Category: Recognition
-
The Mystery of the Silent Steamer: A Biblios Heights Stacks Academic Library Noir
The rain in Biblios Heights was coming down in cold, gray sheets, the kind of drizzle that turns the Social Science stacks into a labyrinth of shadows and damp wool. I was at my desk, navigating the precarious centrality of my own dissertation, when the silence hit me. It wasn’t the “shhh” of a student…
-
The Official Wild Stacks Survival Guide: How to Handle the Silence Behaviors in the Stacks of Your Academic Library
Welcome, fellow academic library explorers! Have you ever noticed that a university library isn’t just a quiet place for study? It’s a dense, thriving ecosystem of institutional logic and relational labor! And like any wild habitat, it has its distinct, and often amusingly predictable, inhabitants. Today, we’re going to help you identify and manage the…
-
Didn’t We Almost Have It All
I am not a historian of the internet. I want to say that definitively at the start, before the argument gets going. Because the argument I want to make is going to make claims that historians, media theorists, and platform economists have made more clearly, more rigorously, and with better citations than I am about…
-
The Open Gate: Dar’Khan Drathir and the Politics of Insider Betrayal
Let’s take a closer look at the particular kind of damage that the named enemy cannot do to you. Arthas Menethil arrived at the gates of Quel’Thalas with the Scourge at his back and death in his hands. We see him coming. His arrival was declared. Whatever he was going to do, he was going…
-
The Rubber-Meets-the-Road Test
Critical librarianship is everywhere. The reading lists, the conference panels, the bios. Nobody is against it. The profession has learned to wear the critique like a lanyard. Sara Ahmed, writing about institutional diversity work, calls it “doing the document.” The report that stands in for the action, the statement that substitutes for the risk. The…
-
The Current Doesn’t Know Your Name
Earlier today, I was watching a movie. It was one of those feel-good things that just hit the right spot. I needed to feel good. Then, it said what they always say — it’s never too late. Instead of feeling good, I felt something tighten. I followed that feeling back, the way you sometimes do,…
-
Sophisticated Extraction: Wrathion and the Politics of Allegiance
The first time I encountered Wrathion in Mists of Pandaria, I was suspicious of him in the way you are suspicious of someone who is performing transparency. He tells you who he is. He explains his motives. He places himself above the factions with a reasonableness that is almost disarming: I don’t care who wins…
-
The Senior Sage: Archmage Antonidas and the Politics of the Slow No
There is a specific kind of institutional violence that does not look like an assault. It does not carry the scorched-earth aggression of a volatile leader or the calculating defection of a careerist. Instead, it manifests as a deep, scholarly sigh. It is the violence of the Slow No, performed by a figure who has…
-
Arthas Moments: Of Contortion, the Weapons We Make of Love, and the Politics of Self-Evacuation
We often encounter the character Arthas Menethil as monstrosity, an irredeemable bad guy. The Lich King on the Frozen Throne. The man who killed his father. The prince who razed Stratholme with his own hand and called it mercy. That version offers us the comfort of clean moral distance. A villain whose choices can be…
-
Capture Soul: Lord Kazzak and the Politics of Overreach
Lord Kazzak is a world boss. He spawns in the Blasted Lands, at the Tainted Scar. He belongs there, his rightful place. The encounter is designed for that terrain, that context, those conditions. He is formidable there. There, he is also legible. You know what you are entering when you go there. You chose to…