I am forever disappointed that nobody responded to John Toland with Christianity Yes Mysterious

Strange takes on Mayor Zamdani swearing his oath on the Qu’ran. It has nothing to do with church & state. The point of the oath is for the person swearing in to do so upon some text that is sacred TO THEM. Some Presidents swore in w/o any book. John Quincy Adams was sworn on a law book. His choice.

Weird that you burn incense to feel calm and relaxed. It should be something you burn to rile yourself up.

Absolutely no "serious historians" think Hitler was a "genius", only fascist pseudo-historians like David Irving. A travesty that this guy has the ear of both the government and the plutocrats.

spent a good chunk of NYE party talking to a nice fellow who was very clearly on Bluesky trying to avoid him finding out how much I was on Bluesky

There’s so much despair and loss (esp in my own life!), but this promises to be hopeful and generative! Celebrate public knowledge + civic infrastructure with us! Apps are due end-of-day on Wed Jan 7! I’m still developing the schedule, but thus far I’ve confirmed…

Well, now that the year's over, here are some books I read (often listened to) in 2025 that really stayed with me (in no particular order): (I'll be adding more over the next few days)

Hashtag not all Dr Houses

...but we're not looking for a handout. There's budget for this. Read on. These have been in a very generous person's basement for over a year, but they're moving away. We need a NYC local who can help (a) secure us new a storage spot and (b) physically move the bins there...

If you've been following the story of Kara, my incarcerated trans friend who has is being held in Texas and has been behind bars for almost three years now, this is the latest need: Everything she has left in the world is in about 7 bins like these. We need to re-home them in the NYC area...

all the other germanic languages in my replies being like yeah we're still using this 😙🎶 english, we could bring overmorrow back, it used to exist and it could come back! en.wiktionary.org/wiki/overmor...

Today is the last day that you can repost this image

pour one out to an icon www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Not to mention we've had wave after wave of a disabling virus for c. 6 years (and a substantial chunk of the population who refuse to get vaccinated).

Not quite an interaction, but I once saw Jimmy Carr in public twice in the space of three days, the first time in a restaurant in Leeds and the second time on the Victoria line. (I didn't interact with him because he's terrible.)

Also I haven't gotten sick (not even a cold) all year and it's great.

What we call in our book, Godwin’s Engine

Don't say you love the anime if you haven't read the manga youtu.be/OExOIp8TrCM?...

"Did you see what Mark Cuban posted? Oh did you see the clapb—" You shake yourself awake in the cold North Atlantic water. You are not online. It is July of 1858. You are a baleen whale, and you have changed your mind. The future most not come to pass. The telegraph cable must break.

#CfP: 'Clio Reframed: Women Writing History, 1500-1750', Oxford, June 18-19, 2026, Abstracts by February 28, 2026 Featuring the quintessential quartet, @rhetorician.bsky.social, Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille, @emiliekmmurphy.bsky.social & Sue Wiseman as keynotes! www.rensoc.org.uk/event/clio-r...

CFP for special issue of @sttcljournal.bsky.social for work from early career scholars, which will receive particular editorial attention. networks.h-net.org/group/announ...

Christmas Cracker joke: Why does Edmund Burke put a small citrus fruit at the top of his Christmas tree? Because he wants his decorations to be sublime!

Experimental evidence that students are more likely to contest grades when they are delivered by an evaluator with a female-sounding name. "These findings suggest that women in evaluative positions face disproportionate resistance when delivering negative assessments."

Taking a charitable, Hanlon's razor approach, the Mark Cuban healthcare thing I think really just underscores the complete abandonment of politics as a necessarily complex and conflictual process by mainstream, nominally left-leaning Democrats. All complex reforms create winners and losers. The...

This is about race

Every time I read a book by someone I'm mutuals with I tell my partner I'm basically hanging with celebs

Starting to work on my book index and have every intention of including Holy Roman Empire; Empire, Holy Roman; Roman Empire, Holy; both to aid readers and to underscore my profound disagreement with Voltaire

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Google's little AI thing routinely tells me that both the UK and Serbia are in the EU when I need to make sure I have the right visa documents.

Looking for a New Year's resolution that is good for your mind and (relatively) easy to keep? Check out the Institute of Historical Research seminars for January 2026. Fourteen seminars in week 1 alone. Free, broad-ranging, open to the public and usually available both in person and online.

Won't somebody think of the broken white pencil!

Yes yes, Reason is generally horrible, but I think this does a good job of setting out not only Trump's murderous grandstanding but also why if we want to stop fentanyl (and other drug) related deaths we need to seriously rethink prohibition as a strategy.

A guy just nearly assaulted me for asking why he parked on a crossing. He got right up in my face yelling about how he's Italian and I'm not and he only backed off when people leaned out of the windows saying they would call the police.

Bonkers that there's a several-year delay so they can make a "business case" for local light rail. The business case is "right now everyone gets the bus and it's always late and everybody hates it." www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Adore the British-themed mural in my hotel in Valletta, including: yassified Virgin Queen, Churchill with pigeon, and for some reason General Rochambeau (not very British? like really pointedly not? did they think he was Nelson? wrong number of arms for a start) in a Spitfire that says “dong” on it

Small UK life hack: if you want to a flu jab but don't qualify as not 65 etc, just go into any providing pharmacy and say you're a careworker. There are no checks, and they want to out jabs.

Hooray! The British Library has just released a beta version of its rebuilt Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue: searcharchives.bl.uk 2,619 hits for 'petition' in Western Manuscripts, texts in English, in case you're curious. 🗃️

If you are working in humanities education and thinking how to respond to the tragic events of this weekend, I'd like to draw your attention to a new project launching next month at the AHA. I would rather it wasn't so topical, but here we are.

This obviously isn't all of What's Wrong With America, but ironically enough it is probably part of it.

I also think there should be a) a maximum weight for private vehicles and b) a (very low) maximum height for the driver's seat to be above the ground. Basically anything we can do to make cars lower, slower, and lighter will save lives.

I don’t know why but he has gotten so many replies that are just the dril tweet

Regardless of how many bouts of covid I may/may not have avoided, I haven't had a cold in like a year and honestly masking is 100% worth it just for that.

I remember when the right wing had a years-long freak out that informative trigger warnings gave students veto power over their courses.

My friend Eduardo Angel Cruz (KU Leuven) wrote this really cool open access article on diablados ("dances of devils") in 16th-17thC Peru for a really cool special issue on Joy as Resistance for the really cool Journal of Festive Studies. Really cool! journals.h-net.org/jfs/article/...

This isn't even "I never expected the leopards to eat my face", it's "I never expected the leopards to eat the faces of the exact people I spent millions campaigning for them to eat (and it is the fault of that guy who famously campaigned against leopards eating peoples' faces)"

In a move everybody will have seen coming, the exact same people who spent years screaming about the evils of cancel culture are now pushing people out of public life for having normal, reasonable opinions

I made a Chrome extension that swaps Times New Roman for Calibri on every site or just .gov. It also had Open Sans and Open Dyslexic, because f**k these people. I’m waiting for Google’s approval for it to install automatically, but you can download it and install it in 90 seconds. Instructions 👇