The lazy laughing Jenny of the bard • fellow @magdalenealumni • once @FoxCenterEmory, @hilda_beastoxf • essays @newyorker @the_point_mag @ftmag @thenation &c.
cambridge (old)
Joined August 2008
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Spent some time with Zachary Leader’s ELLMANN’S JOYCE, thinking about modernism and the complicated allure of understanding a life through its work
Zachary Leader’s book on Richard Ellmann’s landmark work on James Joyce asks whether a biographer can be considered an artist.
thenation.com/article/cultur…
michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
I used to use long sentences. But then I realised something that stopped me in my tracks: lots of people don't know how to read. Now I only use short sentences. Lots of them. And honestly? It's a game-changer
michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
this is as good as everyone has been saying. incredibly funny, equally depressing and distressing, written with the charisma of a great writer. couldn't ask for much more thebaffler.com/salvos/paid-p…
michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
Even if you only use an LLM to make tools for your writing/thinking, never to do writing/thinking on your behalf, it still makes you dumber, and makes your writing worse, because its prose is so bad it infects you, and it's also incapable of actually surfacing its (non-)thinking.
michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
one of our great prose stylists, honed, it turns out, in the content mines....
Wrote about losing my content writing job to AI and then getting hooked on predatory AI-facilitated payday loan apps for @thebafflermag thebaffler.com/salvos/paid-p…
michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
Wrote about losing my content writing job to AI and then getting hooked on predatory AI-facilitated payday loan apps for @thebafflermag thebaffler.com/salvos/paid-p…
michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
We probably won’t ever see anything like this for the rest of our lives
would love to participate in bookshelf twitter however I have had most of my books in storage since I finished my phd in 2021 🙃
Yesterday, WIRED learned that Madison Square Garden was suing us for our accurate reporting.
We stand by our work. That’s why we’re removing the paywall from two of the MSG stories they don’t want you to read, making them free for everyone.
michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
Here's what actually happened (thread...): Massification of higher education during the final decades of the 20th century and early 21st century, normally attached to a promise of social mobility. The liberal idea, at least, was at the least that this would make society more
michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
Really grateful for Alexandra Brodsky—for everything, but especially for this commentary on the disappearance of public feminism: newsletter.thedriftmag.com/p…
michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
of all the ways to spend time in the world, thinking about, writing, and teaching art and culture for its own sake is pretty high up there for me as a Good, and I wish more of us could do that without worrying about immiseration or blacklisting
keep getting ads for the Tom Hiddleston Pompeii thing, in which he tells the story of the "real people" who lived there and the "survivors." my friend, the cambridge latin course beat you to it
michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
Not actually true. Jonathan Rose’s 2001 study, based on some 2000 working-class autobiographies, library records and archives, shows that (roughly between the advent of 19th C education reforms and the mid-century arrival of television), weavers at mills were reading Milton while butlers and maids were reading Proust.
If the life of the mind is for freaks, then it turns out we all have the potential to be those freaks.
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michelle a. taylor (@michelletaylor ~elsewhere~) retweeted
if like me you were wrecked by that Atlantic article & want to think about how the fight for reading might become part of a larger political movement... 👇
“For literature to do its work of intellectual emancipation, however, a prior freedom is needed: the freedom to read in the first place. Wresting that freedom from a world that doesn’t want you to study, think, or imagine even in extreme circumstances.” @CharlieTyson1
plough.com/articles/the-free…
