‘The scale of the earthworks was so great that Israel’s two hundred bulldozers were not nearly enough – many were damaged by the Palestinian resistance – and Israel urgently needed two hundred more.’ In the next issue: Eyal Weizman on the demolition of Gaza, online now www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

The question that broke America fundamentally was ‘do all people deserve basic rights?’ This question was too hard for us. Too hard for our leadership. It still is. So now all of our rights are in jeopardy.

One for the #TravelWriting scholars. Samia Ounoughi and I seem to have been working on this book forever, but it's out at last! It features a great range of contributions. If you have access to an academic library and an interest in travel writing scholarship, please request a copy!

UK: Prince Andrew arrested. South Korea: Former President Yoon sentenced for life. Brazil: Former President Bolsonaro serving a 27-year sentence. USA: President Trump demands $10 billion payout from taxpayers.

The joint @AustModernist & MSIA Conference will be held in Adelaide on 19-21 November, on the theme "Toxic Modernism/Modernist Intoxication." Further details at the link below. Send us your abstracts! amsn.org.au/amsn-confere...

"It may take time to prove you're right, but you have to stick to it." - Fred Korematsu Jailed for refusing to abide by FDR's Exec Order 9066, he took his case against internment all the way to the Supreme Court - and lost. Remember him on Korematsu Day, January 30th. 1/

Short list for the new £10,000 Sherborne Prize for Travel Writing: deskboundtraveller.com/short-list-f....

A thread on birthright citizenship I wrote in 2018, that unfortunately remains relevant. I always thought this was where it was all headed. Abolishing birthright citizenship for the non-white and non-rich. And why I teach on United States v. Wong Kim Ark every semester. Who was Wong Kim Ark? 1/

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents border patrol officers at the National Border Patrol Council, calls on Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller to resign or be fired

We’re supposed to believe this is a domestic terrorist attacking ICE with a gun

Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum.

The annual Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Pulitzer prize-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum on Monday, February 9, 2026 from 4-6 pm at the Manetti Shrem Art Museum. The event (including reception) is free and open to the public.

Words from the road for 2026: new books on travel and place from writers including Helena Attlee, Howard Cunnell, Louis de Bernières, Charles Foster, Kapka Kassabova and Sara Wheeler. deskboundtraveller.com/words-from-t...

BOOK NEWS Transportation technology in Henry James's fiction Recent release from @universitypress.cambridge.org journalofmodernliterature.blogspot.com/2025/12/book...

This week we look forward to publication, on Thursday, of the next in the Society's New Historical Perspectives book series: 'Atlantic Isles: Travel and Identity in the British and Irish West, 1880–1940' by Gareth Roddy bit.ly/4o9iblT Available free Open Access from @uolpress.bsky.social 1/2

A neat tool I just came across: Viabundus, a digital road map of northern Europe 1350-1650, that lets you calculate contemporary travel routes/times. In 1500, going Amiens → Köln by horse took almost 7 days and 13 toll payments. #medievalsky www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/handelsstras...

Here it is: the Trump Administration "draft proposal" to the University of California. Published bc faculty sued for its disclosure. Its terms go beyond what Trump demands in similar compacts to other universities. EVERYONE should read: faculty, students, admins, alumni. ucop.edu/communicatio...

Moments from the history of the road trip…. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Announcing our new and forthcoming books in Modernist Studies! buff.ly/HCJbjw9 @xenoglossic.bsky.social @kristingrogan.bsky.social @fuscowrites.bsky.social @maebhlong.bsky.social @matfournier.bsky.social @adam-mckible.bsky.social @skkeller.bsky.social @notquitehydepark.bsky.socia

The shortlist for the Ilse Schwepcke Prize has now been announced. Congratulations to Kapka Kassabova, Ursula Martin, Viv Groskop (@vivgroskop) and Victoria Whitworth, It is an annual award, administered by the SoA, for women’s travel writing in the English language.

The right sets the terms of our political discourse in so many ways, one of which is the idea that there isn't enough "debate" and "free speech" on campus. We need to push back on this. The truth is (speaking for myself as a history prof), I don't really emphasize debate much in my classes/

Thomas Swick’s perspective on English-language travel writing of the last 50 years….

We're delighted to share that the CFP for the joint @modernistudies.bsky.social and @moderniststudies.bsky.social 2026 conference, Weird Modernisms, is now live! 1-4 July, Loughborough University @lborouniversity.bsky.social More info here: moderniststudies.org/conference/MSA2026/CFP/

On the extraordinary Balkan quartet by Kapka Kassabova: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Sunday evening, Reno.

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength - and Germany violates human rights more than El Salvador. on the upsidedown world of the new State Department human rights reports www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

The first planned migration of an entire country due to climate change is happening! Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation, is at risk of being submerged under rising sea level, so it has signed an agreement with Australia to allow 280 Tuvaluans to settle in Australia as permanent residents each year.

This is very bad. Although entirely predictable. Once more the humanities are being cut back to prop up STEM and, increasingly, AI investment (including at the expense of bench science). In the past, cuts to humanities were promoted on two separate logic streams that do not hold true: /1

Researchers have been sneaking secret messages into their papers in an effort to trick AI tools into giving them a positive peer-review report Read the full story: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Colin Thubron on Kapka Kassabova and the romance of the nomadic life

The library of Congress is so so so fundamental, founded in 1800, it’s the only library of its kind, it belongs to every American, it has every copyrighted book, it is non-partisan. It is for research, anyone can use it. It is our library and we cannot let them trash it.

Samuel Diener on “what might be learned about early modern and modern cultural practices of imagining the self by examining accounts of maritime travel and exploration that (in contrast to…lyric poems, novels, and paintings…) are narrated in the first-person plural.”

Major new publication for the #TravelWriting Studies folk - Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing, edited by the dream-team of @afquaireau.bsky.social, Emanuelle Peraldo and Samia Ounoughi. Lots of excellent stuff in here and some interesting perspectives on contemporary work.

The EO that included restoring monuments/memorials on federal property is a full-on embrace of Confederate ideology. Beginning Monday @uncpress.bsky.social will make my book No Common Ground available to read FOR FREE for the next two weeks. Educate yourself about what this embrace means. ✊

This was such a satisfying project, and one in which I realized for the first time how much my whole life had been spent in a manscape, in places where almost everything was named after men.

Benjamin Paloff, Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning (@nupress.bsky.social, 2025; #skystorians): nupress.northwestern.edu/978081014862...

*PUBLICATION DAY* *Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing: Decentring Epistemologies* (Routledge 2025) is out in the world! Many thanks to my co-editors and all the contributors! More info: www.routledge.com/Twenty-First...

Did Meta steal your work to train its AI? Probably. Check and see.

New travel-writing prize for women writers! Deadline is end of the month... www.ilseschwepckeprize.co.uk

Moving Identities: Constructing the Self and the Other in Travel Writing, ed. Winfried Eckel and Sandra Vlasta. Essays on travel writing in English, French, German, Polish, and Spanish from the 18th to 21st century. New from Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg.

Moving Identities: Constructing the Self and the Other in Travel Writing, ed. Winfried Eckel and Sandra Vlasta. Essays on travel writing in English, French, German, Polish, and Spanish from the 18th to 21st century. New from Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg.

It’s usually bad news if scholarship on free speech becomes timely, so I am pleased/dismayed that I have a timely new paper, forthcoming in U Chicago Law Review, about one of the Trump admin’s most powerful tactics of censorship: jawboning 🧵https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5162523

This new complaint against DOGE is truly cranked up to 11 from start to finish. What a way to start a lawsuit storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... h/t @mikesacks.bsky.social

My review of Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley and Kathryn Walchester eds., Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection (Anthem Press,2024) for Viatica is now online. journals.openedition.org/viatica/5098

Rubio terminated 5800 USAID contracts – more than 90% of its foreign aid programs – in defiance of the courts. Here’s a list of just some of the lifesaving awards that were terminated. Nearly all were Congressionally mandated. They’ve saved millions of lives. 🧵

‘Multilingualism was so ordinary in 14th-century England that not everyone would have had a reliable sense of the boundaries between the country’s different languages.’ John Gallagher @earlymodernjohn.bsky.social on the influence of French on medieval English: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Whoever described generative AI as the aesthetic of fascism made a sharp point.