June 1-7, 2026

As this is my first entry of weeknotes, before writing out these actual notes, I wrote a general introductory post and posted it to my blog site.

Dissertation

Early this week I received a desk rejection for a paper that I had submitted a few months ago to a top journal. I wrote the paper several years ago now, and I no longer feel that it represents my best work. But I still broadly think that it contributes something to the discourse (about AI and capitalism), and had hoped to place it in this journal on account of the fact that last year I had had a paper rejected from the same venue, but with encouraging comments. The peer review timelines in the humanities are punishing, unfortunately, and so I now have on my hands a paper that I’m beginning to feel less excited about (it has been rejected from two journals now), but which I feel that I should still peddle, especially given my early career stage as an academic.

Part of my feeling divided about the academic mercantilism of pushing to publish papers in prestigious venues is that, in the very early years of my PhD, I ‘open sourced’ a paper after another paper came out that (I felt) stole the (almost inaudible) thunder of the point I wanted to make. Though I don’t feel at all that this paper was my best work, I do hear every now and then from folks who have found it on my website and find the writing useful or interesting one way or another. Had I published it in the non open-access venue for which it was written, I very much doubt it would have been read as much. Of course, releasing papers as ‘preprints’ on my website abandons the benefits of peer review, which are non-trivial when the process is done right. But I increasingly am beginning to feel as though the time-cycle of peer review in the humanities (6-12 months, sometimes more) also prevents a lot of good work from coming out in a timely fashion. Whether or not the essay that I have just had rejected is a part of that ‘good work’ is, of course, a question that I am not best positioned to answer, as the paper’s sole author and therefore someone with an emotional attachment to the piece that makes me want to see it as such.

On the reading front, I am still working my way through Kojin Karatani’s Kantian Marxian treatise Transcritique, a book whose argument will help structure the transition from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 of my dissertation. (I currently have a full draft of Chapter 1, and need to complete a full draft of Chapter 2 before the summer is out.) I also churned through a number of the articles in the most recent edition of the LRB (having just purchased a subscription), and finally opened George Eliot’s Middlemarch, having purchased a hard copy of the novel last Christmas.

Digital Theory Lab

I spent 3-4 hours drafting an introduction and reviewing PRs for a paper I’m working on with colleagues at the Digital Theory Lab that we hope to place in a machine learning interpretability venue later this year. (The outlines of the idea are in this presentation by Leif Weatherby and Tyler Shoemaker from a few months ago.) I need to present a full draft of this paper to my DTL colleagues early next week.

Rheo

I refactored the Typst template from two Rheo sites (https://rheo.ohrg.org and https://book.cftw.ohrg.org/) into a sidebar component in the rheo-packages registry. (Previously, this was very similar code duplicated across both repos, as the packages feature in Rheo only landed three weeks ago, which enabled this factoring out.)

I also created a rheo-author Claude skill so that Claude Code can do a better job at working within Rheo projects without me having to provide a lot of context in every prompt.

LOLM

I spent one morning in the library firming up a Turing test entry, which was then discussed by members of the project in our weekly working group. (More information on the LOLM project, which I run with Ryan Healey, is available here.)

LIMINAL

In the coming weeks I need to finish up a frontend project for LIMINAL Lab. Several months ago, I (vibe-)coded a prototype of the application using React and zustand. There is an interactive table component in this application that has been fragile since I spun up the prototype; and I am almost unconquerably unmotivated to delve into the particulars of react-window to work out why the styling keeps going out of whack.

In an attempt to motivate myself to get steaming on the project again, I spent an evening (vibe-)porting the basics of the application to Jane Street’s Bonsai framework. Almost a decade ago now, I explored the tradeoffs between Elm and React as an undergraduate project, and in all of the serious frontend work done since I have longed for a framework that feels better than React, for a way to write web applications with more express use of types.¹

The OCaml tooling setup (opam, dune, etc.) took an hour or two to get used to, as it’s not quite as smooth-surfaced as the modern bundling tooling for JS (pnpm, vite, etc.). But I now have a basic copy of the single-page-application prototype I had in React, and am much more excited to rewrite the interactive table component while refining my OCaml and Bonsai. This will be the thrust of what I work on in this coming week.

et al.

Kohei Saito, the Japanese eco-Marxist who came to fame through his book on Marx and the Anthropocene (and the youngest ever winner of the Deutscher Prize, apparently), was in Torino for a film festival! I moved to Torino at the beginning of this year with my partner, and we are still ‘integrating’ and learning about the sociality and activities that take place here; so it was nice to feel as though a part of my academic world (anglophone ‘Marx people’) was here, if only briefly. We fangirled after the interview and got a picture with him: