Finally rewatched Gattaca (1997). What a beautiful movie. Cinematography: Sławomir Idziak (Three Colours: Blue, Black Hawk Down).

Happy publication day! Thrilled to share a new #openaccess article in the Journal of Open Humanities Data. If you've ever wondered how LLMs are assessed for historical knowledge and reasoning, then read on! 🧵 doi.org/10.5334/johd... 1/8

(1/7) Below, I share the slides for a talk I gave Tuesday at NYU's "Cultural AI" conference. The talk was about how slippery "culture" becomes in discussions of AI. A beautiful example of this comes to hand, because another conversation about culture and AI is taking place today!

A very good article on AI and coding from the NYT by @clivethompson.bsky.social Here's a gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/m...

"The Pentagon and [NSC] significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz" This is the sort of decision making case we teach at war colleges and I will be fascinated to see what happened here.

New blogpost from my business partner about how we are teaching AI the wrong way — should not be about prompting, but how to design systems, cultivate judgement, delegate specialized tasks. anastasiastasenko.substack.com/p/the-phenom...

Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii, but its graffiti survived. New tech just revealed what it’s been hiding.

There is no best VLM OCR model - rankings can flip completely by document type. I built ocr-bench: run open OCR models on YOUR documents, get a per-collection leaderboard. VLM-as-judge with Bradley-Terry ELO, all running on @hf.co. No local GPU needed.

I love everything about this! The conviction that a major figure was not struck by a bolt of lightning but worked to understand the system he would ultimately critique and help dismantle. The scholarly sleuthing rare books — all of it. 😎🤓 www.science.org/content/arti...

In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower warned: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists & will persist.”

Pick up your Age Of Revolutions companion collection! Great essays drawn from essays that first appeared on the site and others unique to the book! upress.virginia.edu/title/10176/

New publication: Very glad to see my article on American food and Italians in WWII in @modernitaly.bsky.social 😍 Thanks to @efghilmno.bsky.social and Camilo Erlichman guest editors of SI on Allied occupation 🙏 #WWII #foodhistory www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Probably not based on a true story

Academic friends: I'm hosting a campus discussion today with real talk about the the scholarly publishing process/pipeline, and would love to share some "in the trenches" wisdom: what is something you know now about the process that you wish you'd known as a first-year/early-career academic?

There are a lot of interesting things in here but to see the USCCB come after the most famous/awful decision from the Taney court was a nice moment for me.

Thrilled to finally be sharing my Densho blog post on disabled Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII. #DisabilitySky #skystorians Glad it made it in time for #DayOfRemembrance #EO9066 #AcademicSky densho.org/catalyst/ask...

That bot that deleted emails of a Facebook “AI alignment specialist” was a vibe-coded piece of viral slopware. LLMs are being steered into coding because failures are presumed to be easier to spot. But sycophancy, “hallucinations” and projection of mind happen with code, even when it “works.” ⬇️

Ten scholars revisit Jon Butler’s 2004 Journal of American History article, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” evaluating how it inspired historians to embed religion in “mainstream” modern U.S. history, and its legacy amidst historiographical trends.

Our release date is still seven months away, but my book is now up on the Yale website. Grateful to so many people who helped make this possible. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

Opportunity: we have two post-doc positions at Yale that are about to be opened! If you have finished your Ph.D. within the last 3 years in one of these areas, let's talk! First: Using AI and knowledge graphs to accelerate provenance research. Second: Knowledge graphs for research dataset discovery.

Announcing the release of new Common Corpus, and the first really global update. For the Indian AI Impact Summit we added 270B tokens of permissibly license collections, more than half of content from non-Western countries. pleias.fr/blog/blogcom...

Cardinal Cupich: “Today is a day that speaks to all those who live in the shadows and in secret. Our immigrant friends know what it is like to live in the shadows, fearing a knock at their door…God does not need papers to see who you are.”

My essay “Slouching Towards Arlington House” is out now in a special issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era, featuring “Historians of Crisis in a Moment of Crisis.” The whole issue is open access this month, thanks to the good folks at @uncpress.bsky.social.

Introducing anymap-ts: a new Python package that makes geospatial visualization easy! Built on MapLibre + TypeScript, anymap-ts brings the same rich mapping experience to both the web and Jupyter Notebook.

I wrote a book about how Americans have remembered, forgotten, and fought over George Washington and slavery for the past 250 years. It comes out on April 7—but you can win an advance copy and read it before anyone else by entering this giveaway on Goodreads! Please share.

The vibe of the Halftime Show

Playing the grinch at the 250th. washingtonmonthly.com/2026/02/05/p...

We are excited to share the CFP for next year's annual meeting in New Orleans, from January 7 through January 10! We are accepting proposals on any topic relevant to Catholic studies. To submit a proposal or visit our collaboration Google Sheet, visit achahistory.org/neworleans20....

“America is open to receive not only the Opulent & respected Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions…” Washington (1783)

Well done, Rice University Owls. Well done! www.chron.com/news/houston...

The Trump administration had another rough day in court trying to defend their removal of the slavery exhibit at the President's House site in Philadelphia. www.inquirer.com/politics/nat...

Today, on Fred Korematsu Day, we honor the man whose refusal to comply with the mass removal and confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II became one of the most significant challenges to government authority in U.S. history.

"Authoritarianism doesn’t disappear with the news cycle. The administration’s automatic lies about the killings and slander of the victims are less a cover-up of facts than a display of utter contempt for them." -- George Packer www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Today is pub day for "Until the Last Gun is Silent" @vikingbooks.bsky.social! It is about patriotism and dissent in the Vietnam era, through the stories of Coretta Scott King's antiwar activism & the life of Medal of Honor recipient Dwight "Skip" Johnson www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736800...

New at The Watch: I dug into archival witness accounts of the British siege of Boston prior to the American Revolution. They are remarkably similar to what we're seeing in Minneapolis. open.substack.com/pub/radleyba...

Discover the overlooked story of Black Revolutionary War hero Jim Capers, a drum major who fought in key Southern campaigns and even served with Francis Marion. A powerful read on courage and resilience. 👉 ageofrevolutions.com/2026/01/26/t...

The #WWII and the Home Front series continues on Wednesday with “Fences of War: Spatial Boundaries and Microhistories of WWII.” Cassie Tanks will share experiences of the home front using #OralHistories and local #archives. https://community.ncph.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?alias=WWIIWebinars2026

Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti. "Please get the truth out about our son."

Some history of this song. It got famous featured in O Brother Where Art Thou, included because Allison Krauss knew it as "Down to the Valley to Pray" having learned it from Doc Watson. But it is much older...

"Slavery was real" Tiny sign at the base of a brick wall that, until yesterday, held panels about the people enslaved by George Washington. Presidents House, Philadelphia.

***DEEP SIGH*** This is just the latest in our centuries-long fight over how to commemorate George Washington's involvement in slavery. It began while he was still alive, and continued immediately after his death, in the lead-up to Civil War, through Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and Black Lives Matter.

Tomorrow’s front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 23, 2026

I know I don't have a ton of media followers, but I'll put this out there anyway: if you need someone to comment/offer context on the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President's House site in Philly, get in touch. I just finished an entire book on Americans' fight over Washington and slavery.

I had a really fun time interviewing Malcolm Craig about post-apocalyptic tabletop RPGs from the Cold War and what they reflect about shifts in Cold War nuclear culture, and the differences between how the games were designed and how they were actually played. doomsdaymachines.net/p/playing-at...

Only took me a few weeks but here is a list of books to introduce one to all things military. My latest⬇️

read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/... 📣📣 CRITICAL AI'S LATEST ISSUE IS OUT! ALL CONTENT IS CURRENTLY FREE AND OPEN FOR YOUR PERUSAL 📣📣

I am so humbled and thrilled to say that my first book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America’s First Opioid Crisis, is a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize! 🗃️ @uncpress.bsky.social www.gilderlehrman.org/book-prizes/...

Have a look at the Introduction of my 'Encounters in Wartime Italy: A Social History of Invasion, Liberation, and Occupation' (OUP 2025)!! This is now available for free until 18 February 2026: academic.oup.com/book/61479/c... And the book is still 30% off with code AUFLY30!! Thank you, OUP!

1/ I recently wrote about Frances Perkins—FDR’s Labor Secretary and first woman cabinet member. She is best known as the architect of the New Deal but she had a lesser-known achievement: She dismantled her era’s version of ICE.🧵

Call for Papers! We are seeking short papers that center questions and stakes of time in AI models. How do machines encode time & how do they structure our experience of time? For example, work examining the compression of labor & capitalism within AI’s infrastructures and model vectors. Details: