when I get a chance to think back on it some more..." The semester! Is over! We're done!

2024-12-27 16:31:13 UTC

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And one of the things I know is going on is that many of my students taking my course for a gen ed requirement are sad about the semester ending because they don't get to take more humanities courses after this. This is the last chance they get to read and discuss books in this exciting, far-reaching way before they dedicate themselves to professional development, test mastery, presenting themselves as someone they are not on the inside. They don't want the semester to end.

2024-12-27 16:25:21 UTC

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Does Dr. Mister Chem Prof get to have the moving, intense, philosophically reaching, epistemically productive conversations we have? Does he get emails months and years later about how what we read continues to surface again and again in their thinking? Does he get to read papers about how students thought some texts were inaccessible until I showed them how smart they are, using what they have? We're both good professors and valuable to our fields. But the rewards and costs are different.

2024-12-27 16:21:42 UTC

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There's still nothing I can do for them other than encourage them to turn it in today or ask for an incomplete for the course if it really is an emergency. But it's still the one day of the whole semester that I have to meditate on not taking it personally before responding with the options available. The good work I get is so excellent that I really have nothing to complain about. Still, as a woman humanities prof at a men's college, I think "You wouldn't ask Dr. Mister Chem Prof this." But---

2024-12-27 16:17:46 UTC

On the last day of every term, I am the professor most likely to get "can I get an extension" requests for final papers and exams. Even after 23 years of doing this, I still have to meditate myself out of the assumption that my course is clearly not a priority for them.
1. Some are especially perfectionist about work for my course and want more time because they don't want to be anything other than excellent.
2. Many of their other professors are harassing them every moment about work due.

2024-12-27 04:33:08 UTC

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When I focus more on reading and listening to things I actually care about understanding, it's a lot more fruitful, I think. I might one day take up Wanikani again, but it also has given me four or five hours back per day to leave it alone.

2024-12-27 04:31:14 UTC

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For kanji, Wanikani is amazing, but after a year, I realized I wasn't actually able to read well because I wasn't putting anything in context. I could pass all my lil tests, but I'd read posts in Japanese here and go... what? I was watching a YT video from a Japanese teacher who said, if you don't have a reason to be learning Japanese, you will hit these walls when your knowledge just doesn't show up when you need it. Basically, I have to keep applying, not just taking lil tests.

2024-12-27 02:22:59 UTC

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This is not a toot of self-righteousness, btw. I too love taking lil tests and am trying to at least stop confusing that for learning. Duolingo especially is built to make learning take years and years to cover a few concepts a good teacher could explain in a pair of lessons. I got a good look at their new music lessons recently--after several weeks, you can read about as much music as a first piano lesson teaches. Pa-ping! Dun-dada-dahh!

2024-12-27 02:18:48 UTC

Sometimes I wonder how many former "gifted kids" are out there spending their 40s and 50s studying for lil tests that they pay to be given. Once I realized that my Duolingo/Rosetta/Wanikani cycling was just about giving myself lil tests rather than learning to engage meaningfully with texts and people in other languages, the pings and fanfares felt less satisfying. (Now I'm focusing on listening to real people talking, reading found text--no pings!)

2024-12-25 16:55:31 UTC

Happy holidays from Dolores! #CatsOfMastodon
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2024-12-21 03:27:08 UTC

Had a romantic hot tub for two while snow fell on us in the woods, and I have to say, I feel like my "Christmas at the in-laws'" experience is not what I expected from sitcoms.

2024-12-14 15:09:03 UTC

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This website offers a fun space for playing Microscope and sets up the wiki in a really neat and well-organized way: https://utgars-chronicles.app/

2024-12-14 15:05:59 UTC

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Microscope works this way, and is a lot of fun to write! https://pdfcoffee.com/microscope-rpg-resumo-2-pdf-free.html
A long time ago I did another one with friends that could only be played on a wiki host, in which you all write entries for a letter of the alphabet each day, and you have to cite previous and future articles as you go, but it wasn't as flexible or coherent as Microscope.

2024-12-11 02:03:23 UTC

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My employer! https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/444/672/

2024-12-04 16:00:46 UTC

"naturally as soft as the pap of an apple"
Somehow I missed this chapter, and in my Shandean way, I allow myself to return to it. How could I have missed Toby getting his knuckles crushed to a jelly by Slop's hideous forceps? This is a crucial passage that reveals to Walter that his trust in the man-midwife may be tragically misplaced.
#TristramShandy

2024-12-04 03:12:02 UTC

This adorable sweetie just loved me up on my way home from an event at work. He was so cold and thin and asked me for a lot of love. #CatsOfMastodon
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2024-12-02 17:20:51 UTC

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It is so frustrating to be a scholar at a time when manuscripts are luxury fetish objects to be hoarded rather than shared.

2024-11-20 19:43:52 UTC

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No, I've thought the same myself, though it would trouble Tristram's account of his ejaculation. It would certainly make the last joke of Volume 9 make more sense!

2024-11-20 14:08:45 UTC

"unparallel’d modesty of nature"
Just a warning that we're going to be here for a while, waiting for Tristram to be born upstairs. Toby's wound is introduced, and the effect it has on his character, to make him extremely shy around topics of sex and desire, which Walter speaks of incessantly with the satirical rage of a betrayed man, despite not having been betrayed at all. Ultimately, character is in the blood and in experience, not the weather.
#TristramShandy

2024-11-19 19:09:57 UTC

I finally figured out how to turn off predictive text in my work email app, which might have been contributing to the utter exhaustion I feel when I'm trying to email. I'm constantly having to avoid accidentally writing "With love" to the dean or whatever. Who thought it was a good idea to constantly be pre-writing random words and plopping them down in front of your cursor while you're trying to think about what you're trying to say? It's like screaming numbers at someone trying to do math.

2024-11-18 18:07:15 UTC

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I have a weekly BGA meetup group already (we video chat while playing), but I highly recommend it to others! It is such a great way to learn a lot of games, and many of our all-time favorite physical bgs are there.

2024-11-18 16:07:02 UTC

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We could all use something that inflames the moral sentiment a little right now. (One quick note--your hashtag is off by one letter--it's TristramShandy, with one unexpected r.)

2024-11-18 15:53:27 UTC

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How kind of you to say it!

2024-11-14 15:45:43 UTC

The UCL Faculty of Laws and the Bentham House will be holding a conference 23-24 July in London to celebrate the publication of a substantial Bentham manuscript, A Picture of the Treasury, in which he begins to theorize the "sinister interest" that controls and limits government expenditure.
I'm honored to be one of the featured speakers at the conference, and I'm already eagerly looking forward to our conversation! CFP now available here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/2025/jul/person-jeremy-bentham-panopticon-penitentiary-scheme-and-picture-treasury
#Philosophy #cfp #humanities

2024-11-09 15:59:20 UTC

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I think you do it with "Only Followers."

2024-11-06 13:52:17 UTC

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I am especially grateful for the Fediverse today--for a means of finding and communicating with others without corporations profiting from misinformation and rage.

2024-11-06 13:48:08 UTC

Twenty years ago, I was hungover in a bathrobe all day wondering what the hell kind of stupid, cruel country I live in. It radicalized me, and in the wake and ongoing progress of that nightmare, I found people online and IRL who became my best friends and allies. (One of them was at my apartment last night.) I don't have any wisdom other than to say we will find each other and work for justice. It's not the "bright side" to this; it's the only side there ever is.

2024-11-04 15:33:11 UTC

(re: previous boost)
In solidarity with the NYT Tech Guild strike, I won't be using NYT Games or Cooking until it's over. The Guild is only asking for boycott of these two resources to support the striking workers. This is an open-ended strike that could take a while, and workers will not be paid during this time.
Contribute to their fund here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/nyt-tech-strike-fund
and develop a habit of playing other daily games like Gisnep https://gisnep.com/ and Puzzmo https://www.puzzmo.com/today

2024-11-01 15:41:35 UTC

I caught Dolores trying on my sandals. #CatsOfMastodon
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2024-10-31 15:04:55 UTC

Halloween voter swag in NYC includes a regular early voter sticker, a Halloween voter sticker, and a temporary tattoo. Too bad the polling site is a 45-minute hike uphill all the way from the nearest subway stop and surrounded by MAGA-festooned houses. #voting #uspol
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2024-10-27 22:29:31 UTC

"Crazy Cat Lady" skeleton display in Queens
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2024-10-23 14:47:10 UTC

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Reading Zeke Faux's account of Michael Lewis shilling for Sam Bankman-Fried freaked me right out. He knows how much weight he carries with people who care about finance, and he squandered it to fluff up an obvious criminal. So did Tom Brady, but no one thinks Tom Brady is someone with unique financial insight and journalistic integrity.

2024-10-22 14:47:05 UTC

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What bothers me now about Gladwell is different from what bothered me then. Now, I'm much more creeped out by his obsession with what he thinks of as excellence and achievement. It's almost like he's trying to figure out what *makes* someone special, and the rest of us are over here trying to assert that everyone is special, actually. Human beings who live in their communities and do their best to live honestly and fairly are interesting, should be interesting, to us.