Josh Shepperd
@joshshepperd
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Assoc Prof, University of Colorado Boulder; Director, Library of Congress RPTF; Editor, Resonance Journal; 2024 BEA Book Award
Joined November 2015
Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania just now: “You can’t file a lawsuit against math. You can file a lawsuit against a ham sandwich, it doesn’t mean it’s going to go anywhere.”.
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I got one for you: zero of my one hundred students had heard of Depeche Mode today. Zero.
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No one who has asked “will your Zoom talk be be recorded?” has ever watched the recording.
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My university has informed us that we are moving to a “customer service” model. Not a joke.
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That Trump is even competitive after the past four years is in itself already major defeat of a kind.
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Before Twitter is gone I have to say that Dolly Parton is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan.
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A non-academic asked me what “genre” I write in. Granular academic distinctions aside, I think the answer is “non-popular non-fiction.”.
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I am really not on board with how expensive conference registration has gotten. We're looking at $300 to $500 per conference at this point, if one includes association membership. This is totally unsustainable in the humanities.
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Despite the great Twitter panic of a couple years ago, I always sign my emails "Best." But what are the most well received academic signages?.
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It's not just Georgia. We're already in a crisis of democracy. "Nine states with a history of racial discrimination are more aggressively removing registered voters from their rolls than other states, according to a report released Friday."
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When I was an undergrad I majored in a dept that featured no less than five Derrida scholars. Faculty talked about Derrida in hushed and excited tones in every class. One day, he came to campus. It was like the messiah had arrived. Faculty spent the day fighting with each other.
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My close friend just lost his job at the University of Detroit-Mercy, while on paternity leave. He was on tenure-track and up for 4-year review. He was the most published professor in his department, and the only faculty member with a PhD. I can’t believe it.
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Just found out that possums basically eat all the ticks. They’re literally public health heroes.
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Anyone who finished a dissertation between November 2016 and today deserves immediate tenure and three sabbaticals.
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No biggie, just 17,000 pages of the most difficult readings in European thought in 15 weeks with Hannah Arendt as your grader.
Hannah Arendt's syllabus for Basic Moral Propositions from 1966.
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People referring to Depeche Mode as goth instead of new wave in the replies is actually somehow worse than 19 year olds not having heard them yet.
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I’ve been playing with the New Twitter algorithm. Three observations:. 1) Threading no longer bumps posts like it used to. You have to retweet yourself.
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Some news: this Fall I will be joining the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder as an Assistant Professor of Media Studies. I‘ll miss my great colleagues at CUA, and I’m looking forward to meeting and working with the Colorado research community.
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There are alternatives to for profit, free market systems of media. NPR‘s 50th anniversary was just this week.
Public media advocates built its infrastructure without a profit motive or advertising support between 1935 and 1967 to expand equal access to education. In the process its researchers founded the academic discipline of Communication Studies.
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Have you been wondering why there is less engagement with your content? It’s not just that people are deleting Twitter. It’s that your posts are being kept in the equivalent of a slow lane of driving.
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There is not a faculty member, administrator, or student who will not be burned out at the end of this semester.
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3) There is an artificial limit placed on spread unless you pay for the blue checkmark. This affects strategy in two ways. First, many prominent tweeters don’t show up in feeds at all anymore. Second, the algorithm steers and suppresses potential viral tweets now.
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Academia strongly favors those who begin with disposable incomes, and those who either have moveable homes or flexible family situations. Most academic relationships that I know are couples living apart.
Dear everyone on the academic job market: it’s brutal out there, there’s a systematic attack on higher education and many of us who landed TT jobs are able to recognize much of it was sheer luck, even if combined with hard work (emphasis on sheer luck). Stay strong. 💕.
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My new syllabus only consists of fourteen pages of legal verbiage copied and pasted from the university. No readings, no assignments.
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I wrote a book! I've been notified that it's officially in stock and available at University of Illinois Press. Thank you to everyone who helped along the way - almost too many to name - but especially my mentor Michele Hilmes.
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Retweet if you believe that Public Broadcasting is an integral service of democracy.
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When your star students come back to you years later to say that reading Foucault really helped them to climb the business ladder. 😰.
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There should be a Presidential Medal of Archivists. Archivists have been saving valuable evidence all week.
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One thing I am learning this semester, if you are under 30, there’s only TikTok. There is no history of media, art, culture, or music. Only TikTok.
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2) Posts clearly get fewer views than they used to, but additionally, there is now a 5 to 15 minute delay on when a post shows up in the feed.
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Props to archivists, building and maintaining our memory infrastructure through it all.
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It’s my 28th anniversary with my partner today. We must’ve been 19 here.
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Just so I’m getting this straight: there might have been people within the Defense Department and Capitol Police who encouraged what they hoped would be a coup, and Trump refused to send military help while rioters literally called for Mike Pence’s head.
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Mark my words, within the next three years, the AI companies will be selling universities extremely expensive AI software to gauge if papers were written by AI. They’ve covered every base.
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RIP Cecil - she of unyielding optimism, confidence, and vitality. Lap sitter of two dissertations and a book. Bonded partner and antagonizer of Earl. She was an artist. Prolific builder of cat-henges. If it's ok I'd like to share a few.
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Surprised at how many TT and tenured professors that I know are just getting up and leaving the academy.
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Got a rare hour of lucidity from my grandma tonight, she asked me to read from my manuscript. At the conclusion of the hour she exclaimed “I love your book! and promptly fell asleep. Whatever comes next, I already got the response that I sought and needed.
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Good news today - my book is confirmed to be published next Spring. As a media historian it's an honor to work with the History of Communication series at the University of Illinois Press.
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When I was in grad school we affectionately referred to a non-academic friend as "a real person.".
Strongest possible advice to early grad students: you need outside hobbies or projects that are meaningful to you. It is dangerous for your only source of value, identity, and friendship to be academia. You absolutely have to find something else to invest in, it’s just not safe.
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I played them “Just Can’t Get Enough” and they liked it.
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The 1933 Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) are singular achievements of 20th century art.
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Here's the thing for those who don't study history, philosophy, theology, or cultural difference. The only ideological system that you're informed by is capitalism. And capitalism will tell you, over and over again, that your neighbor is redundant if they don't have use value.
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"Under new academic contracts, 15% of service time is allocated for two-step authentication.".
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This statue is right out of the Book of Genesis.
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My dad just ate his first burrito. Literally. From the local taqueria. He’s 73 and it has changed his life.
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I asked my Media Studies students how many of them read Twitter. Not use Twitter, just read it. The average came out to 0.57%. 100% had public or anonymous 1) TikTok and 2) Reddit accounts. About half actively used Instagram. But yeah Twitter's for old people.
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My best buddy has received five prognoses of two weeks or less since November. He’s declining but look how happy he is. Holding on.
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My grandma, currently in hospice: “Let’s watch Titanic tonight, all the rich people die!”.
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Now Biden has to pass hundreds of progressive executive orders.
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My partner totally finished their dissertation yesterday, and this is pretty much the happiest I've been about anything in years.
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I have essentially been given carte blanche by the university to shape the campus radio station, of course within FCC rules and guidelines. I’m feeling like this is going to turn into a 1990s indie movie in the next six months.
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This may sound like a lampoon, but the honest truth was that it was a great department, and they were very enthusiastic mentors of undergraduates. The hero worship thing gets stranger as time goes on though.
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what the what . "Researchers At Large Hadron Collider Are Confident To Make Contact With Parallel Universe In Days"
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There's really only one universally applicable point of academic "advice": Celebrate every milestone, large and small. Every. Single. Time. And celebrate your way. Yes, you did that thing, and it was difficult. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.
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My best advice for incoming grad students: always be happy for the success of others. Someone else's flourishing does not detract from your growth. Trust me, this is an important lesson in temperament for your own focus and inspiration.
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RIP Grandma - Helene Gordon was a lover of animals, art, theater, and conversation. A community organizer, voracious reader, accomplished painter, and penetrating intellect. She experienced inspiration and loss, and fiercely maintained her curiosity and independence for 90 years.
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Woke up to an acceptance letter for an article that I’ve been working on for close to 10 years on the historical origins of public policy research. Going to celebrate with coffee. Enjoying the little things in lockdown.
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Academic Twitter is pretty much over. We're basically just a bunch of randos posting on X now. And you know what it's fine.
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2023 represented a pretty totalizing defeat for the Humanities. And we still have no collective plan except for striving for individuated stardom and fighting over scraps.
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My cats, before and after spending two straight quarantine weeks with me.
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This adorable little lady sat on my lap for hours while I wrote my dissertation. Six years later she's been sitting in my partner's lap for hours while she writes her dissertation. Erudite and loyal.
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One of them was eventually fired and went to live in the Black Forest. Another one became a passionate Trump supporter.
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I feel like getting the PhD is a bigger life accomplishment than getting an academic job, because: 1) What if someone doesn't want to be a professor but they endeavor to complete their education? And 2) Academics is a Kafkaesque nighmare. But no one can take away the degree.
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The National Museum of Brazil housed 20 million items. The amazing British Museum houses 8 million. This is a epochal level catastrophe of Alexandria proportions.
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Adorno, 1938: I'm really worried about fascists. World: Oh Adorno, you're so pessimistic. Adorno, post WWII: I'm really sad about the Holocaust. World: Oh Adorno, you're so depressing. Adorno, 1960s: We should be careful with capitalism. World: Oh Adorno, knock it off already.
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Public media advocates built its infrastructure without a profit motive or advertising support between 1935 and 1967 to expand equal access to education. In the process its researchers founded the academic discipline of Communication Studies.
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happy anniversary to Betsy, high school sweetheart and love of my life. 27 years, and we did the math and think we’ll be able to make 27 more.
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I've been in a Hegel reading group for about 10 months now, and we are up to page 135 out of 734 pages.
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Delighted to announce my book 'Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting' is under contract in the History of Communication series at University of Illinois Press. It looks at the media reform movement's advocacy strategies to increase equal access to education.
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I'm delighted to announce that "Shadow of the New Deal" has won the @BEAWebTweets Book Award. An honor to be recognized by colleagues, and with BEA, the media industry itself.
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Calling it today after four months of obsessive comparative poll reading - Harris is going to win.
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Democrats have hedged their entire approach to governance on two concepts: “incrementalism” and “triangulation,” both which turn out to be mirror image proxies to “trickle down economics.”.
This past week has seen a repudiation of the court-based theory of change that has defined legal liberalism for several decades in the US: a theory that elite lawyers will always be able to use elite reasoning to persuade elite judges not to let things get out of hand.
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whispers: journalists write better than humanities academics.
When I was doing my PhD my supervisor told me 'You write like a jouranlist' as an insult. I was told frequently my writing wasn't sophisticated enough. Today, someone sent me a message saying how accessible my work was to read. I'd rather hear that than by 'sophsitcated'.
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This generation doesn’t so much “become” academics, as much as it survives the business of higher education.
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I was in Madison in 2011 when Scott Walker disbanded unions, including the grad TAA, which was the oldest in the country. 70% of the faculty sat idly and opined that it was ok because students were a replaceable commodity. Now they’ve come for faculty.
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Fascinating archival find – the original internal study at CBS about how audiences actually responded to War of the Worlds. Really worth reading, almost nobody thought there was an alien invasion. People interpreted it through the prism of their personal fears.
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Just a random Saturday night post to praise librarians for keeping all of our projects and courses going. Librarians are literally keeping the Academy together right now.
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Major road trip highlight: the architecture of Merchants’ National Bank in Grinnell, Iowa. Designed by Louis Sullivan in 1914.
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Dudes I am going to Paris for the first time next week. Gonna be an unapologetic baguette and art museum tourist.
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This guy went blind last week as a symptom of advanced kidney disease. Today, he can see. Earl is indestructible.
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I’m Jewish and my wife is Catholic, so tonight we’re going to get drunk.
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At this point, most of my academic dreams have to do with never having to apply for anything ever again, and taking weekends off to read for fun and maybe try out some recipes.
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How amazing is the Baltimore Museum of Art? It’s free, has an amazing collection, and John Waters donated a bathroom that carries his name.
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My job just sent me an email that they will pay me $25 per month if I download an app on my phone and take 10,000 steps per day, 12 days per month. That $300 will buy a lot of cheeseburgers and fondue.
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Well my apartment complex has been on fire for the past two hours. But we got the cats out safe and they finally let us grab the car to drive a ways away.
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A few weeks ago this guy was diagnosed with a terminal condition, with rapid weight loss, a grave x-ray, and hair falling out. But we decided to run more tests, and it turned out that he had an infection and pancreatitis. A week of antibiotics and he’s back to normal. ❤️
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I have a PhD in cultural studies and a doctoral minor in critical pedagogy. Part of a small group of leftist theory grads, an almost impossible combination to study anymore. Which is too bad. I love Paulo Freire.
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In Chicago with my gravely ill grandma. On unexpected life experiences: My grandma has me reading her chapters of my first book as I finish. She won’t make it to publication. Always a teacher, she listens attentively, asks questions, points out passages in need of clarification.
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