Airline wants me to pay $45 to check my bag in. We both know that if I drag it to the gate, they'll check it for free. Why must we do this dance, Southwest? There's only one way it will end. (Me gate checking my bag for free.)

The ASU The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is searching for its next Director of the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. Head to Interfolio for details, or message me! Please share widely. apply.interfolio.com/187054

I want the "Keep me signed in" box to keep me signed in.

H&R Block Location Mistaken For ‘Backrooms’ Fan Event

'many polytechnics...sought to widen access to the humanities by developing their own provision. Indeed, the conversion of polytechnics into universities in 1992 was justified in part by the principle that a general intellectual education should not be the preserve of a narrow elite.' 2/4

Be perverted, read books

One of my most prized possessions is a used copy of In a Glass Darkly, wherein some earlier owner has annotated Carmilla and slowly comes to the horrific conclusion that it is a Lesbian Thing. "Girls like butterflies?" "Perverse..." "Perverts!!!" "Perverts!!!!!"

It's true. No one prepares you for how fun it is to go full cringe.

This looks like it will be a great conference on 'Maritime Histories from the Margins, 1500-present. The call for papers is here: CALL FOR PAPERS www.rmg.co.uk/call-papers-...

That is not what immersive reading is though.

this recent assessment of scholarship on hegel and race is very good

Millions of Packers fans in Wisconsin will be forced to pay for Netflix just to watch our home team play. So yes, I do take issue with this deal. www.nbcsports.com/nfl/profootb...

New Publication Alert Tatsiou, Eleni, Marianna Karamanou, and Marianna Karamamou. "Bills of Mortality and the Birth of Epidemic Surveillance: Evidence, Uncertainty, and Decision-Making in Defoe’s Plague Narrative." Cureus 18.5 (2026). #danieldefoe #defoe #18thCentury #C18th #18thC

What I find so weird about the whole discourse is that I, a college professor, spend most of my time explaining complex ideas to 18-year-old novices. There’s a lot to mock academics for, but most of us couldn’t do our jobs at all if we didn’t know how to communicate with non-experts

No cap I’ve read more of these than on the Guardian’s list. Uncle Silas is seen!!

Wonderful New public history resource animating and annotating Hogarth’s famous Humours of an Election series- a collaboration between the ECPPEC team and the Sir John Soane Museum. Do check it out! #skystoriams #c18th #elections hogarth.soane.org

“Also, Middlemarch is better than Moby-Dick,” the Pope stated, conclusively resolving the debate.

Excited to launch London Theatre, 1660–1800, an analysis and visualisation framework built on @londonstagedb.bsky.social: londontheatre.prisms.digital Explore a map of venues, theatrical calendar, repertoire, casts and roles, receipts, networks and more. #c18th #TheatreStudies #DigitalHumanities

I still can't get over the way that at no point in the "you KICK Miette" tweet are we told that Miette is a cat, but absolutely everybody deduces this.

Pope:”Reading nourishes the mind, helps cultivate a conscious and well-formed critical sense, guards against fundamentalisms and ideological shortcuts.” Reading is “an antidote to closed-mindedness which manifests in rigid attitudes and reductive views of reality.” www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news...

Harrison Ford isn’t an academic and doesn’t have much to offer beyond values, but his speech at ASU offers a useful contrast: he does not flatter the conservatism of donors or trustees, but he was enthusiastically received and seems to have done a great job.

BREAKING: SCOTUS keeps mifepristone available on current terms, including mailing of the abortion drug. Thomas and Alito each authored a separate dissent. New, at Law Dork:

This is because the data used to train the AI was taken from the highly-controlled "indexing" process done by lay volunteers for around 20 years. Since the purpose was research, not historical authenticity, all terms for race were coded as "White," "Black," all place names were standardized, etc etc

The neighbor with whom I share a fence and I both have dogs named Sammy. Unfortunately neither Sammy is a good listener.

Well, it finally happened. I gently admonished my dog by name in front of a human stranger with the same name.

A few years ago, while I was out walking in my neighborhood, I caught the tail end of someone admonishing their dog -- all I happened to hear was the woman telling her dog, "Well, I'm sure you have your reasons." And ever since, I've been dying to know what exactly led up that.

I hate this.

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

So this made my day!

At ASU, we have one postdoc and 11 assistant professors in the Department of English, 6 of them in Lit -- and we have a new t-t asst prof starting in Ling this fall. I see headlines about universities collapsing their humanities programs "on the ASU model." That's not our model. At all.

Does anyone know what a medieval illness (which apparently Batu Khan was struck by “due to old age”) called استرخاطاری might be? It sounds like a Greek name to me (στραχαταρι?) like many other diseases in Arabic & Persian. But I cannot figure it out…

FAFSA got fixed because the Biden admin created an in-house team to fix the problem. The lesson here, and elsewhere, is that once you contract out such important functions you close control of an outcome that generates political risk. Better to have in-house capacity to build rather than repair.

it is crucial that the MLA, the AHA, and the ACLS joined forces to fight the illegal theft of federal research and programming funds i donated to support these efforts, and if you can, in any amount, you should too

Our next job in the courts is to pursue our claim against the shuttering of so many NEH depts and grant programs and the elimination of staff positions. If you want to help, please give to the fund at the top of this list, which is the one we are using for the lawsuit. www.mla.org/About-Us/Sup...

I hope you’ve all seen this job listing for a Humanities Leadership postdoc at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center: deadline June 13 ✨ apply.interfolio.com/185526?fbcli...

a synthesis of AI opinions: people who choose whether to use it and choose how to use it like it a lot, and people who are compelled to use it or forced to use it for certain tasks resent the shit out of it

My dog Henry James was such an aggressive strawberry eater that in ten years of growing them I don’t think we managed to save more than 2-3 for human consumption. Corgis, man.

TIL a bunch of ex-Gawker folks sold a series based on their stories to Apple and Tim Cook personally quashed it when he heard about it www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

if you buy my book you’re allowed to tell people im your friend

ICYMI, @kvanaren.bsky.social and I are launching a new weekly television podcast, and the teaser is out now. Links and other info here:

Depeche Median

BREAKING: Justice Alito extends his administrative stays — keeping mifepristone available on current terms — until 5p ET Thursday, May 14.

I wrote my first book as the polite fiction required to get my footnotes into print. In no way am I joking about this.

Happy commencement day, ASU grads! The Department of English wishes you a galaxy of success. ✨🔱 #ASUHumanities

The Burger Court

The Sheep Detectives is a sweet, cute movie, but I wish they had not done so much to downplay the mysticism / religious beliefs of the sheep ... is a sentence I just felt moved to write.

Speaking of THE SHEEP DETECTIVES, Leonie Swann just published a third volume, WIDDER SEHEN, in Germany, and it's being translated into English by Amy Bojang with plans to publish next year:

I've long wanted my own copy of the 1784 Lady’s Magazine. It’s a volume I have written a lot about, not just in my book on the magazine, but in separate work on periodical illustrations, particularly those that accompany its serialisation of Cook’s Voyages. 1/