I'd like at add a few things to this. (1) humanists have not been able to convince any political party that curiosity-driven humanities research is a public good that should be funded using tax dollars. Republicans don't believe this, but neither do Democrats.

From ancient Rome to today, war-makers have talked constantly about peace theconversation.com/from-ancient...

“But what deeply troubles me now is that for all the steps we've taken toward integration, I've come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house."  Dr. King said this famous quote on March 27th, 1968, mere days before his murder. But the context around the quote is interesting...

Read this. Even more than the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, I think, this speech captures the essence of where King was going and where we still need to go from here.

"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government." - MLK All we need when people scrutinize protester conduct & communal self-defense.

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

TIL that not only is my birthday also the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., it is also the date of the assassination of Rosa Luxembourg. What a do.

An article that combines my birthday-sharer MLK Jr. and racial/disability solidarity? Yes, please! Also, dire warnings about the efforts to resegregate society? Necessary.

Hello just making my periodic announcement that I'm a trans man and transitioning made my life SO MUCH better and trans people of all ages deserve respect and access to gender-affirming care - just like cis people do!

CripAntiquity was at the SCS/AIA Conference in SF! Thanks to everyone who chatted with us during the conference and at our roundtable. Discussions at the conference gave us many ideas to improve accessibility in our sector. Please continue these talks and providing your support in the future!

This is such a good story. If you'd like an easily listenable version, try this one from The Memory Palace. https://thememorypalace.us/the-wheel/

It's the 3rd of January 1939, your name is professor James Smith and you are staring at a drawing of a fish. It's not a regular fish. It is a completely impossible fish.

Useful.

Rough vibes on this website today, likely because people feel Hopeless and Helpless Because Can't Stop It and No One Who Is Supposed To Is Trying To So Now We're Fighting Each Other™. I recommend activities such as book, or potentially instrument if you like instrument, or even do talk on phone.

You need to seriously consider sense modalities other than vision. Theorising about vision and assuming that it will generalise is not a good strategy. (Also, don’t conflate states, events and processes, but that’s another kettle of fish!) #PhilPerception

Tomorrow’s a preview of 2026! A collection of clips from my conversations with Jonathan Sedlak, Sara Koenig, @mburtwrites.bsky.social & @kkramermcginnis.bsky.social, @blindscholar.bsky.social, Jennie Grillo, Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat, Kirk MacGregor, David Basher, & @alexianafry.bsky.social.

I think it’s more the case that everybody is stupid sometimes, in some contexts. So we have to protect people for when it’s their turn to be stupid, since someday that will be us too.

Whenever I led sections of undergrads, I found one of the most effective things was openly admitting I didn't have all the answers, but I could teach them how an expert (and them!) might find out. The content is often secondary to the scaffolding of knowledge creation and discovery

oh my. I love this.

Make a Bond movie academic: Peer Review to a Kill

Make a Bond film academic: GoldOpenAccessFinger

Probably didn't even know the song the elves sang to Santa on his birthday last year. Youths.

I don’t design my coursework with different ethics and principles than those I expect from myself. Deep reading, sincere effort, meticulous citations, a willingness to acknowledge mistakes, honesty and humility are all things I want from students AND myself. And that shapes how I see gAI.

Call this file “article cast offs” and then promptly save it to a piece of technology that will go obsolete a year later

Don't just delete it, though. Copy and paste it into a separate text file in case you need it later, then never look at it again.

This except the dismantling started in the late '60s

Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies job with University of California, Santa Barbara

I love academic research questions!

"I'm pretty satisfied with it, but I can't escape the feeling that it suffers from a deficiency of hijinks and pratfalls. For the second edition, I suppose." - George Orwell, after publishing Animal Farm, probably.

I just learned that they are turning Animal Farm into a zany, quippy animated comedy and I just... You know what? This is probably what we deserve. If you need me, I'll be walking slowly into the sea.

Clay letters from ancient Mesopotamia are alive with idiom, sayings, and everyday language that I love. Here are just a few random ones so you can enjoy them too.

incredible that the oldest scam in the book — “look away from the greed and poor leadership that destroy your chance to make a career, it is the [blanks] that stole your job!” — still works

🚨 JOB JOB JOB!!! 🚨 Late-breaking job! Indigenous history at University of Colorado Boulder. Assistant or eatly associate. Been trying to get this line for forever. It’s finally happening 🙏 Great place to live and work. Fabulous colleagues (ask me how I know!) networks.h-net.org/jobs/69637/u...

Also, check out those commas in the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice! Language rules belong to us, not the other way around!

Reading through Tolkien's letters and I'm tired of signing emails "Best." Do you think I could get away with signing "Yours, etc., Eric"?

So I saw the whole "running out of ideas" discourse, then I read a 1938 letter by JRR Tolkien where he laments that he has nothing more to say about hobbits after publishing The Hobbit. Pretty clear he should have fed it into an LLM and let it come up with some good ideas for him, right? C'mon Ron!

My book, _An Exotic Apocalypse: Revelation and the Appropriation of Judaism in the Roman Empire_, is officially forthcoming with Penn State University Press. It'll be the inaugural book in their _Religions in the Ancient Mediterranean_ series.

The author was dead: to begin with.

Iron Chef: Enuma Elish.

Alternative take: Universities (and all institutions really) are terrible at predicting job market changes over a timescale of 5 to 10 years. Thus, turning them into clout chasing vocational training centers is a stupid bet when the original Humboldtian mission showed surprising resilience.

I've started the practice of writing a little note of appreciation when I read or hear something I particularly enjoy. It's not weird and it leads to wonderful happy little interactions!

Fellowship in Hebrew at Oxford www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPU393/k...

This is a fun idea. Should we call them abvent calendars, though?

#AdorableAntiquity Now I'm all in my feels about tiny Babylonian babies slobbering all over their clay rattles.

The criticism of virtue signalling was always dominance signalling. It said "I see what you're doing and see that it is hollow and empty. I understand you better than you understand yourself because I am smart enough to see what's really going on."

This is a nice follow-up. To me, it seemed clear that there was no material contradiction between "they need to be able to talk about us without us" and "nothing about us without us," since the latter cannot be understood to mean literally nothing.

I found this interview with a tech expert and investor very helpful. It rebuts the idea some AI in schools boosters push that genAI is just going to keep getting better. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-wi...

Less "too many people are using accommodations in school" and more "Universal Design Learning"

Curious about this text? Check out this blog post by @blindscholar.bsky.social, who covers the work in "Reading Creation Myths Economically in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel" www.blindscholar.com/2025/08/04/b...

We see similar discourse in Atra-hasis, a literary work from the 2nd millennium BCE that opens with a narrative of dissent between the ruling and the ruled. Humans have spent a long time thinking, writing, and conveying the difficulty of balancing political power and social liberties.