finally, we're living through precedented times

Out of curiosity, I looked into the history of inevitability. It was first used as an adjective in the 15th century in Life it St. Katherine. The noun form was used 100 years later. Anyway, possibility has been around for longer. Take that with you into the new year. #academicsky #skystorians 🗃️

an article about postwar bells & sonic gaps? MADE FOR ME (& i kinda wish i wrote it tbh) www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/a...

In a footnote about Peale’s Power of Positive thinking do I include the current president saying Peale helped him navigate his crushing debt in the 1990s? On the one hand I don’t want his name tainting my lovely monograph. On the other hand I could index his name under “Bilious Turd that I Hate.”

NEW: Organ tuners have been leaving temperature and humidity records in little-known books for decades. 🎹 They reveal how temperatures inside churches have changed over time due to climate change and increased heating. A new scoop for The Reengineer! www.thereengineer.pro/p/church-org...

My childhood Santa candle is dubious of the world generally and the next generation’s holiday decorating scheme specifically. Not my dried okra garland though. Santa loves that.

Have completed my institution’s active shooter response training module (such helpful tips as how to gouge out an attacker’s eyes) and will now change my work email sign off from “taking care of what matters,” our branded school motto to “I deserve to live,” the tag line of this horrendous exercise.

A query for those of you that write and publish academic things: what is a ballpark rate and timeline for hiring an indexer for a ~130,000 word edited volume? We already have a spreadsheet of keywords built. #academicsky #skystorians #histstm

I’ve figured out why my (fabulous, wide-wale, red-orange) corduroy pants are agitating me so much today: they sound just like the cords worn by middle-aged women in the 80s and oh my god, THIS IS MY MOM’S ZIP ZOP!?

"are you enjoying duo mobile" does a hamburger enjoy being made of quarks. does a fish enjoy linear time. does the mountain enjoy the first taste of a cup of hot chocolate when you get back to the ski lodge. your question means nothing to me. i couldn't enjoy duo mobile even if i tried

Who has two itchy wrists and poison ivy in December? THIS GAL!

My son has many wonderful characteristics but today my favorite is that he will break into a Peanuts dance and coax everyone else into it as the (absolute best holiday album) Vince Guaraldi Trio Charlie Brown Christmas tracks come on.

Scroll through for the whole thread!

when we say we want more streets to be pedestrianized, this is what we mean

My friend just fuckin showed up with a corncob pipe & that’s when it hit me that we are all in our 40s which means we get one new accessory slot

“Search history,” a poem (by me) How to prepare duck breast In the fall of democracy, And protect overwintering bees And immigrants. De-icing your freezer And town square, And saying what you mean To get a knee off your chest. Six ways to make casserole Without health insurance. (Cont)

Having spent half my life nearish the ocean, I now find this landlocked phenomenon of 40-degree (Fahrenheit!)-temperature-drop days to be downright thrilling. I have multiple weather apps open just to cheer on the thermometer. Gogogogo! I want to make soup!

The arc of history is a foot-long, but it bends towards justice.

So I guess this is also my favorite Bill Gates story.

My favorite Ted Porter story is the time he found an old ranking of all the high school students in the state of Washington, ranked by aptitude and taped it to his office door for several months. Ranked third was a William Gates, carefully underlined by ballpoint pen. 1/2 #histsci

I got a letter from the government the other day I opened and read it it said you get free electricity

BREAKING: Democrat Johnny DuPree has flipped a Republican-held Mississippi Senate district in a special election. DuPree was previously the mayor of Hattiesburg. His win imperils the Mississippi Senate GOP's narrow supermajority. www.mississippifreepress.org/democrat-joh...

Pretty grateful to our featured sticker artist, Ida for her joyful mermaid!

Couldn’t vote today but did just receive 100s of these promotional stickers @emilypawley.bsky.social and I had made for our forthcoming supernova of a collaborative book. If you’re at HSS in a couple weeks, I’ll give you one! Or stick it on you when you’re not looking! #histsci #envhum #envhist

My second science job as a summer undergraduate intern was here working on the IMAGE spacecraft. It went silent in 2005 but then was found again in 2018!

I have a pet theory that flight attendants, who spend their workdays in a state of emotional and physical restraint, fitting all the cups and condiments and passengers into tight spaces, go home and just fling stuff everywhere. 1/3

Woooo, out doing recon for tomorrow’s community art workshop on… panoptic mapmaking?

Back on the Metro, eyes peeled for my Nutella colonel.

Am in DC for a few days for the GSA. Was ambivalent about seeing the city I used to adore so changed. Made and held eye-contact tonight with an USAF officer (LOTS of stripes/badges/flair?) that was riding in one of the sideways seats with the biggest container of Nutella I’ve ever seen next to him.

Before I go dark on Bluesky for a bit (returning to MS), sharing some heartwarming tidbits I collected in LA this week: First, my Doktorvater’s goldfish survived the Palisades fire in his little pond, soot and all. Second, my niece’s school sings Felix Navidad in Mandarin at their holiday pageant.

Heading back to the severed floor/Mississippi today, so doomscrolling all the Bluesky I can for the next several hours.

Already having a tough day so thought I’d cheer myself up by working on archive requests for my Monday visit. Searched “LA civilian defense” in the hopes of finding some information on the siren infrastructure but the first several hits are civilian exclusion orders targeting Japanese Americans.

Everything is terrible and terrifying so instead of finishing my guest lecture slides, I’m trying to write a limerick about it. Any suggestions on words that rhyme epistemology? Yellow-eyed vireo?

Just touched down in ATL and popped open Bluesky for the first time in 12 days - been locked out because Mississippi. What’s been going on? Anything happen?

I’m at a tucked away, very mediocre concourse restaurant where they serve the only chickenless salad (desirable) in the whole airport. They are blasting Boyz II Men and multiple people, servers and patrons, have stopped everything to sing along. ATL is amazing in unexpected ways.

One of the more adorable language hiccups my son used to have was mishearing and misremembering cuttlefish so that he called them snugglefish.

Attended the opening reception for the "IQ: Hva forteller testene?" exhibit at the Univ. of Oslo Historical Museum this evening. Lots of good material on the history of intelligence testing, my favorite being the cheerful diagnostic toys. The opening quotes were a bit of an emotional rollercoaster.

I know there's a lot happening today, but this is sneaking in under the radar. This proposed new rule would absolutely crush foreign PhD students, potentially making it impossible for them to enroll with any certainty of their ability to finish www.politico.com/news/2025/08...

An imprecise ranking of the top five things that happened to me today: 1. Waking up in a charmingly restored 1803 Jakstuga on the edge of the forest outside of Stockholm.

the crisis in which the University of Chicago is now engulfed -- one entirely of its own making, and which has led to the (hopefully temporary) suspension of admissions into numerous PhD programs in the humanities -- represents I think a seismic event in the history of American higher education 1/

EDITOR'S NOTE: "For those of us at the Mississippi Free Press, this is a significant blow. We left Twitter earlier this year for a lot of reasons, and have since made BlueSky our main social media platform (it’s also where we have the most followers)," Ashton Pittman writes.

The best part of Uppsala so far (besides seeing old friends) is discovering that the very serious Güntherska bakery pulled a 300 year old stone out of their facade at street level to install this tiny mouse bakery diorama. I love it so much. #eseh2025

The crux of their argument is that if they're found liable, then the consequences of their own actions that no one forced them to take could ruin them and the rest of their industry that undertakes similar practices. To which I say motherfucker did you never hear about Napster

Gonna repost this every time I hear “Take Five,” this time on the Concourse E lounge piano.

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

We're 300 followers away from 70,000. 300 more would be really nice. But you know what would be even better? 300 plus 30,000. Bluesky: help a museum out

In these trying times, an Ode to the Dumpy Bucket Thingy at my Town’s New Splashpad: My favorite thing about my town’s new splashpad is the dumpy bucket thingy. It’s a giant bowl, uncentered on an axis, that fills with water and, when heavy enough, tips over on children eagerly waiting below. 1/

those damned outdoor pigs can't keep getting away with this

The 2025 @aaup.org Faculty in the South Survey is live. If you are a professor in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, or Texas it's for you. Ends 8/29 at 5pm Eastern forms.gle/v7T3BH2w9LXs...

Prairie Chickens Imaginaries paper became a co-authored email thread on music theory & iterative novelty then a zany experimental piece w/Tswana terms & LA sunsets. We did revisions w/track changes OFF & just submitted it. Tenure is nice but "fuck it, it's all burning down anyway" is even more fun.