AI to send an email? No thanks I’d rather train a carrier pigeon ✌️ 🪽

“Until now I had known that Latin was a dead language. Now I know that it is the language of death. Death speaks Latin.” Georgi Gospodinov

Someone needs to offer classes to husbands on how to take flattering photos of their wives because what the hell is this

Went to Modena to see if there are local documents about the story of St. Geminianus stopping Attila the Hun from attacking by sending down fog. The story appears in much later sources & according to the very knowledgeable woman at the museum, the story was passed down orally, not written.

I’ve got 5,000 questions about Modena, Italy and 4,999 of them are about this specific sculptural relief from the Teatro Comunale Modena

Okay I admit it I did start to cry when I saw her

Headed to Ravenna, Italy for the first time, any restaurant recommendations?

please stop booing I have a lot of speech to go

Guys I rolled my ankle I can’t do anything but make memes right now

The Helen of Troy controversy is ridiculous. It’s not history, it’s fiction. How many real historical figures get whitewashed by Hollywood? Why’s that’s ok? Also, in Xena: Warrior Princess, Helen was portrayed by a Black woman, and that was in the 90s! How is inclusive casting a scandal in 2026?

What if instead of PowerPoint or Google slides I made all my history students sit on the floor in a half circle with their little tablets and styli and answered every question with a question?

Was John Travolta discovering berets on anyone’s 2026 bingo card?

☝️👵Back in my day, the cloud was called “my computer” and I just uploaded all my pics onto it with a cable, and it was easy, and I never had to worry about data centers or Bluetooth connection or subscribing to increase storage

Why do faculty and students have so little say in the governance of American universities? This terrific new paper by Daniel Hemel and David Pozen asks why American universities are liberal autocracies rather than stakeholder democracies. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I just feel like the push to make syllabi publicly available coinciding with the rise of AI in education and AI web scrapers is not a total coincidence.

In a new article for @antiquity.ac.uk, we find that a quantitative analysis of housing at Mohenjo-daro, one of the world’s first cities, reveals that inequality sharply declined over time. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

My first month of grad school my prof assigned us all a book in German. Only one student in the class knew German. When someone brought that up the professor looked at us and said, “well, you all have to know German, so.”

Maybe women in his house should run for office?

Everyone loves being woken up by their spouse saying, “Hey, there’s a bat flying around the porch, it was in the house, any thoughts on how to get it to leave?”

guy who is mad at Nolan’s Odyssey because it depicts the sea as blue instead of wine-dark

My left eye has been twitching for going on three weeks, I really thought the semester ending would stop it but it hasn’t 😫

Oh they cast Elliot Page as Achilles? Okay I’m back in, that’s perfect casting actually

A top-tier Hermes. Elite. The bar is high for this role. Robert Pattinson has big (winged) shoes to fill.

For my fall of Rome class all my students argued for transformation instead of decline, except for the student researching the denarius. It was a pretty fun class overall, I organized it thematically with a focus on theory instead of chronologically.

Whatever witch cursed me into having an incredibly crappy day, I apologize for whatever I did please reverse this curse

A Harvard study just published estimates Elon Musk's destruction of USAID has already caused 600,000 deaths 2/3 of them children. That is his legacy in this world.

Children using tanning beds is both unhealthy and weird. Like why do they want to make sure children can get tan? That’s weird.

When (if) I publish my book on Nonius Marcellus I think I want this as a tattoo (initial from VFL 73, 9th century). I’m not a medievalist though so idk what animal he is. A dragon?

Big news, teachers now get discounts on Hoka (I’ve been waiting for this moment).

Back in San Diego, the best California city, for like 36 hrs. Mexican food? Already doordashed it Local beer? Already drinking it Speaking French? Unexpected but I had a couple convos in French with my Lyft driver. I’m not very good. The talk I’m giving tomorrow? Mostly done…mostly…

“Use AI to brainstorm but not to write.” “Use AI to help you outline but not to write.” These are commonly proposed as “ethical” ways for undergrad students to use AI, but I’m sorry, brainstorming & outlining are just as integral to writing as the actual construction of sentences.

One goal I have this summer is to make a big reader for my world history classes, that includes all the reading (most of what I assign is open access anyways) and notes sections I can check off during class.

Did the gov also get rid of grants that specified “men” or was it just the ones that mentioned “women” “nonbinary” etc?

You don’t need to see the manuscript, you have a digitized version accessible at home. The digitized version accessible at home:

A high school student who attends the school my husband works at is missing. Her name is Maya Barreto. Please share

"If only men wield weapons, then all tombs with weapons are male. If only men are ever found interred with weapons, then it’s unlikely women ever wielded them. We only imagine some version of what we’ve seen. It takes a lot of unlearning to learn history." Great guest post from @isabelleroughol.com

Happy Light Jacket Day to all who celebrate

The latest episode of Byzantium & Friends: How and Why We Teach Roman History, with Beth Digeser www.medievalists.net/2026/04/how-... #AncientRome #Teaching #History

Just nibblin on the Iliad in the afterlife

You wouldn’t believe how much time three of us spent today debating whether it’s The Iliad or the Iliad. 🏺🧪

This is a FRAUDULENT paper, AI-generated. My name was used as an author and I had nothing to do with it, never saw it until today e-pubmed.co.uk/journals/dig... The "Editors" Angelo Rossi Mori, David Mensah, and Zarnie Khadjesari and this "Journal" should be reported.

I hate the cloud. I hate it so much. I miss when it was easy to just download all the photos on your phone to your computer with a cable.

And Dame Averil Cameron (1940-2026), historian of the Byzantine empire bit.ly/4ex8POD #Skystorians

Headed to Ravenna this summer to get a closer look at fashion in the mosaics! If anyone has suggestions for things to see/places to go/ food to eat I’m all ears.

Does anyone use Canva for their lecture slides? If so, pros-cons?

AI is profoundly unpopular. A recent NBC News poll found that among 18-34 year-olds, AI's net favorability rating is -44. *Negative 44*. Those are basically serial killer numbers. It's not much better among women 18-49. (Men over 50 and upper class are the only ones who like AI, and just barely.)

Dr. @amycking.bsky.social and I wrote a teaching module on "Authoritarian Aesthetics and Youth Appeals" in Fascist Italy for the American Historical Review's "Authoritarianism 101" project. See below! And please share widely.

Senior professors - if you want to help your junior colleagues in these times, I am begging you, review our papers. I have done 25 manuscript reviews in the last 6 years. But my own manuscript is stalled out waiting for reviewers. Relatedly, I won't be doing any more reviews until tenure. 🧪

How I woke up this morning (my face is basically under the cat)