🔖 NC Mutual Will Cease Operations This Month

This is heartbreaking and I’m ashamed I didn’t follow this story earlier.

🔖 Read Howl’s Moving Castle should be the model for every book-to-film adaptation (Polygon) by Petrana Radulovic

🔖 Read The Big Bang Didn’t Happen.

I know very little about cosmology, but this makes some good points about the limits of academic funding and publishing and the value of public science communication.

🔖 Read A CRITIQUE OF DARK ACADEMIA: THE ROMANTICIZATION OF OVERWORK.

Wearing tweed and wandering old bookshops is fine. Denying yourself sleep over an essay that isn’t due for days is not.

Say it with me: school should not take priority over your mental health. School should not take priority over your physical health. School should not take priority over your relationships.

If Einstein could take a nap, so can you.

🔖 Read Wear Me This: Dark Academia could be the answer to the very problem it romanticizes.

I would venture that slipping on a tailored button-up and sitting in the library because Aesthetics Wiki told you “studying and reading” are “activities” of Dark Academia could be the impetus for a powerful academic pursuit or useful social connection.

🔖 Read THE SCHOLARSHIP OF SEXY PRIVILEGE: WHY DO I LOVE DARK ACADEMIA BOOKS?

This ownership over dark academia gives me the courage to keep going with real academia; to forge a space again in the gaps and achieve immortality in the sharing of ideas without boundaries. This ‘dark academia’ reminds me not to take things so seriously, to see the rot in the foundations of an institution I can’t stay away from, and build my own school in defiance.

🔖 Read What’s Dark about Dark Academia

I think the real power of dark academia is the way it compresses—and thus preserves—humanistic study at a time when the humanities are under constant threat… Creating and emulating dark academia content offers students a way to fantasize about a world in which higher education isn’t instrumentalized, but rather self-sustaining and inherently valuable.

An aesthetic that evokes the academy is more flexible, more malleable, than the academy itself.

But if dark academia commodifies education, they learned how from the corporate university itself. Their commodification as style has far less insidious ends than the university’s spreadsheets of departmental deliverables.

🔖 📺 Celia Rose Gooding, who does an amazing job playing Cadet Nyota Uhura on Strange New Worlds, wrote a beautiful guest column for The Hollywood Reporter on Nichelle Nichols’s legacy. 🖖

🔖 Read Rapport or Respect? (Helen Kara).

Dr. Kara makes excellent points about how research can seem friendly but be extractive. This is why I prefer either to do insider research or to maintain relationships after the study.

🔖 Read ‘Lost’ Fans Gave Me a Safe Place on the Internet. Is Such Fandom Possible Now? (Catapult) by Anna Myers