S.J. Pearce
@homophonous
Andalusi lit and cultural history at NYU. Medieval, but not like that. Trying to strike a balance between critical and creative writing. Chaos muppet, always. Still perfecting my gazpacho.
Do the Spelling Bee editors just not accept the existence of ancient material culture in its entirety?
Kid's taking some kind of theory class and is in the "must! use! all! the new! vocabulary! all! the time!" phase. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/n...
Niche post for NYU colleagues: If you have UGs who are looking for another course this fall, please share this flier for Cultural History of Spain with them! The course is taught in English, so accessible to interested students with any languages/level. @appuhn.bsky.social @waterman.bsky.social
In completely unrelated news: I am a total badass. I used lasers and hung wallpaper.
Nothing new or insightful here, but the example this morning struck me as especially egregious: Why [rhetorical] is everyone looking the other way while POTUS play-acts at governance by tweet?
“How will Trump’s Hormuz toll work?” It won’t, you absolute nincompoops. Stop playing along like this is real or normal!
From one of the Arabic lit listserves. Because why would anybody need or want to learn about Arabic or Islam right now? (To say nothing of the not “right now” reasons…) Petition to stop huge humanities cuts at Exeter: www.change.org/p/stop-redun...
This is the start of my historical fiction/detective novel genre mashup:
I disagree with pretty much everything else Bret Stephens says in this conversation, but come on guys, this was such an unforced error and last week Susan Collins said she doesn’t regret having voted for Kavanaugh. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/o...
It gets worse. There is a qualitative difference between drunk tattoos and drunk *Nazi* tattoos that he completely glosses over in the next paragraph.
Seaching for a particular article with the keywords: +maimonides +safadi +tarawih +mazor. The article vs. what Google AI "thought" I was looking for:
I got a DNC fundraising email nominally from Graham Platner yesterday, before the most recent allegations & even then it had me wondering what the DNC thinks it’s doing. I’m not a political strategist but i wouldn’t push the misogynist with the Nazi tattoo to the front of national electoral efforts.
Reorganizing/tidying/recycling in my campus office. I found a small ziploc bag of… Moomins…? with my early modern lit. 🤷🏻♀️🦛
The wording on this sign is doing the exact opposite of what I think it was intended to do. #brooklyn
To paraphrase Naomi Shihab Nye, you have to have lived a very particular kind of life to be able to enjoy fireworks.
I mean… at some point let them not believe in weather and see how it goes?
As a side note, unlike a lot of rhyming children’s books, Sandra Boynton’s are actually translated into Spanish well — readable, preserving the fun, everything you want a translation to be.
My recollection is that the little black platforms under the columns at the Lever House were designed to make the building look like it it’s floating… …this is not that.
I have honestly never been more annoyed by a @democrats.org email than this one. If y’all really care about unity and defeating MAGA, Speaker @hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social, et al., need to stop delegitimizing the NYC primary results that have energized so many citizens.
Yes, those are cranes counting sheep on the Island of Sodor. Why do you ask?
Apparently several of the men in this painting are actually self-portraits.
An artist whose work I didn’t know is Osman Hamdi Bey, who was described in the Met’s Orientalism exhibition as a kind of insider who painted in the orientalist tradition but whose proximity to the subject matter yielded more humane portrayals.
7) Bohemian blown-glass replica of vases found in the Alhambra 8 and 9) Owen Jones’ architectural drawings of the Alhambra