Brendan O’Kane

Fuck him up, Mencius

We're taking submissions for our annual book/article lists again. Submit your own, tell us about a colleague's work, or put down everything relevant from your press's Spring and Fall 2026 catalogues.

Mbappé effect: a variant of the Streisand effect in which overlapping propaganda and censorship regimes render the targeted individual's ostensive misbehavior simultaneously inescapable and incomprehensible

Surprise, the interview I recorded last October with Sarah Bramao-Ramos is live on @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social now! If you'd rather not read my book (open access via @uofmpress.bsky.social because they're the best), just listen to me babble about it instead: newbooksnetwork.com/teaching-and...

Join @acwise.bsky.social and me tomorrow at Main Point Books to kick off Halloween week, and THE NIGHT PARADE!

will have a new little daoist print for BEC in 2 weeks :> i was inspired by tibetan thangka paintings. not an aspirational meditation but perhaps something to look at while you imperfectly ponder. i chose wood sorrel compared to lotus flowers because the wood sorrel is a resilient and humble plant

"Let me think about this — there is one 'a' in the word 'lunch.'"

HARVARD STRIKE HARVARD STRIKE HARVARD STRIKE HARVARD STRIKE www.instagram.com/reel/De9j6Tb...

didn't hold with this altogether-ooky business myself until i saw the financials

Today’s hearing at City Hall regarding the closure of The Academy of Natural Sciences went well. Part 2: This Time with Subpoenas! is scheduled for Nov 16th. www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...

Awesome chat with @yangyangcheng.bsky.social and Yueran, we cover a lot of ground in 50 minutes

This is really cool - like Pastebin for nicely formatted poetry, with the text contained in the URL. Here's a demo with a recent Yuan Mei draft.

This 19th c lady’s multitool was found in the pocket(!) of an antique (1872) garment donated to the historic clothing archive at my employer. It features a button hook for fitted gloves and a tiny corkscrew. The corkscrew is too small for wine & was probably intended to open apothecary bottles.

Hey you. Do you live in Philly & enjoy taking walks? Join the #SaveTheAcademy street team We need people to hang posters in business windows, home windows, street poles, and anywhere else. We want reopening the museum to feel inevitable. Sign up here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

AI bros out here burning tokens instead of just slapping an Arduino on a prayer wheel and making enough merit for the whole community at a fraction of the cost

After 14.5 years my book The Dispatch: Rogue Americans in British Asia is coming out November 24th from Audant Publishing House. I will update for pre-sales soon. I'm so excited! If you know Levi Savage. This is also his story.

Literary Chinese for Why Bother With Literary Chinese: 今人乃我類，嚼蠟聞語言。 "People today are more or less like me: Listening to them talk is as dull as chewing wax." (Yuan Mei 袁枚, from 'Written at Random' 偶然作 7 of 13)

We’re encouraging people to carve #SaveTheAcademy pumpkins and then post them tagging @acadnatsci.bsky.social and Drexel (who isn’t on here), to continue the point that we’re not giving up. Get some templates and take action at save-the-academy.org (scroll down to find templates).

Many of humanity’s best stories feature a cunning antagonist—one who plagues the hero through deception and disguise. Dr. Jeremy R. Brown shares some examples in Ethiopic literature, including a full translation of the story “The Man Whose Servant Was Satan”: https://bit.ly/47PXvIW

I'm looking to hire a Japanese-English translator to do a very small amount of work related to something for my book. It is probably 30 minutes of work and I will pay. If you have any leads, send them my way please either by responding here or emailing me (damon.beres@gmail.com) ☀️

this is the type of shit David Byrne says directly into the camera in True Stories

oddly this translation was not me

"You Can See Everything" was phenomenal. I'm so glad Sir Patrick Stewart finally got to make his movie

I just noticed that the digital version of my book has been available since early September. Please find the links in my reply below:

Discontent Over Unrest Raises Questions, For Some

do you ever think about how The Leftovers refracted the post-9/11 combination of madness grief fear and anomie into imperfect little pinhole-camera glimpses of the post-COVID future

which questions

Trump's continued attacks on @repilhan.bsky.social the Somali American community, & our Muslim neighbors are a heinous attempt to distract from his complete & utter failure as president. Every American should be chilled to the bone: these are the actions of a dictatorship not a democracy.

a world where they denaturalize a sitting congresswoman is not a world where the law is operative

Going over my recent deposition in my lawsuit against the school district and I guess I’ll go die now

Interviewer: Can you explain this empty space in your resume? Laozi: Emptiness and presence emerge together but are named differently. Together we call it mysterious.

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Me, a Sinologist: The essay topic is 吾猶及史之闕文也. 1. Exordium: The Sage laments that the virtue of former historians no longer obtains. 2. Propositio thematis: Of old, historians left gaps in texts rather than fill them with baseless hearsay

chinaheritage.net/journal/in-t...

Having long been aware of those tech bros who read my work as utopian porn, where they’ve taken that doesn’t exactly surprise me.

(Buffalo buffalo voice) tow trucks tow trucks tow trucks tow

(hurt people hurt people voice) tow trucks tow trucks

Lots of people will weigh in with thoughts on Anne Carson in the coming days, but I will just note that she wins the epigraph game

For context: Princeton Classics famously did not tenure her.