Briallen Hopper
@briallenhopper
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HARD TO LOVE @BloomsburyPub GILEAD REREAD @ColumbiaUP Teaching @CUNY @YPEIdwighthall Editing @KtBMagazine @andothertweets c/o she/her
Elmhurst, Queens
Joined July 2011
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A CUNY student said the encampment was her first experience of a society where all her needs were met: for community, for food, for rest, for care
I just re-read the letter that my grandfather wrote to his congregation in Palo Alto after going to Selma in 1965, and this bit really feels like it could also be written about the encampments and protests today
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I will never forget the PhD who told me she was mad she made less than a Starbucks employee. I was like: you should both be paid more, but also the Starbucks person is making coffee which everyone wants and you are making specialized scholarship which almost no one wants, so ...
y’all have no respect for the ppl who make your life easier. the person making your morning coffee deserves a livable wage. the person stocking the groceries you buy deserves a livable wage. the person cleaning the restrooms in the office you work at deserves a livable wage.
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There were 30 cops, literally, in my subway station last night. Just standing there in a vast crowd, getting paid overtime. This is why libraries are closing on weekends and public schools are falling apart
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This is good actually! If you're poor or undocumented, arrest & suspension can utterly derail your life. The people who can afford to take risks should be taking them the most.
Ok? Do we want rich students to not care or sacrifice for others?
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Isn't it awful to read this tweet and have no idea which college or university this person teaches at because it could be almost anywhere? This is all of us now.
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I'm doing a reverse Pomodoro where I watch TV for 25 minutes and then I clean for 5 minutes
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I literally watched Yale frat bros march across campus shouting "NO MEANS YES, YES MEANS ANAL" and I thought they were the worst, but I also thought as a society we agreed this was unacceptable. The Kavanagh hearings brought it home: these are the men who rule this entire country
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I am concerned about free speech on my campus. We were just informed that Muslim students' social media posts about the war are being surveilled by the college and have been reported to the NYPD. I don't know what to do yet but I will start by sharing this information here.
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MOST CUNY STUDENTS HAVE A FAMILY INCOME OF $30K OR LESS. THE CITY SHOULD BE GIVING THEM FREE SUBWAY RIDES, NOT RELYING ON THEM TO SOLVE HOCHUL'S SELF-INFLICTED MONEY CRISIS
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Wouldn't it be cheaper to just make the subway free for people who can't afford it instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars arresting and fining poor people for fare evasion?
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People died in the floods in my neighborhood and the next neighborhood over, including a 2-year-old and his parents. An apartment filled with water in 8 minutes
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@MarcosSGonsalez
It's so maddening! My cousin is a cop (works in the Bronx, lives in Westchester) and my dad tells me he is THRILLED about the piles of unlimited overtime $ he & his friends are now rolling in, thanks to the mayor. Meanwhile CUNY is literally falling apart around me
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NYC is 70% Black, Asian, Native, & Latinx. It has more than twice as many Jews as Jerusalem. Brooklyn and Queens are some the most religiously diverse places on earth. By law, citizenship, marriage, voting, & other civil rights in NYC do not depend on race or religion.
@nothing_thank_u
You're from new York. You live in a white Christian ethnostate, originally founded by Dutch settler colonialists.
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I just found out that CUNY forgot to submit the paperwork for my retirement plan when they hired me 5 years ago. I was told my contributions wd be automatically deducted, but that didn't happen. Anyway they finally got around to it last month and I just got a bill for $26K!
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Content Warning: Alice Munro
The thing about the Alice Munro story is that it is *so common.* I remember trying to protect my little sisters from my uncle when I was little; he later went to prison for what he did to my cousin. He had zero remorse. ...
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As an unmarried childless 45-year-old, I'm grateful to have some close unmarried and/or childless friends (as well as some married and/or childfull friends who make time for friendship). But a life built around friendship is definitely structurally harder to sustain at this age
All of society reorganizing around heteronormative family unit suddenly one day when you’re 35 is the worst and you should be ready
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I decided a while ago that this is a fight I am willing to fight. "You guys" has been gender neutral since before I was born, and it's an essential regional part of speech. English *needs* a plural you for clarity & this is ours. It's our y'all.
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If you live in New York, sign this! It's appalling that one of the richest cities on earth might have to close its libraries on weekends bc the mayor only cares about cops
Use your noggin, NYC! Don't cut the Library! Tell
@nycmayor
and
@nyccouncil
:
#NoCutsToLibraries
.
Sign your name now:
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As an infertile person I read all those articles about how hard it is to be a mother and a writer with mixed feelings. Like, I clearly need to be reveling in all my alone time more and basking in freedom. And I try. But I am also wading through grief and it slows me down
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Isn't it ironic: I hustled my entire 20s/30s "making myself indispensable" & then got tenure in my 40s at an institution that is being eviscerated & may not survive. We need SYSTEMIC CHANGE, STRONG INSTITUTIONS, a collective democratic commitment to education & journalism!
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I endured an egg retrieval without anesthesia at Yale Fertility Center where the nurse was emptying the fentanyl vials and filling them with saltwater
It's been precisely 3 years since an Indigenous woman, Joyce Echaquan, died in a Quebec hospital after screaming in distress while nurses ridiculed her and called her "stupid as hell" & other racist insults.
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There is an opossum loose in the Queens College English department! I feel like I'm working in Grey Gardens!
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At the time, and now, I'm like: why was I, a kid, having to do this? Meanwhile after it was official I was defending a sister who wanted to cut him out of the family photos ... my mom thought cutting him out was harsh or extreme ... but we need him OUT! He is not welcome
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In my family it is Christian forgiveness culture run amok. They forget that Jesus said "But whoso shall cause one of these little ones who believe in Me to fall, it were better for him that a millstone were hung about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
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Well this blew up! If you want to buy my book, here’s the link
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Suddenly I owe 5 years of retirement $ all at once. Never ever a dull moment at this place. Truly
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I am literally at the national epicenter. NYC has the most cases in the country, Queens has the most cases in NYC, Elmhurst Hospital is the Queens COVID hospital, I’m a couple blocks away from it, and the sirens literally don’t stop, day or night.
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I want to give my CUNY students the same individual attention I gave my Yale students. But at Yale I taught 2 classes a semester, with 12 or 15 students a class; now I teach 3 or 4 classes a semester, different preps, with 18 or 25 students a class. The math is not in our favor
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The rules: It's fine to write about social movements, but you're not allowed to participate in them
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I'm furious that
@CUNY
is paying $4 million for private security guards to harass students. Meanwhile buildings are crumbling, essential faculty and staff are getting laid off, and there's austerity everywhere
"This Hell Gate reporter witnessed one student pleading with three Strategic Security Corp guards to let her enter campus to take her last final. The security officers told her that her ID had expired, as a look of desperation swept across her face."
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I love how when the weather suddenly changes it feels like time travel and I remember being in my body in this weather all the years that came before. It moves me out of/into time. Do other people have this too?
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In addition to being mean, this is ableist. If you are not allowed to provide chairs for voters in line, people who aren't physically able to stand in line for hours are disenfranchised. And, of course, white people tend to have short lines while everyone else has long ones
Georgia Republicans are trying to outlaw water, food, and comfort for people who are trying to vote.
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It's bizarre to say that the only non-hypocritical, morally consistent thing to do when you live on the site of a historic genocide is to support a modern genocide.
Again I'm struck by just how bad the arguments from the pro-Israel side are. The third slide says Americans can't protest Palestinians being killed because their country killed Native Americans.
That's an argument against protesting *any* injustice!
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I have a petty complaint which is that as CUNY faculty I do not have access to a full-fledged research library (only Grad Center professors have access). I'm trying to figure out how to do research and keep running into a wall.
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“The cruelty is the point”
The fact that this wasn't a deal breaker for yall
IS WILD TO ME
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It seemed pretty sound at the time as well!
I dunno, Kamala Harris saying that Twitter should have deleted Trump's account seems pretty sound in retrospect
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I found out a few days ago that the CUNY trustees approved my tenure, so it's official-official. I'm still processing, but one thing I'll say is I love that job security is the default at CUNY for full-time teachers, tenure track or not. God bless unions!
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I've had a rant brewing ever since I left the Ivy League after 17 years (!) & devoted myself to the democratic experiment that is CUNY. This piece is dedicated to my brilliant students at Princeton, Yale, Ewing HS, Trenton Central HS, the Warrior Scholar Project, & Queens College
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As a student without family money who needed to live on my stipend, I chose a PhD at Princeton over Cal and UCLA partly because it wouldn't force me to go into more student debt. Elite schools are often much better financial deals for low-income students. This is basic info.
Deleted my ranty thread about last week’s comp*ct essay but fwiw this was the passage that made my head explode. The author is at a public uni but pubbing his book—for which this essay is a promotion—with an Ivy UP. Does he “personally desire to be more elite” than other authors?
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I had my miscarriage during the interview for my current job. I have never been in more pain and I was trying so hard to keep it together. I was so afraid that losing the pregnancy I wanted so much would cost me the job I wanted so much.
So many women have miscarriages and Nobody at work knows. They go to work the next day, no time off. Schedule a D&C as if it’s a routine doc appointment.
This is groundbreaking.
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They represent me; I voted blank in the primary to protest the genocide. I'm disappointed in my political party today but grateful for the presence, participation, and protest of these delegates who are refusing to abandon Palestinians to endless American bombs. Democrats: LISTEN
Uncommitted delegates stage a sit in at
#DNC
. They risk arrest. They have been silenced, gaslit, & maligned by the party theyre supposed 2 be a part of. Now they may be subject 2 police force.All their counterparts got time on the stage. This is the stage they made 4 themselves.
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McNeil said that racism was over and that Black people who were in “the ghetto” were there by choice and he used the N word. And these white media people are siding with *him* instead of with the teenager who called him on it!
These white people in media are saying this stuff out loud, like we’ll never see them in a newsroom again.
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I'm teaching two versions of Writing about Religion this spring (MFA and undergrad nonfiction workshops) and am looking to refresh my syllabi! What's some good essays/memoirs/literary journalism I should know about?
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I can't believe it's been 8 years! This is the essay that got me an agent which got me a book deal which got me a job which got me a whole NYC life! Thanks for everything,
@LAReviewofBooks
!
"The spinster is not typically cool and stylish. She is often weird, difficult, dissonant, queer."
Live from the LARB archive:
@briallenhopper
reviews Kate Bolick's "Spinster." All these years later, we’re still paywall-free—let’s keep it that way.
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I literally was in a meeting where someone wanted a job ad for an assistant professor position to ask for TWO books in the field (a requirement that would have disqualified most of the existing faculty)
90% of what's happening in higher ed is due to corporatization, de-funding, & anti-intellectualism but 10% is the discipline setting impossibly high bars for entry, e.g.,
Asst. Prof job at R1 English dept listing "book ms published or under review" as a requirement.
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Two people I know personally have lost their jobs for being insufficiently pro-Israel. One person I know lost a promotion and a raise for speaking out. It's utterly safe & strategic to be pro-bombing-Gaza in the US. There is absolutely a blacklist and a cost to being against it.
pro-palestine campus organizers get their personal information posted on public websites and billboard trucks labeling them terrorist sympathizers — anti-zionism is job application poison, especially for arab, muslim, and international students who are so often at the forefront
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@sarahschulman3
Yes! We are in touch. I found out this issue affects at least 42 other people!
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Support my dear friend Ashley Makar as she raises money for cancer research!
http://t.co/8vZgBXOk8G
attn:
@realjohngreen
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It is very, very hard to keep my class's attention when a possum is staring at us through the stained glass window.
#Yale
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Seeking syllabi inspiration! What's the best thing you did to make your class more fun/more doable for students during yet another semester of mass pandemic exhaustion?
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It's twitter official! I got my dream job and will be teaching creative writing at Queens College CUNY next year and hopefully forever!
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Hi academic twitter! I'm writing a piece for the Chronicle Review on people who had a good experience in grad school. DM me if this is you & you'd like to share, or if you have thoughts about what would have made your grad school experience better! (PS please retweet)
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La la la, Kirkus said I wrote one of the best books of 2019, nbd
WHO AM I KIDDING THIS IS A HUGE MOTHEREFFING DEAL!!!!!!!!!!!
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@DrLitnerd
Yes! I literally reposted an infographic from the official NYT instagram on my personal account and was told (not by a higher-up) that it was biased & made people feel unsafe & that it was inappropriate for me to post about politics. So much for free speech! This is where we are
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@sarahnadav
According to your posts, you support the ongoing bombing of the people of Gaza, so it's safe to assume that you are not an authority on how best to help them.
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I finished the syllabus for my first ever MFA class! We will be reading:
Good Talk by
@mirajacob
The Collected Schizophrenias by
@esmewang
Heavy by
@KieseLaymon
Coolie Woman by
@gbahadur
Make It Scream, Make It Burn by
@lsjamison
In the Dream House by
@carmenmmachado
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I saw my book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble! Two whole copies!! Facing out!! I autographed them immediately
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This is the only way! Well-paid PhD programs are like a short-term welfare state for curious young people. Enjoy health care, a salary, reading, writing, and conversation for half a decade before you get spat back out into regular unmitigated capitalism.
did you guys know that you can go to grad school without becoming insane and/or embittered? You can just learn stuff and write things you care about for a few years, and then go look for other jobs. Why are you all acting like someone tricked or forced you into doing this
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The vast majority of people arrested at university protests were students, staff, and faculty. But even if they weren't: universities get vast tax breaks because they are considered a public good. Some (like CUNY) are public property. They *should* be be open to the public
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I'm glad these strikebreaking stories are being told. We need to know this history because it helped to shape the current crisis. From NYU to Columbia to the New School and beyond, literature scholars have become anti-labor leaders.
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My hot take: This is a class issue. You can still be a good parent if you can't afford babysitters or a big house. Requiring one whole bedroom per child (!) and exempting children from the care-work of the household is a recent and unusual American anomaly.
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PSA: New
#Covid
vaccines are out, you can get 'em if you haven't gotten Covid or a vaccine in the last 2 months, and if you get them in August, the government pays for them! Just made my appt
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I owe this essay my whole life. It got me an agent, which got me a book deal, which got me a tenure-track union job with benefits in NYC, which got me a rent-stabilized apt in NYC. Thank you
@LAReviewofBooks
&
@CUNY
& thank you spinsters! It truly was the spinsters who made me.
One of the things I do actually love about Twitter is getting introduced to work that I missed when it was published. Today I read this 2015 essay by
@briallenhopper
, and good lord is it amazing:
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It's chilling that you can get blacklisted or fired in the US for publicly agreeing with the UN or Doctors without Borders. I've seen it happen to multiple people I know
Professors are told to 1) ignore the historical record, 2) ignore the UN, 3) ignore the ICJ/ICC, 4) ignore academic consensus, 5) ignore NGO consensus. We are told to stop being academics when it comes to
#Palestine
. This is the threat to the university we should be talking about
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@abigbutandsmile
Many of the basement apts here are not legal/up to code but they're the only affordable option for people
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@AnnaKeesey
I was an adjunct with a PhD at the time, so I wasn't talking from a position of more pay and security (in fact I had a lot less security than this person, who was a homeowner and had healthcare thru her partner's well-paying job); I also said it more tactfully than I tweeted it!
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My teeny tiny but tangible protest against the current crackdown on student speech and protest at
#Columbia
. It doesn’t feel great to sacrifice a job I’ve enjoyed, but it would feel worse not to. Solidarity with all the students who are risking so much!
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@AnnaKeesey
I also think that the idea that being a professor is more valuable than being a barista is just fundamentally flawed. I say this as someone who has been both!
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A Columbia professor writes about CUNY, the resource-deprived public university that is starving outside Columbia's gates. It's high time to redistribute some wealth so that non-elite New Yorkers can have the education and life they deserve
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We knew it was coming! Praying for these students who do not have family money and connections to shield them
🚨Breaking: Gaza Solidarity Encampment established at CCNY-CUNY in Harlem! Come to CCNY to support the encampment and students RIGHT NOW!
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SEND GOOD THOUGHTS TO MY BOOK PROPOSAL WHICH IS NOW OFFICIALLY IN OTHER PEOPLE'S INBOXES!
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Reader, we moved in together! 8 months and counting of pandemic love
"I’ve fallen into an unexpected 'isolationship' with a Facebook friend I’ve never met—someone I’d never spoken to before the pandemic. Each night we put our phones next to our pillows, turn on their speakers & leave them on until morning." —
@briallenhopper
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In my half-decade working at CUNY, we have gotten ONE 2% raise (and even that was delayed because of the pandemic). Meanwhile rent and groceries costs just keep going up.
Confirmed:
@NYCMayor
is about to announce a new contract for the Police Benevolent Association, NYPD's largest union, that'll grant officers a compounded wage bump of 28.25% through 2025 (with retroactive raises dating back to 2017).
w/
@michaelgartland
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This happened to me. My first retrieval at Yale Fertility Center was fine. During the second I was sobbing in pain, asking in vain for more drugs, and I have fibroids, I'm used to pain! A woman offered me her hand to squeeze (maybe it was the nurse who swapped out the fentanyl?).
Did you know up to 200 women at Yale’s fertility center were forced to undergo egg retrievals without narcotics? These procedures are typically done under heavy sedation, but these women were awake enough to talk; one even told them she was alert enough to drive. These women…
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@ThorChiggins
Anyone who does any research at all knows that the encampments have been, among other things, a sacred place for Jews. The many Jewish protesters at the encampments celebrated Passover, held Shabbat services, and led teach-ins about Jewish history & religion
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This guy actually uses his wife's name as a pseudonym! Meanwhile she assists him in his busy schedule.
#ThanksForTyping
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This is disastrous. CUNY has already had years of austerity. Students, staff, and faculty deserve so much better
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Every time
BREAKING: A grand jury has refused to indict Buffalo police officers Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe who violently shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground during a George Floyd protest last summer.
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A year-end thread, short but sweet! In April I signed a contract to write a memoir about rereading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead Novels for
@ColumbiaUP
! Many thanks to my editors
@PhilipLeventhal
@triaspirational
&
@n_j_dames
as well as my agent Rob McQuilkin for making it happen!
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My advice about how to get a job, publish a book, etc.:
1) Be lucky
2) Don't be unlucky
@ThatJBF
I want to read generously, and not cynically, but it's hard to see job market advice threads as anything but a form of trolling at this point.
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@likaluca
The epigraph to my book was from a Toni Morrison interview: “The times I didn't write, maybe I was in love. Or beloved. Somebody was making me the object of love. It's not bad. It's short, but not bad."
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@Nicole_Cliffe
My sister (there are 5 sisters) is a single mom. At my nephew’s birth, one sister and I braced her legs, one sister held her head, one was filming, and one cut the cord. My sister-in-law was in charge of towels and water and my mom caught the baby.
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In the 1600s it was another story. Thank God the Dutch settler colonizers are no longer in charge! But even in Christian New Amsterdam, Jews eventually had the rights to “travel and trade to and in New Netherland and live and remain there"
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@jdgtranen
a quote I'll remember “breaking up with half your family is nothing compared to losing half of it"
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After two abdominal surgeries this summer, I just found out I DON’T HAVE CANCER! I feel like that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart tenderly kisses the broken banister.
#surgerysummer
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"Children would do well to read 'Harry Potter' unreservedly and absorb its lessons," writes Pamela Paul. This is sacred text fundamentalism. I don't think there's ANY book children or adults should be reading unreservedly! Education is learning how to read with reservations.
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Rebecca
my ex would shit talk his ex girlfriend like every day and created such a lore that i developed a huge crush on her
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