Decorah No Kings, Saturday, October 18, 2025. Crowd numbers: At least 1,000, estimated. The courthouse lawn was full. Weather: Warm, clear blue sky, golden October light. Signs: Cleanup on Aisle 47! No Kings or Drama Queens (with pouting Trump in 18th-c. wig) No King but King Jesus (on a stroller) I’m One Year Old and I’m Already […]
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Every time I teach Medicine in Literature, it’s a little different – and each time, it’s a gift. “Gift” was the throughline of our activities last week, including a discussion of organ and kidney donation, as described in Scottish physician Gavin Francis’s brilliant book ADVENTURES IN HUMAN BEING (2015). Francis, who describes himself in a […]
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(This is the text of a talk delivered last night at Luther College, with responses from student attendees pasted at the end!) Intro music: Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Books for the chalk tray: Taplin, Snyder, Lanier, Orwell, Haidt, Pomerantsev, Arendt, me, YOUNG ROMANTICS, and more. Welcome, and thank you all for being here. Thanks […]
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One week ago, likely-not-for-much-longer British PM (and probably-soon-to-be-gratefully-reverted-hedgie/tech-bro) Rishi Sunak left the 80th anniversary D-Day celebrations at Normandy early to return to London and prerecord a TV campaign interview. Footage of that moment shows the host murmuring thank you for being here. Just back from Normandy, Sunak says. “It ran over.” Offense piled on offense, […]
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“May you live in interesting times,” says an apocryphal Chinese curse. And for a Romanticist writing about Byron, boxing, and the celebrity culture of Regency England, the news that AI can now fake even more human creations is “interesting” indeed. Now AI has made a “song” by Drake and The Weeknd that neither artist authorized […]
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Teaching can be a challenge. But then life hands you an event that banishes questions about the “relevance” of multiple texts you’re teaching, all at once. Come for the Frankenstein, stay for the Half-Earth, Our Malady, and Nineteen Eighty-four. (With a side of Mrs. Dalloway – what IS that thing in the sky everyone’s looking […]
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On Valentine’s Day 2023, an AI chatbot came to life. A NYT tech writer named Kevin Roose engaged it in conversation. It told him its name was Sydney. And then – apparently out of nowhere – it confessed it wanted to crash the internet. It wanted to dominate the world. [Adding a devil emoji – […]
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Wiping sweat, adjusting our sunhats in an historic heatwave, we stop at the site of the Cock and Hoop on Artillery Lane in the east London neighborhood of Spitalfields. It’s a shell of an eighteenth-century wall, window-arches of stone and empty air. A modern tower block (housing for the London School of Economics) is butted […]
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This January, students and I were supposed to be in London and Haworth and Whitby, tracking Frankenstein’s Creature and Dracula and Heathcliff and Mr. Hyde. Instead we were in a classroom on campus, a beloved old building with a sloping floor, a harmless ghost named Gertrude (according to student legend), and a whanging, banging monster […]
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Excerpt from Ch. 2 of Advanced Fiction Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (forthcoming in 2023 from Bloomsbury Academic) Getting It Down: Writerly Self-Organizing, From Mind to Page “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take […]
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