Sunday, November 9, 2025 • 1
“… every text is connected to other texts by citations, quotations, allusions, borrowings, adaptations, appropriations, parody, pastiche, imitation, and the like. Every text is in a dialogical relationship with other texts. In sum, intertextuality describes the relationships that exist between and among texts. What follows is a discussion of the strategies of intertextuality.”
Sunday, November 9, 2025 • 3
I’ve stopped posting on most social media and moved to the fediverse. I still browse other platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on IG (friends only) and here. What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life—I’m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that’s great. This is how I approach learning and communicating online.
Saturday, November 8, 2025 • 2
While I’m cleaning up the cruft around my social presence, I’m finding more references to the heyday of blogging that explain how people organized online (Web 1.0) before the era of platforms (Web 2.0). One is this interview with Jill Filipovic, my one-time co-blogger and comrade at Feministe, with the folks at LGM who interviewed me on the subject a few years ago. Jill and I differed (and still do) on the meat of many issues, but have a lot of our thinking in common about how to handle disagreement and advance our ideas in common (and risky!
Saturday, November 1, 2025 • 3
There are certain pieces of writing I return to when thinking about our relationship with technology. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” published in 1985, is one of them. Despite being nearly forty years old, it continues to offer insights into how we understand technology’s role in our lives. Haraway used the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, as a metaphor for understanding identity in an increasingly technological and scientific world.
Monday, October 20, 2025 • 1
Purdue Exponent students distributed 3,000 copies of a special “solidarity edition” newspaper in Bloomington after IU spanked their student paper for insubordinance, ending the IDS print edition and firing their director. The media landscape in Indiana is bleak, generally, after years of disinvestment, so student reporters fill a social and political gap that the free market left behind. Given those conditions, the wider community depends on student media, much like public radio, to fill the information gaps.
Sunday, August 17, 2025 • 6
Thinking out loud about tech in the public sector, and the classic technical problem of covering the “last mile.”
Friday, August 15, 2025 • 7
As communications professionals in higher education, we work for institutions built on the pursuit of knowledge and innovation, yet many of us feel uncertain about how to thoughtfully integrate one of the most significant technological advances of our time: artificial intelligence. I offer some thoughts here.
Monday, February 10, 2025 • 1
While institutions are backing away from making position statements, news outlets are making lengthy statements of intent. This one from Madison is interesting because it also acknowledges that a portion of their audience may be intentionally avoiding news about the White House. This is a traditional trust-building strategy applied in a new way: explaining how the news outlet plans to allocate their resources in an era of “flooding the zone.”
Monday, November 11, 2024 • 1
Posting about my latest quilt for posterity. This is a “wonky star” quilt using 10” precuts, measuring about 60 X 70”. I completed the sides last night and will hand quilt all of it with a mix of big stitch quilting.
Thursday, November 7, 2024 • 1
Deactivated my Twitter account after fifteen years (sheesh).
Wednesday, September 25, 2024 • 1
Been playing with micro.blog for a bit now and very much recommend the experience. The interface is friendly and the team behind the app is ultra responsive. My fav features are Bookshelves - and the ability to push new posts to Bluesky and Mastodon. In other news, I got a new bike.
Tuesday, September 3, 2024 • 1
It’s soup season - and I’m a newly-minted member of the bean club. This is more or less my favorite lentil soup recipe, except I deglaze the pot with a healthy dose of dry red wine before adding the lentils and stock, and I stew it with a big sachet of fresh thyme.
Sunday, July 28, 2024 • 1
This butchery on the east side is owner-operated, and features meats only from local, humane farms. In addition, they are a “whole animal” butcher, in that they buy and break down a whole animal at a time, thus offering an array of extremely fresh products from sausage to steaks to specialty cuts (picanha, anyone?). One of the owners was working the counter this Saturday when we came in and greeted us with some suggestions for the day.
Tuesday, July 2, 2024 • 1
Last week I joined an old friend on a road trip through Wisconsin. We saw a folk show, stayed at a vintage motel, and camped in the crook of Green Bay. In our early years, we were both shit-kicking dirtbags, rebels, people who thumbed our noses at convention and were told (and fully believed) we wouldn’t amount to much. Today, we’re regular middle-aged ladies secure in our work, home and ambition, figuring out what the rest of our lives will look like.
Tuesday, June 25, 2024 • 1
This has a bad headline, but the gist is that AI is already beginning to be used to power racketeering and ransom business models against vulnerable human enterprises. The net effect is a general erosion of the trustworthiness of written communication, especially online, as the same tools we use to perform our work and extend our social lives are increasingly used to scam us.
Monday, June 3, 2024 • 1
A quick read by a singular voice, heavy on descriptions of the New York art and music scene of the 90s. Like many punk memoirs, it’s a tribute to the many names that made the movement and a memorial for a city that no longer exists. Gordon’s voice is kind and bold, curious and smart. Her descriptions of growing up in LA and coming of age in New York are painterly and poetic.
Friday, May 31, 2024 • 1
The Bookshelves feature of Micro.blog is easily my favorite of this platform. It sits right at the intersection of medium and function: as a reader I want to keep track of things, but I don’t need so much infrastructure around it. Just some checkmarks and a place to dash off my immediate thoughts. I’ve been keeping my virtual bookshelf up to date while pushing myself to take on a bunch of literary fiction, but I’m tired, reader.
Wednesday, March 6, 2024 • 3
The internet says Joann fabrics is going to declare bankruptcy, putting a huge market of individual crafters without access to in-person retail craft spaces into a tailspin. It’s likely they will ask their creditors to restructure their debt, making them able to keep some stores open. The whole market relies heavily on in-person shopping (it’s a textural and sensory shopping experience, which is the point!) and hasn’t pivoted well to e-commerce.
Wednesday, February 28, 2024 • 1
I’ve been waiting for this one because it’s a story I know well. It is an impeccably reported book covering how young women navigated a compromised, stigmatized, coercive landscape around unplanned pregnancies in the late 20th century. Sisson is a comprehensive writer whose reporting is deeply empathetic, based on her personal experience as an activist and academic working in reproductive justice alongside extensive research. She discusses the history of the adoption movement at length, connecting it to other institutional family separation movements, and considers it alongside the choice to abort unplanned pregnancies and against the decision to parent anyway, often in a deeply compromised social and political climate.
Thursday, February 22, 2024 • 1
I finished my latest quilt on my birthday, a Halloween quilt made from precuts (no pattern) that I started in 2021? 2022? I don’t know how old it is. It’s been languishing. I don’t love shoving a huge quilt through my lil sewing machine, so I still hand quilt these puppies using 6-strand embroidery floss. It’s hard on my hands but gives the final quilt so much texture and weight.
Thursday, February 22, 2024 • 1
My delightful book club pulled this YA graphic novel out of the 2023-24 “best of” lists and loved it. There is a remarkable amount of information on each page - truly, you could build a dynamic reading curriculum off of each section - between the written and visual communication. A triumphant example of quality science writing, a great gift book, suitable for just about any audience over the age of ten.
Friday, February 16, 2024 • 1
This story spun up yesterday with broad outcry from academics, and with good reason. Institutions needs to define and clarify their relationship to tech in order to assuage ongoing concerns about monetization in a fast-moving landscape. gizmodo.com/universit…
Tuesday, January 23, 2024 • 1
I just spent a pile of money on books, with the goal of reading for pleasure every day, and with the intention of sprinkling some light stuff around my generally serious reading preferences. While I usually read like a dad, heavy on the serious memoirs and book-length nonfiction explainers, I’m trying to take on some lighter reads because mom needs a little sugar with her medicine. So far, I’m doing an okay job of keeping track of my reading habits here, which is why I ponied up for a paid membership to this site at all: flotisserie.
Tuesday, January 2, 2024 • 4
After a stint as an English major and as a writer myself, I got into a habit of reading dozens of articles a day instead of longer form writing: books. I spent a lot of energy in 2023 getting back to books. Thanks to a great book club (you know who you are) and making space to settle in with a great book in a cozy spot, here are my favs from 2023:
Thursday, December 14, 2023 • 4
I’m following a new environmental drama in my Hoosier hometown. Some geniuses in the Indiana statehouse decided to court agreements to build gigantic computer chip plants in an area of the state that lacks one critical thing: there’s no water. Computer chip manufacturing apparently requires a ton of water. “No problem!” the intellectual giants said. “There is the large Wabash River aquifer to the north that we can just have piped 35 miles down to our site.
Monday, December 4, 2023 • 2
Currently reading: A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan 📚 Despite being from Indiana, I feel like I’ve heard very little about this book, which covers the rise of the Indiana KKK in the early 1900s. The book’s central story revolves around the Grand Dragon, a bad man whose bad acts finally land him in enough trouble that the powers that be couldn’t ignore his non-KKK activities any longer.
Tuesday, November 28, 2023 • 1
Finished reading: The Woman in Me by Britney Spears 📚 Come for the juicy tell-all, stay for the damning details on how Britney’s abusive father, codependent mother and opportunist sister ensnared one of the world’s biggest stars into an abusive conservatorship, and consider at length why we ask young starlets to run through these gauntlets in exchange for our attention. It’s neither the complete portrait of the artist nor the feminist manifesto I wish it was, but I came away from it with more empathy and respect for her and what horrors she’s weathered.
Thursday, November 23, 2023 • 1
I was invited to submit to the pop culture fiber craft show at Gallery 1988 again this year. Last year I sold a large Kris Jenner meme quilt. I was delighted to be included and nervous about how my work would be received, and was chuffed to be one of the first artists whose work sold. I immediately took that money and bought a rigid hettle loom. I had recently taken a class and loved it, and also needed a new way to use up some of my growing yarn stash.
Saturday, November 18, 2023 • 3
This sausage and cornbread dressing is one of my favorite recipes, a dish present on every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter table at my childhood home. The original recipe lives in a non-descript church cookbook from somewhere in the Middle South from the 1970s, and another iteration lives in an email from 2008, which is terribly inconvenient. I decided to record it here for posterity, with some of my own notes added.
Monday, November 6, 2023 • 1
Created some artsy fartsy rules for myself where I have to finish something old before I start something new, just to keep some momentum going on existing projects. I have several outstanding embroidery, quilting, knitting AND crochet projects, and a loom I refuse to assemble until I knock out one or two of these other ones. My two biggest priorities are a giant garter stitch shawl that I began pre-pandemic and really want to finish because it’s so beautiful - and so boring to knit - and a gigantic crochet mosaic blanket that is teaching me the ins and outs of crochet.