Jonathan Fine
@jonathanbfine
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Dad, Husband, Germanist @BrownUniversity
Joined March 2010
pov: you’re a literature professor
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I ordered a pdf of a dissertation from 1780. It’s 8 pages long. Including the title page.
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Study the humanities. Understand what the fuck is going on around you.
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The situation in Germany is far worse than I had expected. The entire place is filled with Germans.
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I ordered a German book, and it infected the interlibrary loan system with umlauts.
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I think we all know what really happened to Kate Middleton
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What lack of exposure to the humanities does to a motherfucker
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I see myself less as an academic and more as a pdf dealer.
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This is what happens when you don’t fund the humanities
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This tweet reminded me of when I posted this image and a bunch of Germans got super pissed at me.
In Berlin today, there is a Henrich-Heine-Straße, a Karl-Marx-Allee, a Hannah-Arendt-Straße, a Brecht Haus, a Thomas Mann Grundschule, a Café Einstein, and a Walter-Benjamin-Platz.
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The committee that decided which authors to include must have been an epic shitshow.
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My problem with AI is that it’s a solution without a problem.
the ai hate is obviously not about ai, it is about something else. from experience i know this thing is comprehensible and articulable but i can't quite figure out what it is. (not a joke:) it's hard to focus bc every time i try to talk to an ai hater they are yelling at me.
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In middle school, I told my mom that I wanted to read Les Miserables, so she went out and bought an abridged version for me. When I got it, I asked what abridged meant and then told her to return it and get me the real book.
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My child is interested in visiting Germany so that she can use her “Germany words.” The only thing she knows how to say is Apfelschorle.
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How could I forget to include the leaning tower of courses past (+ DVDs)
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Yes, I did choose to get a PhD and then pursue a job in academia, but I think it’s important to remember that I’m the victim here.
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Wife: How do you peel white asparagus?.Me: Why are you asking me?.Wife: You have a Ph.D. in German. Did they not teach you this?.
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Almost 20 years ago, a professor said that you couldn’t understand Hegel unless you learned German. Most students in the class were perfectly fine with that. One student, however, made a very unfortunate decision.
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I’d always thought of genau as the most German word, but my wife is making a very strong case for leider.
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Best advice I got in grad school was not to be angry when someone got something they didn’t deserve but instead to be hopeful that I would get something better that I also didn’t deserve.
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In Germany, this direct historical connection is considered to be highly inconvenient.
I had no idea the literal Nazi Brownshirts were German colonial army uniforms
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Duolingo will not prepare you to read German philosophy in the original. I thought this would be obvious, but apparently it is not.
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I hope someone on my flight today needs a doctor because I’ve come prepared.
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Being almost completely covered by a footnote must feel so good for a page
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One of my professors said she put a couch in her office so she could nap between classes. At the time, I thought that sounded silly. I was so young and naive.
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A second case of umlaut infection has been found
I ordered a German book, and it infected the interlibrary loan system with umlauts.
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Made me think of this tweet
BIDEN: THERE IS THE RIGHT TO PROTEST BUT NOT THE RIGHT TO CAUSE CHAOS.
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What lack of exposure to the humanities does to a motherfucker
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@kierkegaardetal @lastpositivist Suppose I should have also noted all the artwork that takes up space on the pages
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So I guess what I’m trying to say is yes there were early signs that I would go on to get a PhD in the humanities.
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Study the humanities so that you don’t embarrass yourself on social media.
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Make sure to review Kant’s rules for dinner parties so that you’re ready to celebrate his 300th birthday on Monday
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American academic: Thank you so much. That was a wonderful and very thought-provoking paper. German academic: Every single thing you said was wrong. You need to start over at the very beginning.
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I once jokingly said “you’re going to hate me for this” to my German student assistant. Got an email from the humanities institute’s director an hour later about professional communication.
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The great thing about the humanities is that it teaches you that people have been complaining about the exact same shit forever.
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I once told a graduate student from Germany that the only good dissertation is a completed dissertation, and he told me that this was incorrect.
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The NYPD is now claiming that the protesters were in possession of the most dangerous book in the world
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I want to like the JSTOR tweets, but then I remember Aaron Swartz.
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One time a student said he loved coming to class because it was like listening to a podcast.
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I’m a simple man. Sometimes I just like to look at my giant map of the Holy Roman Empire.
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My advice for the academic job market is to leverage synergy by circling back to deliverables. By focusing on core competencies, you can ideate, pivot, and punt your way to scalability. Optimize mission critical quick wins through disruption. Why is this so hard for people?.
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It really sucks that having the entire paper written in my head doesn’t count as having written the entire paper.
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Tell me you’ve been deprived of an education in the humanities without telling me you’ve been deprived of an education in the humanities.
25 books that should be on every school curriculum but aren't:. Fiction:.1. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky.2. 1984 - George Orwell.3. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy.4. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien.5. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley.6. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn.
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I will happily read through hundreds of pages of Hegel, but I couldn’t make it past the third paragraph of this.
Last night, no one at @MIT had a good night’s sleep. Yesterday evening, shortly after I posted that we were launching a plagiarism review of all current MIT faculty, President Kornbluth, members of MIT’s administration, and its board, I am sure that an audible collective gasp.
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The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to ChatGPT for democratizing the creative process and freeing the written word from humanity’s limitations.
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9 year old: “Why do my friends get to go camping and skiing, and I have to go see the chair Goethe died in?”.
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Another academic job market thing I really enjoyed was when the job title on Interfolio ended with the internal candidate’s name in parentheses.
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Nothing I can do about Schopenhauer. His mom already murdered him.
@jonathanbfine Honestly, the fact that people are talking about Kant at all is a win in my book. Keep up any and all jokes! (Also do something about Schopenhauer - he is like way too pessimistic and he is totally bumming me out.).
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The trick or treaters are really enjoying our pick your own French Theory book. We’re almost all out of Derridas. No one wants Foucault.
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I’m an academic who did manual labor today. I might need to write a thread about all the profound things it taught me.
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Just put together the syllabus for my new apolitical university course
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Hello students who have found my account. I am exactly as boring as you thought.
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reasons why i’m single
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We just have an image
do we have a name for the relentlessly shitty period of history we're going through yet?.
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It’s really not that hard: Read books. Discuss them with humans. Write something down if you want.
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The Sublime.
What’s something people romanticize but it’s actually horrible?.
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I once met a German student of American Studies who was writing a dissertation on surfing. The research for this dissertation mostly consisted of surfing.
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What’s your favorite academic compliment that is actually an insult? Mine is “rich”.
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2024 is both a Kant Year (300th anniversary of his birth) AND a Kafka Year (100th anniversary of his death). It is going to be so depressing.
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What lack of exposure to the humanities does to a motherfucker.
Sam Altman says we have stumbled on a new fact of nature: that intelligence is an emergent property of matter
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my therapist gave me this and said,."that's you"
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The fact that the plural of Umlaut is not Umläute is a huge design flaw.
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Learning German will cost you years of your life, but the depression comes for free.
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This is the actual advice that I received in grad school
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I learned German to read Hegel, and now I exclusively use the language to watch the German version of the Bachelor.
I wonder how it is like, after learning a language like French or German to read literature or philosophy in it, reading or listening or watching pop culture in that language.
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In American academia, you sometimes have to remind people that the language these people wrote in was not English
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City I dislike: Berlin.City I think is overrated: Berlin.City I like: Berlin.City I love: Berlin.City I most feel myself in: Berlin.City I still need to visit: Berlin.City I dream of living in: Berlin.
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What I ultimately like about all the Hegelian egirl drama is that it combines two of my absolute favorite things: German philosophy and being deeply fucking stupid.
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Crazy that you can just get work done if you sit down and do it.
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What German Studies has taught me is that people tend to love fascism. Until they don’t.
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My favorite Badiou moment is when he gave a lecture at Irvine that Balibar disliked, so Balibar stood up and gave his own lecture simultaneously. Neither man acknowledged the other.
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Feel that chill in the air? That’s right. It’s Frankfurt School Fall. If your friend group isn’t critiquing the culture industry and hating jazz, you need to find a new posse.
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Explain what this painting means and why it is good.
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This place has become one giant comparative literature seminar.
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My teenager has finally realized that she doesn’t hate reading. She just hates YA literature.
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I see my job as taking people whose only experience with German literature is Hermann Hesse and showing them that there is good German literature as well.
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i can’t wait to be visited by three ghosts tonight.
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Rawdogging French theory by ignoring the German philosophy it responds to.
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Philosophy should destroy you.
Should understanding a philosopher or philosophy very well have a net positive impact upon one’s material thriving and/or comfort?.
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A degree in German Studies is now mandatory for billionaires
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My teacher had the class vote on whether he was guilty
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