Brandi K. Adams

WBAL in Baltimore helping viewers understand the difference between watches and warnings

Another tough day for team “there’s no point in complaining about AI, just accept it.”

“Evangelicals are missing from the halls of power. That’s a problem. The lack of evangelical Christians at America’s most prestigious institutions fuels mistrust.” Excerpt From “Opinion | Evangelicals are missing from the halls of power. That’s a problem.” Aaron M. Renn The Washington Post https://apple.news/ATJF-eGWhQMuuXvLnrj0ugQ This material may be protected by copyright.

Congratulations, WaPo, you did it, you published the worst take

Sir Gawain Fucks the Green Knight Here’s a tale ripe for telling. Can’t say where I heard it first—in pretty French or Dutch. Perhaps as a young lady walking ‘longside the Rijn. I’ll spin it for you in an English tongue, fine as frost on lace, sweet as malmsey wine. So it goes that young Gawain, strength kissed into his limbs, fresh as the bright dawn, comes trembling down to the Green Chapel. You’ve heard this tale, I know. His breath makes peach fuzz in the air, fear into him like worm to apple. Christmas Morn is too soon, time is short. You have your own life to save, he says, picking through thorn and bough to an ivy-clad cave. The creature is the Jack O’ the Glen / forest prince / the wood’s own laughter. Beard of lichen and eyes like dark elder. I need not repeat their exchange—my boy’s flinching heart—a songbird in a rattled cage. It is after the blows are dealt, he asks, what god is worshipped in these green trees? Boy, the Knight replies, boy, were you not just down on your knees? The Knight is the tang of sap / bark rough and petal soft / everywhere leaves scatter / easily crushed / Gawain clings / hardly knows what he clings to / he is the forest and the flower / a turmoil of roots / where god and tree meet and melt / the birch the oak the fern the deer / mushroom maggot crow / here Gawain is branch and bud / blow returned for blow

This is a sheer indulgence on my part, but it turns out I never actually shared the poem here, so:

🍃

move slow and repair things

As the laid off Middle East News Editor, I concur. Management eliminated the positions of every single staff correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East.

A close-up of a person wearing teal gloves holding a small metal type punch engraved with an ampersand symbol. In the background, part of the person’s face is softly out of focus.

A bearded man wearing teal gloves uses a green rubber air blower to clean a small metal type punch. He sits at a desk with an open wooden case filled with neatly arranged metal punches, while a computer monitor displaying a magnified image is visible in the background.

🔎 Rare 18th-century punches used to create the original Baskerville typeface have been digitised and released online.
Designers, historians and the wider public now have the opportunity to study the physical tools that shaped modern typography.
🔗https://loom.ly/1ulLaFI

And in 206, students will learn how to process this thinking, unassisted, through writing. They’ll learn that writing is hard. It can make you feel bad! It can also make you pretty happy too. 5/5

In this class, you, as a human, will learn how to encounter the joys and struggles of reading literature you may love, hate, or not care about all. (I curated this list, so obviously I care about these works.) 4/5

One can examine and think about the repercussions of LLMs and Generative AI for sure, but it won’t be useful or interesting here with these texts. 3/5

There’s room for everyone to think and study, but *some* disciplinary boundaries exist between STEM and Humanities at the *start* of a major for necessary reasons. 2/5

English 206 advertisement for fall semester at ASU with texts including The Odyssey, Arden of Feversham, Wuthering heights, Passing, Brother Brontë, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and poems by Terrence Hayes and Victoria Chang

I have been thinking a lot about how and why I majored in English Literature lately—and how I grew to respect it more as a discipline when I worked in Computer Science and EECS departments. 1/5

The only reason we are alive to debate this is because Stanislav Petrov decided not to trust a computer.

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

This was published today lol

Poster for a talk I'm giving. The poster reads, UCLE Department of Art History Presents Sonja Drimmer, "Recolonizing the Museum and the GLAM work of AI." The picture on the poster is a screenshot of Google Arts and Culture's experiments page.

Also, while I am enjoying my first glass of something in a week. Next week I'm delivering a talk on material that I've been working on for a while but haven't gotten to speak with people about, and this, too, is giving me life. Excited to be in conversation with folks about this.

Director and Curator, Special Collections and Archives - Middlebury College Reporting to the Dean of the Library, the Director and Curator of Special Collections provides leadership, vision, and budget oversight for Middlebury’s special collections, including its rare book an...

JOB ALERT! 📜📚

Who wants to be director & curator of special collections & archives at Middlebury College (Vermont!) — & work for a wonderful boss (& one of my favorite people), Rebekah Irwin?

apply.workable.com/middleburyco...

February 26, 2026 Dear members of the Columbia community: This morning at approximately 6:30 a.m., federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security entered a Columbia Residential building and detained a student. We are working to gather more information, working to reach the family, and providing legal support. Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a "missing person." We are working to gather more details. It is important to reiterate that all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University, including

It is important to reiterate that all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University, including housing, classrooms, and areas requiring CUID swipe access. An administrative warrant is not sufficient. If law enforcement agents seek entry to non-public areas of the University, ask the agents to wait to enter any non-public areas until contacting Public Safety. Public Safety will contact the Office of the General Counsel to coordinate the University's response. Do not allow them to enter or accept service of a warrant or subpoena. We will update our community as additional information becomes available. Sincerely,

BREAKING: Columbia President Claire Shipman says DHS agents entered a residential buliding this morning and detained a student.

"Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a 'missing person.'"

Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump

NEW: The New York Times confirms my reporting that the DOJ is withholding several FBI interviews with a woman who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her as a child

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/u...

The Enclosures of Free Verse Throughout the twentieth century, scholars accepted that there was something called “traditional” poetic meter, and that free verse liberated poets from ...

In honor of the publication day of The Enclosures of Free Verse (uncpress.org/978146969306...), here's a little thread about what the book does and does not offer.

The BBC should never have aired the N-word racist slur, directed at Michael B Jordan & Delroy Lindo.

It had a two-hour delay!

This is painful & unforgivable.

I've requested an urgent explanation.

The Price Lab’s Critical Approaches to AI Working Group has released a white paper in which we advocate for AI-free instruction in reading, writing, & research. These are fundamental skills in the humanities (& in general), & with decisive action we can keep teaching them well in the age of AI!

Thanks so much for sharing this image!

J'adore la posture qui prétend que tu peux contrer ça en rendant tes cours plus intéressants

English Faculty/OWC Shakespeare Webinar: Cymbeline In this free webinar, Professor Emma Smith will be discussing the new edition of Cymbeline from Oxford World's Classics.

Join us for our next OWC #Shakespeare webinar on 2 March at 6pm.

In this online event, Emma Smith @oldfortunatus.bsky.social will be discussing #CYMBELINE with Kim Gilchrist.

Register for your free ticket: shakespeare-webinar-cymbeline.eventbrite.co.uk

I listened to an interview with Alysa Liu yesterday and I can see that the interviewers are unsettled by her and do not know what to do with her responses.

She challenges so much of what USians are taught about competition and frankly about how to live a life.

Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.

CALL FOR PITCHES

@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.

We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.

Details below!

Publication Day Book Launch Event with Shakespeare Okuni! — Blacksburg Books Join us for the launch of Shakespeare Okuni’s book of poetry, A Twist of Rotten Silk or Words to That Effect. The author and participants will read poems from the book - no preparation necessary. Th...

Publication-day book launch event. Poem and response. Come and join me to celebrate the release of A Twist of Rotten Silk #ATwistOfRottenSilk at Blacksburg Books, Virginia, USA, on Saturday 28 February 2026. Details here –
www.blacksburgbooks.com/events/autho...

It’s always such a thrill to visit the @texaspublicradio.bsky.social studios and to speak with @normdog1.bsky.social and @mariannavarro.bsky.social on their marvelous #Fronteras program. I’m grateful for the opportunity to discuss Shakespeare in Tongues on the most recent episode. Check it out!