Every single publisher getting an AI payout from the LLM lawsuits should be paying it to their authors & making that author’s book open access—regardless of who own the rights. Most academic authors (ca. 80%) do not own their own publishing rights (especially first authors) & wont get checks at all.

getting rid of grades entirely would be much more effective at curbing surreptitious use of genAI than any amount of surveillance, would do vastly less harm to the pedagogical relationship at the heart of education, and wouldn't be another massive economic windfall for the creepiest people you know

Uninterested in leading a pile-on but no, AI does not “have access” to everything ever published. Not archival material, obviously, but not secondary material either. Nor across times nor languages. AI is not human knowledge personified. It’s exactly not that, in fact. It’s not even a search engine.

Hegseth's repeal of universal flu vaccines is nonsense on so many levels, but his claim vaccine mandates were an "era of betrayal" irked me as a historian. Here's my response, in @thebulwark.com this morning; www.thebulwark.com/p/george-was...

I apologize, but I've some harsh words here: Until the tenured are taking pay cuts to get more tenure lines, until they are pooling their salaries to provide basic living for the folks who *didn't* get hired in this shit job market, y'all have no right, zero, NONE to tell us how to do history.

Orban concedes defeat. The support of Trump, Vance, Putin, Lavrov, Weidel, Milei, Le Pen, Fico, Babis and many others could not overcome Hungarian anger at a stagnant, corrupt regime www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

“The Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 Budget proposes to eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and provides $38 million to conduct an orderly shutdown of the Agency.” — NEH.gov The NEH has $207 million for FY2026. War in Iran? 1 billion per day. We go through 4.83 NEHs a day for what?

The danger to my job from AI isn't that AI can do my job, it's that my job is made even more precarious by the way AI is shaping ideas of the value of work. It can't do my job, but it can be part of convincing people (incorrectly) that my job isn't necessary.

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I know that the people who need to read this aren’t here, but here goes: Rules of engagement aren’t for the enemy. They’re for you. They’re for your soldiers when they’re captured or wounded. They’re for your civilians when they’re in range of the enemy. They’re for your allies, to reassure.

Quick reactions after learning that no, nobody could stop him. 1/ goodauthority.org/news/trump-m... 1/

Alysa Liu telling 60 Minutes “I love struggling, it makes me feel alive” is a legit revolutionary statement from a Bay Area native in a time when copious amounts of time and resources are being put toward convincing us to opt out of experiencing struggle, friction and self-actualization

Folks, this is Alexandra Sills' (@belovedofoizys.bsky.social) new podcast, so please give it a follow!

'Reclaiming academic publishing as a public good will require a return to not-for-profit models and sustainable open-access systems. Quality, accessibility and integrity need to be put ahead of profit.'

Operation Just Because

I want to treat "Roman Helmet Guy" as a serious interlocuter, and I want to do it as someone who does what might be called "New Military History," applying cultural studies to military history (religious violence and apocalypticism during wars): you can't study war without studying people.

I don't understand the point of this comment. Because from where I'm sitting, it is actually not a Good Thing for a world class university--situated in a democracy that is frequently at war, where a disproportionate number of future policy makers are educated--to NOT teach military history.

May the Ents march forth and tear your data centres to the ground

This really is a must read for anyone in academia.

Precisely this.

Introduce yourself with four spaceships.

Just a reminder that I'm happy to speak to any journalist, or to recommend other scholars to do so, about why prejudice and "potentially divisive symbols" like swastikas (!) are so harmful to morale and cohesion in militaries

www.npr.org/2025/11/10/n... "'I swore an oath to the Constitution, not a person,' she says. 'I just really, really implore my peers and everybody outside looking in, to just think about that. Really think about that, and think about what that means.'"

"Wouldn't it be fascinating to live in the late Roman Republic?" (Monkey paw curls).

BEST BIG CITY IN THE US 9 YEARS IN A ROW. While critics try to paint Chicago as something to fear, the rest of the world knows the truth — this is the best big city in America.

If Putin concludes that NATO’s incredibly weak physical and verbal response to his aerial assault on Poland is as robust as it is willing to get, then the disparity in wealth etc won’t deter him at all. How is this not blindingly obvious? VERY serious danger is now heading towards us at speed.

So if you remember that frustrating article a couple of weeks ago at the Dispatch suggesting that we ought to save the sciences by shoving the humanities overboard, I wrote a response to the financial illiteracy and moral cowardice of that position: thedispatch.com/article/univ...

The University of Chicago recently announced pauses on admissions to some of its humanities doctoral programs. Tyler Austin Harper argues that it's “a particular gut-punch to the humanities, not just at the university itself, but nationally and even globally.”

I think we should be using “real feel” for more things than just the weather, like you have a half hour meeting today but it’s at 4:00 so the real feel is gonna be up around 53 minutes, or you have 2 cats but they’re in a mood today so the real feel is gonna be somewhere between 7 and 9

As we mark the 80th anniversary of WWII's end, I’ve come to believe that in losing that Greatest Generation, we are losing more than just the memories of combat. We are losing the memory and experience of what it means to fight fascism and authoritarianism. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/what-we-lo...

AI will never locate a new archive. It will never uncover a new source. It will never find a small, privately held collection of papers that can upend what we think we know about the past. It can never work with undigitized sources. It can never do real oral history or ethnography.

Regurgitating/remixing the work of historians ≠ doing history. But clearly the "researchers" who made this list had no idea what any of these professions actually do. "You guys just memorize facts and dates right? And maybe speculate about ancient aliens? Prepare to be obsoleted!"

But because there's no giant 'history formula,' no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there *are* but you don't work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible. 12/

a good arbiter of how close we are to bad hybrid regime shit is if the political comedy shows start getting pulled for whatever reason

"We don’t make enough money to put up with this." Last year, US K-12 schools opened short 55,000 teachers. Between book bans and political attacks on schools and educators, it's looking like this year's shortages will be even more dire, especially in red states. newrepublic.com/article/1967...

To form a more perfect Union, implies as we all know, that we have something imperfect. But to strive for the betterment of all, and to keep striving no matter what - that is the American legacy. “For that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” We strive still.

New article out @ruhm.bsky.social! I examined negative reactions to mass violence (massacres, mass enslavements, etc) in Greek+Roman texts. Such reactions suggest that, for some ancient observers, acts of extreme violence were "atrocities"—i.e., transgressive, shocking, & worthy of condemnation. (1)

There are some things I miss about living in the Bay Area and some things I very much do not miss, but *that summer weather* is the thing I miss the most.

Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Another good reminder from today is that to win this we all need to get used to cooperating with people we sometimes find highly annoying

I endorse this view.

I have a joke about Phylarchus but Polybius says it's too dramatic.

The game was on easy mode, too.

Shout out to @bretdevereaux.bsky.social for consistently being super generous.

Is anyone else randomly getting a bunch of new followers? Not complaining, but, um, I'm super boring, barely post, and when i do it's basically me talking to myself. Like right now, 95% chance no one sees this. So. I don't get it! New followers, are you real? You won't see this, so we'll never know.

Loving how the budget bill goes all in for oligarchic techno dystopia.

This story has repeated every year since the 90s: “At a conference last year, Robert Goldstein, the chief operating officer of BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, said “We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, …”

If we are going to weather this night - hopefully a short one - we are going to need to summon some sincerity and be willing to be 'cringe' in committing, in public, to the ideals we hold. You cannot keep a republic with apathy and nihilism. You can't do good history with it either.