I had a nice sad long cry at the movies for the fourth of July.
https://www.filmlinc.org/films/in-the-mood-for-love-with-in-the-mood-for-love-2001/

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

I should add, I have known them since they were babies. They're such soft, lovely boys. I would gladly take them if I didn't already have two outrageously spoiled lady cats in a 1-bedroom apartment. Sal and Pablo will be very sweet friends to come home to!

My friend is happy to cover costs of transportation and anything needed to get them comfortable! Please let me know if I can put you in touch. Even a foster situation would be great. #CatsOfMastodon

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.

But of course as I say that--have universities been doing their part, not just at marketing what we do to the public, but at also *doing* that thing? Not when most university students see their own professors phoning in the teaching part of their job, sleepwalking through a Powerpoint they've given 800 times, or so overworked and despairing that they don't have time to provide attention and feedback to their students. 2/

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/

The UCL Faculty of Laws conference this summer on Jeremy Bentham's "A Picture of the Treasury" is now open for registration! If you're in London in late July, this will be a real treat. The speakers and hosts include many of my favorite people in Bentham studies, and the new publication that this conference celebrates is absolutely fascinating.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/2025/jul/person-jeremy-bentham-panopticon-penitentiary-scheme-and-picture-treasury

oh no i am stuck on a stopped subway train listening to a fintech dude on a first date help help help

In this case, no, the student was misremembering the name of a poet he read last semester. But, unable to identify a poem on that topic by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Google just made one up.

I've had problems all month trying to put the publication dates of texts next to the titles on the syllabus--quickly searching for a bunch of dates in a row, a lot of them are off by a few decades--just small enough that if you're not really thinking hard about it, might seem plausible.

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.

The only time this has ever happened to me was when I had an 8am panel on gay sex at an 18th-century conference in the deep south. We had one attendee (the student of a friend). I was so mad--my copanelist and I had spent a lot of our own money to be there (while our two tenured panelists decided not to come the day of the conference). At least this time I was local. But it is pretty wild that in 2025 no one at Eastern APA thought Cugoano was interesting except us.

Wow, zero people came to our panel on Ottobah Cugoano. Our moderator showed up, Aminah gave her paper, I gave my paper, and one attendee came in during my paper. We had a great conversation. I had been steeling myself for the "but is it philosophy" question I've heard over and over here, but I guess one way to ask it is just not to attend at all. I've never experienced that before when speaking about Cugoano; at other conferences, it would be an SRO topic in a prime slot. I'm baffled.

Speaking at 9 on Ottobah Cugoano in an invited symposium with Aminah Hasan-Birdwell of Emory! Aminah's work on Cugoano is excellent, and I am so looking forward to the conversation this morning. My talk is titled "Ottobah Cugoano on National Debt and Disaster Capitalism." #EasternAPA

Oh Nikki Giovanni! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48219/nikki-rosa

Tristram Shandy group reading:

For each chapter, I am posting a quotation, a description, a response, and a reaction. I will use the CW labeled with Tristram Shandy and the volume and chapter number. I include the tag #TristramShandy in the body.

If you would like to respond to my posts to converse, feel free!

If you would like to write your own posts, be sure to include the tag #TristramShandy

Feel free to follow #TristramShandy or mute #TristramShandy

Read at your own Shandean pace.

The UCL Faculty of Laws / 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

I caught Dolores trying on my sandals. #CatsOfMastodon

I went to grad school with Steven Alvarez, quoted here on hard-shell tacos! He's also integral to Netlix's lovely Las crónicas del taco series. Taco Literacy is such a great model for thinking about immigrant cuisines. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/dining/hard-shell-tacos-los-angeles.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

I don't know anyone who actually likes Malcolm Gladwell anymore. 20 years ago, I was Your Friend Who Despises Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks and Will Not Shut Up About It. I would go around talking about how they are dumb men pretending to be smart men pretending to be dumb men. Their whole method for writing a book or column is to begin on the authority of "I think I thunk a thought." Loathsome work, loathsome ideas. More here on Gladwell's latest grift: https://culture.ghost.io/forget-gladwell/