This is an almost shockingly wise essay. I'm glad I've finally read it.

when I really get in my shit this is how I talk abt the history of disease (particularly malaria on account of my research) but in my defense malaria predates war by millions of years and has killed so many more human beings that war wouldn’t show up on the bar graph without using a log scale

Yes x 1,000!!!! I find it so incredibly frustrating that this is a lost perk in the modern age of baseball. I use to love buying a pencil and scorecard at the stadium as a kid. Should be a standard practice everywhere.

Just a few days left to donate to my fundraiser for our local animal shelter! Let's see how close we can get it to $8,000! 🥳 givebutter.com/n5l31M

How do you tune (or modulate) an instrument in ancient Babylonia? Fragmentary instructions have survived that tell you how to go from one mode to another on a 9-stringed musical instrument called a sammû

Research is about discovery. THE FACEMAKER opens with the story of Private Percy Clare, who's shot in the face in WWI. I found his handwritten diary at the Imperial War Museum, which led me to connecting with relatives of his who were able to provide further documents & details about his life.

Ask any historian, and this is a standard experience. The project you envision you will write turns out to be something different in the end. Why? Because you go where the sources lead you, and you can never get there if you rely on technology that only builds off of established knowledge.

Absolutely right. AI might be able to summarize (poorly) what we currently know, but a major goal of historical research is to find the hidden surprises out there. Let me illustrate …

What historians (and other scholars do) is create knowledge. We should use that phrase more and talk about what it means. I think we don't, and it's part of why AI enthusiasts are confused when we don't readily agree that our work can be replicated/replaced by their products.

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

A big part of being a historian is being a detective! Who did this? Why? Where? Why does it matter in the grand scheme of things? You have to learn how to probe, how to uncover, how to read against the grain, how to find unusual sources, how to interpret those sources. How to piece together a puzzle

Sounds like they need humanities majors…..

Another layer to the debate discourse is the difficulty to engage in competence in a post-expert society. If one is debating the efficacy of vaccines using decades of peer-reviewed research and medical science and the other is quoting a Facebook meme, how can we even find a “common ground?”

Also we've fetishized "debate” in these spaces as some kind of civic good, when what matters is competence, trust, shared purpose. Medicine, engineering, boardrooms aren’t organized around debate or requirements of false balance. We've poisoned public discourse by insisting it be adversarial.

The beloved 'Coors Field Cat' Socks has been missing for a few weeks. If you have any information about where Socks might be or if you have seen them recently, you can DM @CoorsFieldCat on Twitter. If you don't use twitter, DM me here and I will send the message on your behalf. I hope she is found.

From the Oklahoma U student paper: the school is now saying it will automatically suspend faculty (with pay) in response to student complaints www.oudaily.com/news/ou-poli...

I love this idea! I always show my students WPA projects in the local community, but having them go and see it for themselves….great idea!

Fucking incredible dystopian shit, comparing super rich people risking millions if not billions of lives just to make more money to people that risked their life actually building incredible things that would then make millions of dollars for super rich people.

Reminder: The deadline to submit an article abstract for SABR’s 2026 convention journal is on December 15. Lots of great stories to tell on Cleveland and Lake Erie baseball!

My all-time favorite newspaper correction:

This is actually a good example of why the customer model is wrong. I wouldn't have chosen poetry writing, but UNC made me take a class. And it absolutely made me become a much better writer, with an eye to concision and an ear now trained to the rhythm of words. I'm a better historian as a result.

REPEAT AFTER ME (but really, after Neil Kraus): Wage stagnation and underemployment are not problems that education can fix. We cannot "upskill" students into well-paying jobs that do. not. exist.

In this current moment of neomonarchism, we need to understand that the original Monroe Doctrine was a statement of solidarity with the revolutionary republics of Latin America. It was less about territorial control than systems of government. It was a rejection of kings.

Again, I question the narrative that students have to be trained in AI for their “jobs of the future” when the individuals designing the technology only care about profit margins and will gladly replace the “AI experts” they hired with the very technology those employees helped to program.

Original data-breaching.

You will be visited by 3 spirits

The automatic paper towel dispenser in the restroom I normally use on campus is broken. You never know if it will dispense a piece the size of a pencil or if you’re in for a CVS-receipt length piece.

We're half a decade into studies finding that improving airflow in classrooms will reduce disease transmission enormously, and that bleaching surfaces etc. does very little. And yet nothing changes. Waves of flu and colds wash over schools, and the schools pretend it's an act of God.

The replies to this and @jackiantonovich.bsky.social's original post remind us that the most dangerous thing is insisting that something exists in a meaningful way outside of human understanding of it. No matter how "hard" the discipline.

In the era of slavery, free black people had to carry their "free papers" with them so they could prove to the authorities that they were free, or else they would be thrown in jail and sold.

This pretty much sums up what Iowa State did to Purdue today. Go Cyclones! #BlueCy

I can tell you this. The Supreme Court will not "ultimately decide" this question. We, the people will ultimately decide it, just as the Court did not ultimately decide on the question of slavery in the Dred Scott case.

It's the 160th anniversary of the United States' refounding, the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

Finally, some good news today!

We already resolved this in 1868. The Court's taking up of this case is a disgrace of the highest order. Republicans want it both ways. Invoking originalism when it suits, tossing out otherwise settled law when it doesn't. The mind boggles. There is no logic to it other than racism and nativism.

“If the person is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.” – Justice Brett Kavanaugh

The USPS posting a NINE BILLION DOLLAR LOSS!!! sounds terrible. Certainly worse than if you said "USPS costs thirty dollars per person per year" even though that means the same thing and more accurately describes a government service

Happy “Repeal of Prohibition” Day. #OTD in 1933. Cheers!

My employer, Dartmouth College, today boasts it's 1st Ivy "to launch AI at an institutional scale." It is doing this by partnering--"more than a collaboration"--with Anthropic, a company that stole the books of many faculty, me included, which many of us are suing.

For some reason this reminds me of the story of how the team who worked on the CGI-animated Muppet Babies reboot accidentally rendered Animal without his fur and the end result was so hilarious and disturbing they adopted it as an unofficial mascot they named “Blurph”

Once again: this is not something that "threatens" academic freedom, though it will doubtless be reported that way. This is only possible where academic freedom has already ended.

RCFP is currently representing me in my lawsuit against the DC Metropolitan Police to release body cam footage from their raid on the US Institute of Peace earlier this year. Please support them so they can further their vital work of maintaining journalists' First Amendment rights!

Eric Foner, "What the Fugitive Slave Act Teaches Us About How States Can Resist Oppressive Federal Power," The Nation -- February 27, 2017 www.thenation.com/article/arch...

"I keep thinking that evil would like nothing better than to have us feel awful about who we are."

Finally getting some theological clarity on the ethics of reclining in one’s plane seat

"Anthropic paid" are the two key words here

MLB network still uses live captioning even with prerecorded content and that is how we got this moment

The fact that TPUSA posted the entirely reasonable comments from the instructor here as coming from the “TRANS PROFESSOR” gives away the game. They’re not defending students, they’re targeting faculty — as always