Elizabeth Donald Linkspam for April 2026 This newsletter was written on time. And then it didn’t send. Those responsible would have been sacked except they are me. On the second day of the AWP conference last month, Jim and I finally broke free to snag some lunch, and then I requested to do a couple of…
Category: linkspam
Wait, where is February going?
Happy almost Valentine’s Day! Somehow I blinked, and it was Feb. 11 and I hadn’t sent out a newsletter yet. Who’s running this show? Those responsible will be sacked – oh yeah, that was me. As you can tell by the seriously-delayed newsletter, the semester is rolling. Three of my four classes are working on…
It’s beginning to look a lot like December!
December is always a blessing. The semester is coming to an end and the light at the end of the tunnel may or may not be an oncoming train. I decided to make it a light holiday season and only booked one signing for December. There’s always plenty to be done: digging out the office,…
October-November Linkspam
October was a blast, or at least it must have been, because I hardly remember it! Somehow each year there’s a month that just sort of disappears in a melee of overbookedness, and it’s usually October. That’s why you’re getting two months’ worth of schtuff at once! This is my favorite time of the year. I…
August 2025 Linkspam
It is a universal truth among academics that when Aug. 1 rolls around, the panic hits. We all begin the summer with the best of intentions. We will finally have time to read that giant backlog sitting on the TBR pile. We will unearth the surface of our desks and sort out the chaos that…
February 2025 Linkspam: Are ya feeling WEIRD?
You know what’s fun? Spending an hour writing your newsletter copy, only for a glitch to eat the whole thing. That kind of fits with how things are going these days, doesn’t it? Pretty WEIRD… I know the world is burning down and reading your Facebook feed is enough to leave you hyperventilating into…
January 2025 Linkspam: Happy New Year!
Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. — Samuel Clemens Remember when I said I greatly regretted taking on such a huge class overload for the fall? Well, it pretty much ate me for the last two months of 2024, and one of the things that fell through the cracks was this newsletter. So…
October 2024: This newsletter was not created by AI
It seems everywhere I go, I’m plagued with AI. Cribbing term papers is not a new invention; since the first teacher scratched out the first assignment on a stone tablet, Krog and Ug were sneaking peeks at each other’s slate. But AI has taken avoiding the work of writing to a new, shiny level, and…
September Linkspam: It’s in the syllabus
Holy late newsletters, Batman! Remember when I told you folks that I was a tad overcommitted for the fall? I wasn’t kidding. I ended up with nine classes at three universities for the fall, and that’s at least three to four more classes than any sane person should try to teach and four to five…
August linkspam: Back to school even though it’s summer
When I was a kid in Massachusetts, school started after Labor Day. I was floored when my family moved to Baltimore, where classes began at the end of August, and then to Tennessee, where school inexplicably opened by the middle of August and where did my summer go? I have friends whose kids are now…