I’ve been frustrated by the tweets I’ve seen of this as a Canadian. Because the facts are being misrepresented.

We’re not under some sort of major persecution. That’s not what this is. A thread. 1/8

There's a particular kind of romantic partnership, with a certain sort of person, that I've wanted since I became a self-aware, directed agent at around age 15.

Empirically, this kind of relationship has been hard to achieve. It hasn't worked out yet, at least.

And this sometimes leaves me wondering if my standards are unreasonable.

In years past that desire was often very alive.

These days, I'm rarely directly or viscerally in contact with it.

I sometimes contemplate aiming for some other kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship instead. In part because I might be more effective if I...I don't know, got laid more? But that's not really the thing. More like, if I had someone around whom I could regularly relax.

But mostly, I don't pursue those alternative relationship-setups out of a sense of something like loyalty to myself + a vague sense of wrongness and/or sadness about it. It often feels like giving up or giving in.

[I might elaborate on the wrongness sometime.]

@cain_nate My friend Nate Cain and I have worked hundreds of hours with various politicians and legal groups trying to explain the election laws and how they fit together. There are many misperceptions of what happened during this election and what it means.

Simply put, our election laws are an intricate tapestry designed to ensure accuracy and prevent fraud. They work together like parts of a car. But when certain parts fail, the car is just a hunk of scrap iron and plastic. In this case critical parts failed.
2/

You do not have to prove fraud or intent, you just have to show that the election officials were unable to conduct an election that met the law and relevant certification requirements. In this case, the election does not come close to meeting accuracy requirements.
3/

These specifications are found deep in laws like FISMA, HAVA, and state adoptions of EAC guidance. 1 ballot error out of 125,000 or 1 position read error out of 500,000. Just look at the discrepancies between incoming ballot counts and total votes, the system fails.
4/

It is worse in the the swing states in Democrat strongholds but it is bad in many places. You add the apparent losses of ballots through the Mail and error rates in the ‘system’ are staggering. Why do we have these rules? Sure it is to prevent fraud, but......
5/

THREAD: On the full-fledged process of responding to a Revise-And-Resubmit (R&R).

I have written pieces of the process, but I hadn't actually written a thread or a blog post showcasing how all my blog posts fit with one another. I teach this process when I give workshops.

So here's what I do (now), and let me share a lesson from my past lives:

DO NOT SIT ON R&Rs.

I know, they're painful and scary and sometimes we don't know if our paper will get rejected in the end.

But remember, an R&R means an OPPORTUNITY to get your paper published.

Sitting on R&Rs, leaving them for later, and not prioritizing them has gotten me fewer publications. I know this for a fact. I am not ashamed of admitting that I have sometimes felt that I will not be capable of responding to multiple (often conflicting) comments.

HOWEVER...

Sustained, frequent advice from professors who are senior to me (though I am senior myself now too) is always the same and on-point:

The goal is the R&R.

You're not getting a desk rejection.

You are getting your work read, reviewed carefully, thought about, responded to.

What do I do now (and have been doing for the past few years, with success)

When I get the R&R (the "decision letter"), I make sure to calm down, because I am always afraid I'm going to get nasty comments. These have been (luckily) very rarely present in my latest submissions.

1) Dreaded thread on why I think the response to postcritique is so vitriolic. Short version: Because literary studies is a discipline in search of an application.

2) Before I go on, I'll say from the outset that many in lit studies explicitly reject the idea that the field *should* have an application. My opinion is that's fine if you want to do book clubs, but if you want an institution you can't ignore that difficult issue. But anyway...

3) The evidence by this point is overwhelming that when lit scholars talk about 'method' we're actually just talking about ourselves: 'ways of reading,' 'how we argue,' 'phenomenology of reading,' etc. etc.

4) David Kurnick nicely illustrates this phenomenon:

5) But none of this is method discussion. Talking about ourselves, how we approach our objects of study, our motives and objectives, our commitments, etc. would be the *beginning* of a method convo in every other discipline. In lit studies it's the *end*, or the whole convo!