Prickly Dispatches Roundup #4: August 2026
Greetings from Prickly Paradigm — we’re back in your inbox with another edition of Prickly Dispatches.
The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning by James Chandler is now available in print and online. Below you’ll find more information on the book and a link to a recent interview with Chandler for the American Campus podcast. We also have new writing from Prickly’s summer interns, who dove into our back catalog to bring you some fresh thinking on AI, celebrity book clubs, and Spielberg’s Disclosure Day.
Read on for the latest from Prickly Dispatches.
The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning
The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning is out now! Chandler, a literary and film critic by training, connects the the Trump administration’s contemporary assault on American universities to the nineteenth century “Know-Nothing” nativist movement, and considers — with the help of Roland Barthes — the limits of irony and satire as a response to Trump’s style of governance. Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville, the WWE, Jonathan Swift, Stephen Colbert, John Stuart Mill, and his own experience at an institution of higher learning, Chandler takes stock of Trump’s first year efforts to Know Nothing, again. Watch Prickly Dispatches for further updates from the author and press coverage.
Pamphlet Forum
We invite colleagues and critics to respond to our pamphlets through our Book Forums on Prickly Dispatches. For The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, leading voices from the war on higher education weigh in. What does Chandler get right? What does he miss?
You can read the full suite of commentary on Chandler’s pamphlet at our Pamphlet Forum for The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning.
Chandler on American Campus
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd interviewed James Chandler about The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning for the podcast American Campus. Chandler offers an overview of who the Know-Nothings were, why they wielded so much influence in American cities, and how their legacy impacts policy today. Shepherd and Chandler also have a spirited discussion about the legacy of classical liberals like Alexis de Tocqueville and J.S. Mill, and Chandler shares some extra reading recommendations on the Know-Nothings and higher education. Learn more here and listen at the link below.
From the Backlist
This summer we asked our interns to select a book from the Prickly Paradigm backlist and write their own Prickly Dispatch. We’re delighted to share their work with you here.
Smrithi Senthilnathan riffs on Ray Bradbury, Dead Internet Theory, and PPP pamphlet Data, Now Bigger and Better! (2015). She applies Melissa Gregg’s concept of data exhaust to the contemporary rise of AI, showing how our tendency to obscure the material costs of data feeds into a rising sea of slop.
Hannah Lee turns her attention to pop star Dua Lipa and the rise of celebrity book clubs through the lens of Katarzyna Bartoszyńska’s Reading Together (2025). While celebrity book clubs have been great for the publishing industry, do they really fill the social and cultural function of a book club proper? Lee thinks that whatever virtue they may have, they’re no substitute for “a round table, a bottle of wine, and the great risk of being changed by people who have zero stake in your image.”
Ava Volman takes us to the movies to watch Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s new alien movie—that never uses the word alien once in its 145-minute runtime. She turns to Bruce Kapferer’s 2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche, and Anthropology (2014) for inspiration as she maps Spielberg’s concerns onto our contemporary moment, where corporations are rapidly supplanting opaque government agencies as the ultimate villains of science fiction.
Lastly, some housekeeping for our subscribers—this will be our final newsletter sent via Beehiiv. Moving forward, we’ll be hosting our Book Forums and Dispatches on our main website, pricklyparadigm.com, and sharing content and updates with you via Substack. This requires no action on your part, but you’ll see the next phase of our evolution online and in your inbox this September.
