Ag secretary confirming 1 in 4 US farmers has no fertilizer secured, American Farm Bureau survey says up to 70% can’t afford enough fertilizer for the season under the spiked costs Honestly shocked this isn’t bigger news. 25% of farms are just not planting at all this season. Farm bankruptcy up 46%

A New Cambridge Element, _Language and Script in Achaemenid and Hellenistic Central Asia_, by Rachel Mairs, is out now! Read for free for the next 2 weeks: cup.org/4u3Ykaz

audience: <settles into seats for The Odyssey> Nolan: Ha ha, suckers! Movie Title: <scrolls into view> Christopher Nolan's Iliou Persis

I want a disaggregation of those who support ghosts vs. those who merely believe in them.

Well well well looks like those art degrees aren't so useless after all

Job applicants take note: you can aim much higher when embellishing your CV.* *Please don't.

Gas price check today on the walk to work: $4.29. A month ago in rural Missouri it generally hovered in the upper-middle-$2 range.

If I could convince students of one thing at the start of their college career, it is that you'll get as much out of a class as you put into it. Sure, some classes will suck for whatever reason, but most classes will have interesting material and impart lessons if only you put in some effort.

Me, describing the cats: They are jerks and one of them pooped all over the floor. Him, not understanding the context: I told you not to listen to the news in the morning.

I was going to quip that the first paragraph is just the affirmation I give myself in the mirror in the morning, but "do not inform me about morals and ethics unless I specifically ask" is a pretty sociopathic request.

A century ago during the 1920s, America experienced what the historian Merle Curti aptly called a "cult of prosperity," an era that -- just like our own -- conflated "rich and powerful" with "brilliant and wise" I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but I bet it worked out great for everyone back then.

this is true of literally everything

If I could convince students of one thing at the start of their college career, it is that you'll get as much out of a class as you put into it. Sure, some classes will suck for whatever reason, but most classes will have interesting material and impart lessons if only you put in some effort.

I’m not going to lie, I don’t think we should be having a Mets Gala this year. The team’s playing real poorly and they aren’t even in town for it.

In the unlikely event that AI systems become smart enough to ‘solve’ the climate crisis, their first and last instruction will be to power down all the AI data centres… 🫠 #AIEthics #ClimateEmergency

New rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges of pink paper—and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable. . . . I must off to studio and work with . . . Tennyson (that can’t be right) Ford. Ellison? (? — No!)—well, a rangy, languid young man. —Alec Guinness, diary, 1976

This is great! Also, how to support an academic: - read their papers - cite their articles and books - tell your friends and students about their work - include their work in your reading lists and syllabi - ask your library to buy their books - tell them you liked their work or that it was helpful

Weekly Varia no. 180, 05/03/26 On going out, plus a few links for the last week of the semester and a media roundup.

Btw the duck trick works for historiography: if you're struggling to find the literature you want, articulate the parameters as if to someone else. You will probably realize how to find it. If you're short a rubber duck, pretend you're writing an email to a colleague asking them for help.

I write about people who became famous for saying and doing horrible things so I routinely get asked this question. "Did they really believe it?" Look, I get the curiosity, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what's in their hearts. They put evil into the world.

This paper is science fiction wearing the clothes of sober assessment, pitching the dreamy retrofuturist visions of the 1990s cyborg fantasy.

In 1979, Mattel sold toy Battlestar Galactica fighter ships that fired a tiny spring-loaded "torpedo." One 4-year old choked on it, and the entire line of torpedo toys was recalled and never sold again.

We are delighted to announce that every research article accepted for publication in Antiquity after 1 June 2026 will be published completely #OpenAccess at no cost to the author or reader! More information here: www.cambridge.org/core/service... @cambup-archaeology.cambridge.org 🏺 #Archaeology

There’s also the problematic conflation of people who love history with trained historians that implies that the field has no methods, no particular skills. I too find AB fascinating and read a lot about her. It doesn’t make me a historian of her or her period./3

Minas Tirith in the films looks like it would have serious problems with flash flooding whenever it rains.

But a manuscript generated by AI feels like porridge. Impossible to separate out the elements, impossible to untangle.

A human-written manuscript with big structural problems can feel like a tangled mass of spaghetti. But it’s usually possible to separate out the strands and untangle it.

Vermont remains great and completely ridiculous at the same time

April Reading Notes Notes on every book I finished in April.

The Academy has banned AI from ever winning an Oscar. • Only roles “demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” can be nominated for acting Oscars • Screenplays “must be human-authored” to qualify for a nomination

I blame Substack. The single worst development for the literary world in the last few decades.

I'm confused here. @historians.org did an AI study saying faculty should happily use AI to make pics for lecture slides... but it's not ok when Linda McMahon does it? How about just saying: don't fabricate pictures of any kind & stick with genuine photos?

I gave my last lecture of the year today, "The Roman Republic in Perspective." I have studiously avoided commentary on or even allusion to contemporary concerns in this course on the Roman Republic. Not today. Here's a bit of what I said (none of it particularly original). 1/5

I worry we're going to get decades of really rank, acidic reactionary politics fueled by the shattered dreams of generations of men who thought school was girly but gambling was manly and then wonder why they are poor.

In all seriousness, disciplinary norms and different expectations about what constitutes peer review are serious contributing factors to this problem. I'm under no illusions that my field is perfect, and this problem makes the task of reviewing harder, but AI is also symptomatic of deeper problems.

I have enough things to fill all my spare time and then some, but I'm still toying with the idea of picking up some frivolous hobby this summer. Something I can do while listening to music and not being very good at it to see if it brings me any joy. Maybe painting miniatures?

I just want one coach to be the hardest atheist imaginable. No gods. No masters. No salvation but existence. It's 3rd and 17 and we need a first down. The universe will never care and no one is here to help you. Now go get 'em, cowboy.

I understand and support the move toward analog/in-class experiences to protect some measure of academic integrity, but retreating entirely to this stance leaves us firmly in the camp of writing as "schooling" when I believe that we should be focused on "learning." That longer struggle is meaningful

Another exhibit for the “LLMs are extremely impressive technology, just not in the way people assume” case file.

I don’t want to dunk on this user, Franklin Roosevelt served hotdogs to George VI in 1939, so it isn’t as though there isn’t tradition here. www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/w...

...Faculty + staff are already stretched thin + traumatized, more folks are on precarious term contracts, + large portions of library collections aren't curated in-house; they're supplied through vendor databases — oft by the same commercial publishers who demand ⬆️ volume, incentivizing AI use...

Again, re: last RT: In response to the proliferation of AI-generated fraudulent research, I've seen several folks call for peer-reviewers to check citations, for librarians to weed out slop, etc — but of course we can't individualize the solution to this systemic problem....

The Brendan Sorsby betting scandal really sucks. The "betting on your own team" thing is the headline, but I am hung up on something w/ wider ramifications: the incessant betting on balls and strikes from the stands at MLB games. This shit shouldn't be so easy. @slate.com slate.com/technology/2...

At my last teaching job (I've since left), there was a plastic tarp up with a sign warning "asbestos work," the water wasn't potable, and my office was either freezing or sweltering. It occasionally flooded. My favorite part (since I was then a new mom): the lactation room was a supply closet.

I want to re-emphasize Annie's important point here. Helping kids to express themselves, for themselves ; helping them to contemplate themselves and the world, for their own ends which they choose ; helping them construct the mental faculties and habits they can use autonomously - that is the goal.

I’m married to a physician. Increasingly they get nervous when they have new residents or med students who don’t have substantial humanities training in undergrad - like a minor or double major. Because they have a harder time w nuances, ambiguity, needing to make decisions w fragmentary data, etc.