@adamgolub
American Studies professor at Cal State Fullerton. Pop culture, true crime, monsters, music, creative work. Writing a cultural history of the doppelgänger. Also a runner who blogs about fatherhood. https://www.everydayfictions.com/bio
Just walked by a colleague's classroom after my class finished and he was talking about Elvis, getting blank stares and so he had to ask "Does anyone know who Elvis Presley is?"
It's rough out here on these teaching streets.
DOGE fed grant descriptions into OpenAI’s ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence chatbot, asking it to decide if grants were “DEI.”
(5/7)
we have saved daylight
but at what cost
Now more than ever I’m convinced losing Anthony Bourdain meant we lost probably the biggest person on tv who advocated for the wonders of meeting new people and calling anyone online who hated learning new cultures the children they were, ruthlessly to the camera.
✊⚖️ "I Am Somebody!" 🌟 🕊️
Rev. Jesse Jackson, 1972 Sesame Street
Shoutout to @mattparr.bsky.social for bringing the plan for this collection to me & making it happen at @libraryofamerica.bsky.social!
It feels like the majority of knowledge I gained from social studies classes in middle school about civics and American government is useless now. I was promised three branches of government and checks and balances.
This film deliberately depicted guys like this as over the top, but now reality has caught up with it.
HOUR The extra hour given back to eternity The hour gained by travelling west The hour of the imagined empire The deepest hour of the darkest sea The guilty hour that precedes catastrophe The hour that it takes to go from here to there The haunted hour of the knowledge of death The hour in which the moon darkens The hour that moves through the mind like cloud shadow The blue hour that rests on the roof of the house The hour that is the mother of minutes and grandmother of seconds The swollen hour of pain, enough, enough The hour when mice run in the walls The bronze hour of electrical weather The cloistered hour of the nun's great moment The necklace of hours the widow wears The numbing hours of a night in Nome The sound of hours in the breathing of plants The central hour that exists without you The hour in which the universe begins to die The hallucinatory hour that hangs forever The hour of excess that equals two of self-examination The hour that flashed on the skin The hour of final music The hour of painless solitude The hour of moonlight upon her body
Mark Strand's "Hour" as it first appeared in The New Yorker.
My daughter is very excited that we can see Jupiter tonight
The richest man owns X.
The second and third richest men control Google.
The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post.
And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros.
See the problem here?
These are “low enrollment” majors but the classes are regularly at capacity. They changed the funding structure a few years ago here, switching the allocation from course enrollments to majors then blamed these departments for a structural, top-down change. This is entirely a political choice.
“Paula Rabinowitz … argues the format’s genius was its physical intimacy and portability … ‘I consider [the mass market paperback] one of the significant technological interventions, of the 20th century.”
www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...
A SoCal beach 10 minutes after sunset. The clouds glow bright orange-red
NH state house passes "CHARLIE Act," which bans teaching, I kid you not, "critical consciousness" & "prohibited world-views," such as that queer people exist, or that slavery involved race, or, implicitly, that the Nazis murdered Jews based on identity. newhampshirebulletin.com/2026/02/19/h...
A flyer publicizing an unveiling ceremony for the Toni Morrison historical marker is taped to the covered marker in front of 513 North Albany Street in Ithaca, New York, on February, 18, 2026. The marker was a project of Cornell University’s Toni Morrison Collective. The group is comprised of Cornell faculty, librarians, and scholars dedicated to celebrating the legacy of the 1955 alumna of Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences. The marker was sponsored by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation through its New York State Historical Marker Grant Program. The unveiling ceremony was moved indoors due to rain. (Andy Bass photo, 2026)
Organizers of the Toni Morrison historical marker project and community members stand on the sidewalk between Morrison’s former home and the newly unveiled roadside historical marker on February 18, 2026. Left to right are three members of Cornell University’s Toni Morrison Collective—Kofi Acree, Director for the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library; Margaret Washington, Professor Emerita in the Department of History; and Anne Adams, Professor Emerita in Africana Studies and Comparative Literature. Beside them are Anastasia Sopchak, Research Historian and Engagement Associate at the William G. Pomeroy Foundation; Elizabeth Bittel, Civil Rights Education and Training Specialist at the Cornell Office of Civil Rights; Kaleb Hunkele, artist and lecturer at the Ithaca College School of Humanities and Sciences; and Cally Arthur, retired staff member in the Department of Global Development. Bittel and Hunkele are current residents of Morrison’s former home. (Andy Bass photo, 2026)
A street view shows the newly unveiled Toni Morrison historical marker (left) in front of the duplex at 511-513 North Albany Street in Ithaca, New York, on February 18, 2026. Morrison lived in an upstairs apartment on the left side of the duplex (#513) from 1953 to 1954 while a graduate student at Cornell University. She received a Master of Arts in American Literature from the school in 1955. (Andy Bass photo, 2026)
A close-up view shows the north side of the newly unveiled Toni Morrison historical marker at 513 North Albany Street in Ithaca, New York, on February 18, 2026. The cast aluminum marker was sponsored by the Syracuse-based William G. Pomeroy Foundation through its New York State Historical Marker Grant Program. (Andy Bass photo, 2026)
A historical marker commemorating literary icon Toni Morrison was unveiled in Ithaca, New York, on what would have been her 95th birthday, February 18, 2026. It stands in front of the house where she lived while a graduate student in American Literature at Cornell University in the 1950s.
literary+cultural studies friends working in grad programs! does your program offer a required introductory seminar for new students? teaching ours again, eager for suggestions of themes, readings +assignments for theory foundations+cohort-cohering. (some past versions in thread below in return)
Last four movies watched: Real Women Have Curves, Rumble Fish, After Hours. To Live and Die in LA.
We discussed Real Woman Have Curves in my childhood and American culture class.The Coppola, Scorcese, and Friedkin were all new to me. I’m kind of obsessed with Rumble Fish at the moment. And I’m still getting over the end of To Live and Die… #LastFourWatched #LetterboxdFriday
Richard Matheson turns 100 today. You know how I'm always saying people take LONESOME DOVE's greatness for granted? Well another novel whose greatness is often taken for granted is Richard Matheson's I AM LEGEND. It has influenced the last 72 years of genre fiction and film for a reason.
This program has produced some of my favorite scholars.
It's so acutely painful to watch from the inside as the US academic system, one of the greatest institutions for the advancement of knowledge in human history, gets dismantled for no good reason.
Wow.
Duval, in full priest garb, swinging in an SF park next to a child.
my favorite Robert Duvall role is where he appears as a priest on a swing for 2 seconds for no apparent reason in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
The department celebrated 75 years of American Studies at UT Austin back in 2016. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMUh...
Henry Nash Smith--who received the first doctorate in Am Civ from Harvard--started teaching American Studies classes at UT Austin in 1941. The program evolved over the years, offering graduate degrees starting in 1970 and becoming a formal department in 1998. liberalarts.utexas.edu/ams/about-re...
This is nuts. Famous and prestigious program. So toxic that it’s now a conservative goal to gut the humanities and universities generally while shoving AI everywhere
They are merging AMST with three other departments, effectively shuttering a program that has been in existence for 85 years. www.texastribune.org/2026/02/12/t...
Devastated to learn that Univ of Texas at Austin is closing the American Studies dept. The years I spent there earning my PhD were formative, making me the teacher, thinker, and writer I am today. I've passed on what I learned at UT to thousands of students over the past 20 years. Just awful.
Movie description of the B horror move Death PhD. Gawdawful movie.
Now this is a movie plot!!! Someone understands grad school.
