The humanities have been polemicized by the right; chronically defunded and under-valued by the right and the left (in positions of power); and treated as utterly useless by tech oligarchs and the media elites who act as their PR reps.

The only thing this misses is the "why". WHY are you including an image with your post? What does it add? Providing that context *can be* more important than describing the full image.

This is about logic. An argument has three parts: premises, chains of inferences, and a conclusion. The move you just described is literally not an argument because it jumps right from premises to conclusion w/ no actual chains of reasoning that compel the conclusion or show how premises warrant it

Earrings and Infamy: The Male Ear in the Medieval Imagination www.medievalists.net/2025/06/earr... #medieval

Red Wall discourse has so clouded Labour’s mind that they’re sleepwalking into doing to university towns what Thatcher did to mining towns

Does central government really not understand how much money universities bring to their local economy? University of Lincoln £430m *annually*, Hull 0.6bn gross added value. Just two examples. Destroying universities will destroy communities.

If you were designing a "Bible-based" tour of the British museum, what would you include? Obviously the Lachish reliefs, but what else?

UUK, VCs, etc need to be on the barricades here pointing out 1) they cannot control the labour market for grad jobs 2) most evidence suggests people do in fact benefit financially from degrees and 3) the universities did not want, did not introduce, and do not benefit from the current loan system.

Got to ramble on about Judges for the Biblical Time Machine podcast. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b...

If you were designing a "Bible-based" tour of the British museum, what would you include? Obviously the Lachish reliefs, but what else?

Happy to share my latest article in Aschkenas, “Rachel Was Shapely and Beautiful: A Jewish Woman in Hostile Archives”—on a 13th-century woman from Nottingham, archival silences and hostility, and critical speculation. Check it out: www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

I can't do universal here but just know that everything mentioned here is compounded one zillionfold by terrible accessibility practices. Prove your human by identifying tiny motorcycles. Can't? No problem! You can get around it by downloading this accessibility cookie...

I'm sorry but what a stupid question (that presupposes an "answer" in a manipulative way). Look no further than the speed w/ which this prompt elicited a thousand replies: bsky.app/profile/bria... Digital everything is inconvenient. And costly. And impermanent. And compromises our privacy.

"I want to chuckle through words or names being mispronounced or events taking too long. I want to learn I said the wrong thing and know better for next time. These moments can be uncomfortable and even painful, but I like these human parts of living." – Beautifully put.

The fracturing of ALL information into a million different places, e.g. my kid's school using 4 diff apps to communicate basic info; getting an email (from doctors, kid's activities, etc) that tells me I need to login to a 3rd-party "secure portal" to read innocuous messages. Oh, and Silicon Valley

My first book used this relief of a painting ceramicist and his wife for the cover. Workshops were often run by a husband and wife (she holds bread 🍞 and a fan 🪭) with children—so I strongly suspect membership in artisan collegia was under the husband’s name but included the familia (image: VMFA).

Well this is more like it!

Ditto

You could just read scholarship before you cite it and only coauthor pieces with other people who do the same.

Okay, what is the TL/DR? Across time, royal portraits have extremely little to do with what the sitter actually looked like — to the portrait artist or to anyone who saw them that day. Rather, they are encoded with deeply important messages about power, dynasty, political alliances, and more./17

The whole thread is great but this bit especially. Portraits. Aren't. Polaroids.

In underfunded fields, people tend to do their own work. In overfunded fields, people pay others to do everything, including “their” research and writing. It’s not an accident that AI is an overfunded field that grew out of other overfunded fields.

The Gifford Lectures with Prof Paula Fredriksen are now finished, but if you missed any, were unable to make it, or would like to watch them again, the good news is that they're all online! All six are linked in this 🧵⬇️ #Giffords2026

just open contempt for the united states as a pluralist and secular democracy. and a reminder that the function of the fiction that the united states was founded as a fundamentalist christian nation is to establish a hierarchy of human worth with white christians at the top

Racists want white Northern European/American actors playing ancient Greek roles because they believe the ANCIENT Greeks were white, not MODERN Greeks. Nazis claimed the Greeks were white Aryans but since became corrupted by racial mixing during the Hellenistic, Roman, & especially Ottoman periods.

Does anybody know of any research on the efficacy of online training courses? I'm asking specifically about the kind of online "course" where you click through slides with small amounts of text, might include animated videos, and usually finishes with a multiple-choice quiz at the end.

someday, when i am emperor of the world, i will require all multi-page conference programs to put the DAY OF THE WEEK on the top of EVERY page (i will also abolish capitalism)

For further context: almost everyone in the Faculty of Arts is at risk of redundancy. Music, Modern Languages & American & Canadian Studies courses to close completely. History will not close but staff numbers will be significantly reduced. This is what 'right-sizing' looks like, apparently.

Middle English Dictionary ancillary materials, files, and documentation from Paul Schaffner, consolidated and updated, free to download. Some fantastic stuff here! #medievalsky www.medictionary.info

I really hope some institution is able to step in and do this!

This is great, so let's make sure everybody can read it! Alt-text on a text-based post is ridiculously easy, please don't neglect it. Alt: "Mediaocracy, noun, Early 21st century. No matter how a country votes, a small bunch of journalists decides which topics to cover (see 'ad nauseam')…" +

Absolute DISASTER! bSky have blocked my Chat function (no idea why?!) so DMs are down. However, there is a work around! If you would like to come to our London meetup on 1st then send a message via our (very basic!) website independenthistoriansnetwork-wulpv.wordpress.com/contact/

Looks like it's time to repost this again. What I wouldn't give for politicians to recognise the value – fiscally, culturally, politically, socially – of Higher Ed, and to give even a fraction of a shit to the crisis in that sector, as they do to other industries.

Men are extremely keen to explain to me that Britain *needs* a domestic steel production plant and doesn't necessarily *need* universities. Okay. Steel contributed about £1.7bn to the UK economy in 2024. Universities contributed more than £200bn.

A dozen female Palestinians are working to save and preserve medieval and early modern manuscripts 📕 from the Al-Omari mosque’s library. Hang this picture in the Louvre (and the Met). www.newarab.com/features/ins...

Don’t run universities like a business run it as a public good

What's a Judean soldier's favourite curry? Chicken tikka Masada

NEW from me: many of our universities are now in a dying fall. A new global-national-regional-local split is opening up, which could choke off progress on almost all the Government's plans. Do they have a plan? Nope, nothing, not a clue. 👇 isrf.org/blog/whats-t...

"Employers are demanding AI skills" Seriously, do they even know what AI is? The whole point is that it requires no skills.

Via Medievalistmatt: www.facebook.com/permalink.ph...

Presenting a paper online today at 2:30pm for the centre of Muslim-Christian studies: “Renegotiating Armageddon: The Failure of Evangelical Apocalypticism During the Iraq War (2003-2011) and its Impact on the Iran War (2026–)” Sign up below for the link www.cmcsoxford.org.uk/cmcs-news/a-...

This reporting created caricatures of AH & its scholars to marvel at a technology lazily used. It reinforced a ‘computer scientists over humanists’ narrative that strips humanities training of its merits and skills. It turned humanists yet again into backwards gate keepers allergic to modernism. /7

Many people are taking issue with the study for good reason. But the reporting also bothers me. The computer scientists & history enthusiast are presented as pathbreaking, innovation heroes vs gatekeeping, stodgy art historians who give soundbites that imply they are swept up in pique. /1

The reason you'll never be able to stop LLMs from "hallucinating" is because they don't hallucinate. They output pattern-matched responses, things that appear similar to answers based on a database. It can't know what's in that answer because it doesn't know anything.

Where are all my women in PHLEGM at? Yes, I will be adopting this phrase henceforth and encouraging female students on this path.

“AI is fluent. Fluency is not the same as good. Goodness requires judgement, and judgement is what the humanities train.” This is an excellent read!

Just heard an LBC presenter claim, repeatedly, that King Charles is not a political figure. He may not be a politician, but absolutely nonsensical to say that the *Head of State* is not political!!

Learned from my publisher that my new book dropped early in the National Gallery shops today! If you would like to look at nice pictures of Saints and learn fun things about them, this is the one for you.

Why is this not a national scandal? If 1000+ jobs were lost overnight in carmaking or steel it would be pure shock.

The thing is that this has been true for a long time. Thinking that liberal arts degrees are impractical is received wisdom that collapses under the slightest scrutiny. This claim is only "counterintuitive" if you have bad intuition about higher ed, and, accidentally and on purpose, most people do.