Samara Rafert

It's that time again. I'm really, really excited about these books. Some highlights in comments. Email me OSUP_publicity@osu.edu for review copies! bit.ly/fall-26-s

New interview with brenda Lin! UNRAVELING THREADS brings together etymology, textile history, Taiwanese history, and personal narrative so beautifully. chajournal.com/2026/10/13/t...

ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

Good news and a thank you to Ukraine! Bot traffic from Russian tech company Yandex’s network has plunged following Ukrainian strikes on its data centers.

Didja hear the one about the chemist who became a literary critic? He was great at identifying isotropes

Gina Gwenffrewi's J. K. ROWLING AND THE ANTI-TRANS PANIC, out now from @ohiostatepress.bsky.social, is excerpted here!

medium.com/prismnpen/go... @tuckerlieberman.com @ginagwenffrewi.bsky.social

After 30+ years of listening to "Heroin" by the VU, I finally realized it's "thank God that I'm not aware," not "thank God that I'm not all wet."

LOL, the gotcha part in the second paragraph is truly hilarious. Who will think of the straight white rightwing men in the literary world? WHO? WHO?

Report Reveals Jesus Christ May Have Benefited From Father’s Influential Position To Gain High-Powered Role As Lord And Savior https://theonion.com/report-reveals-jesus-christ-may-have-benefited-from-fat-1833717521/

Out now: my book, about the institutional and localized impact of anti-trans campaigns in the UK. C1 + 4 analyse the anti-trans outputs of JKR and R.Gervais; C2 + 3 about GC ideology and anti-trans campaigns on a uni campus; C5 about media; C6 about the beauty and magic of being trans in Edinburgh.

Workers at the signage firm Spanjer Brothers, Newark, New Jersey, with giant wooden letters destined for the Singer Sewing Machine Co., 1897 Image: 1916 company catalog, Avery Library Architectural Trade Catalogs Collection via @archive.org; archive.org/details/cata...

Dense fog, Minneapolis 9th St. and LaSalle Ave. October 27, 1943 Image: Hennepin County Library; digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/coll...

This reminds me of Simon Armitage's brilliant entry in the book Mortification: Writers' Stories of their Public Shame.

Life and Death Contrasted, engraving from ca. 1770. Discover its male counterpart here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/life-and-death-contrasted-ca-1770?utm_content=bufferddaa4&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

If I fits, I sits

Rendered by the inimitable @cooljerk.bsky.social, here are all the new power plants that went online in the first half of the year, by state. Wow, Texas! That's a shit ton of batteries. Here's the accompanying story: insideclimatenews.org/news/1308202...

This cruelty has no need but cruelty. Haiti remains deeply dangerous; a country in the throes of anarchy. Hundreds of thousands of people are SAFE. They are safe. They are safe here and the nation has decided to make them unsafe. We are embarking on a tragedy and we cannot look away. We cannot.

Really value my morning ritual of waking up, pouring myself a cup of coffee, making my way through the next few minutes in a dissociative fugue state, and pouring myself the same cup of coffee again

I strongly disapprove of the decision to have an extremely loud rock band play in the middle of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on a Sunday afternoon #getoffmylawn

The two most satisfying moments so far on my trip home to Delaware: --Revealing to my high school friend that not everyone calls it "water ice" --Explaining to my Ohio children what scrapple is

I also did not want to cut my children’s sandwiches into star shapes, a problem for which there was an extremely straightforward solution

I have definitely noticed an uptick in deep backlist sales from the OSU Press list. It's not the perpetual bestsellers but one-offs from decades ago that even I, after seven years at the press, have barely heard of. www.404media.co/ai-companies...

Original artwork available via everydayoriginal.com. Pachycephalosaurus Brown and graphite pencils on Hand Book Journal Company sketchbook paper, approximately 207 x 130 mm. Another small page of studies from c.2018. As with others from then, I would do things a little differently now. 1/2

I am so fucking tired of creating accounts

My favorite part of the print @theonion.com is "passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood"

HyperEssays has had full-text search of John Florio’s and my own ongoing translation of the Essays (w/ Cotton/Hazlitt’s as a placeholder) for a while. Today I’m happy to announce that the original Middle French text is also searchable on the site. 🥳 hyperessays.net

Want to know more about the US at 250? ReadUP! Here are some suggestions from university presses & their expert authors, reflecting on the American experiment from the Founding to today: https://bit.ly/4xQZlFq

Annual Report cover Minneapolis Public Library 1966 Images: Hennepin County Library Organizational Records Collection; digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/coll...

I just heard Dan ask our child, "Should we listen to Charles Mingus or Charles Mingus?" Say what you will about Dan, when he finds something he likes sticks with it.

This is an excuse to repost my favorite live video of Sue’s Changes, from Montreux. This performance basically contains all the things in life. m.youtube.com/watch?v=cklE...

NEW: The Water Defenders, the award-winning book on the historic 2017 metals mining ban in El Salvador, is now available as a beautiful graphic novel. “If you’re in need of some inspiration... look no further than this crucial and absorbing account." Preorder now: ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

@ruthbenghiat.bsky.social just interviewed this book's authors! Ordinary people CAN stop corporate greed! The Water Defenders How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed @johnelkington.bsky.social @rbreich.bsky.social @hcrichardson.bsky.social ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

We chatted with NiemanLab about the Porter Square Review of Books!!