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We should remember that almost everything about how software looks and feels is a choice that someone made, often quickly, often for practical reasons that may not apply anymore.

What, in the face of this aggression, is so relevant about his demeanor or his attitude or how he approached the agents right before his death?

It is as if he had decided to see exactly how un-Christlike it was possible for one human being to be

But these exceptions prove, I fear, the rule of general passivity: in general, the old mainline Christianity never was able to offer a very potent defense against the aggressive and toxic new forms of Christianity.

five or six declining and theologically similar denominations never really considered uniting into one more powerful one

he said in a sermon two years ago: “Jesus came to transform the world. Christian nationalism is here to maintain the status quo. They have coopted the Son of God. They have turned this humble rabbi into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear mongering fascist. And, it is incumbent upon all Christians to confront it, and denounce it.”

America is best defended, in other words, by reference to the best about American history, just as Christianity is best defended by reference to what makes it distinctive and beautiful, which is the example of Jesus.

“A two-fisted engine of aggravation and despair” is how I recently described the gig to a friend

Every last thing we do here, I say, rests upon the conviction that our job is to bring the highest-caliber literary education imaginable—comprising the best of what has been said and written and argued—to a student body selected with as little regard for the distinctions of status, wealth, background, color, and need as can be found at any major institution of higher learning

Every student who comes to this massive and growing urban university needs to be taught what collegiate writing is.

Working conditions are learning conditions, we like to say, and it is so obviously true you want to tattoo it on your clavicle.

They are in deadly earnest when they say the goal is to close this fiscal gap on our own terms, before the job is given to provosts and CFOs and independently contracted consultants, with their appreciably blunter, bloodier instruments.

budgets are direct expressions of an institution’s values, so that an unwillingness to meet that cost, still astonishingly fucking low, is as good as declaring that working-class kids do not rate, do not deserve an education of as high a caliber as that of their whiter and wealthier peers, and ought to get by with a replica, a cheapened facsimile

The expressed conviction that the greatest goods of civic life belong by right to the winning classes, and to everyone else go the knockoff approximations, actually precedes our present-day authoritarian vandals by decades.

preying with vulpine cunning

We all live inside this brutal, loud, limitlessly stupid soap opera now, where each and every institution you might have valued, with whatever misgiving, can be seen sliding toward a ruined and more or less unviable version of itself

In richer places, some semblance of humanist knowledge production will continue for a while, even after the current war on education has done its annihilating work.

“Professor,” I get asked, “what does a degree in English even buy you?” I always respond with three answers, clustered around one another in concentric rings. For the practical-minded, nothing is plainer than the fact that training in English outfits students with an extraordinary range of adaptive skills, coveted by employers across sectors. Facility with language, interpretive agility, a live-minded responsiveness to conditions of ambiguity, multiplicity, contradiction, and above all an ability to write: these are aptitudes essential to work in tech, media, education, law, politics, medicine, and much else. Bank on it.

serious work in English prepares its participants, as I think almost nothing else can, for the perplexities, anguishes, and errant joys of being alive in the world

The current overclass wishes to destroy this world of thinking because they’re feckless and venal and almost inconceivably greedy, a battalion of the oiliest smash-and-grab conmen and bigots and sociopathic ghouls you could ever imagine, but not because they’re afraid of anything that might be fomented there

I start to think differently as well about that grasping and felonious overclass, the one that looks at us and sees only something small, helpless, as good as servile. I don’t know what gets you out of bed in the morning. The hope that they might one day learn to spell out the gravity of their error, in letters of blood and fire, works pretty well for me.