I think I had a nightmare once where I was surrounded by dancing Dr. Simis

Entry-level full time exhibits role open now at Penn Libraries! This position reports to a talented and kind Director of Exhibits to form a two person team for our ever-expanding program. Salary $50k-$65k w/ benefits wd1.myworkdaysite.com/recruiting/u...

Trans Continental Pipeline-Donate to help queer relocation! Please support if and as you are able. www.zeffy.com/en-US/donati...

Excited to host this film screening of Searching for the Songs of Wanaragua next month at Penn Libraries! Learn about Garifuna language preservaation in Honduras. www.library.upenn.edu/events/searc...

Excited to host this film screening of Searching for the Songs of Wanaragua next month at Penn Libraries! Learn about Garifuna language preservaation in Honduras. www.library.upenn.edu/events/searc...

Got to show off some of my favorite collection to a visiting class from Bryn Mawr today

For the first time since @projectsaltbox.bsky.social launched their DHS warehouse acquisition tracker, the number of canceled sales is higher than any of the other warehouse-related figures. We've reached a tipping point, folks. lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/b0...

Please listen at link below (at the top of the program) to my interview last night regarding implications of the newly intensified "drug war" in Mexico, please share widely @hofferdal.bsky.social @casbsstanford.bsky.social @witnessborder.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f...

Check out my interview on Al Jazeera today on the killing of El Mencho in Mexico and why it’s unlikely to reduce the flow of drug to the US, but will (and already has) escalate violence in Mexico.

A lesson about networks that I’m kind of proud of: at the beginning of the year, I gave my 200 students a dumb survey: fav books, foods, etc. I told them they could use pseudonyms and that I’d share their responses with the class. We’ve been using that data in various ways: to make points about +

I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.

From Black chattel slavery to Orphan Trains to Native boarding schools to Georgia Tann’s Tennessee Children’s Home (where Joan Crawford bought her baby) to Operations Babylift and Peter Pan to the modern family policing system of CPS, the USA is DEDICATED to taking children from their families. 🥚

“Giant donations, he’s come to realize, often increase the university’s bills, generating new operating expenses for projects that may have only tenuous links to the university’s core mission. […] He remembers the quip from a former dean: ‘The endowment is the gift that keeps on taking.’l

What's more shocking than ICE's plan to cram as many 8,500 humans into massive, soul-crushing warehouses? Seeing the actual DHS floor plan that echoes slavery ships and history's worst gulags with no rec space but a gun range for guards My new column on the camps www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...

The Trump admin claims they have been arresting the worst of the worst. But the Guardian, working with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sued the govt for docs that show that isn't true. 77% of people who entered deportation proceedings in 2025 had no criminal conviction My latest:

Well isn’t this just the nicest thing 😊

Fun lil donation from 1974

Legendary founder of NPR programming Bill Siemering is enjoying Zoom visiting with students so much that he's asked me to put a second call out. No honorarium necessary. Any takers?

Stuart Schrader on what Trump’s urban occupations mean for police and the unions that represent them https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/02/14/authoritarianism-from-below-trump-city-takeovers-police/?utm_source=Bluesky&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=2026-02-14_Schrader-policing-1

This is a travesty. African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin has been one of the best programs in the country. And for historical context, this is explicitly about reversing the gains of student movements in the 60s and 70s. www.statesman.com/news/educati...

Habeas cases filed by immigrants claiming their detention is illegal have taken off to levels we have never seen before. Just look at that chart. www.propublica.org/article/habe...

OPINION: "As border residents can tell you, what’s playing out in places like Chicago and Minneapolis is, in many ways, nothing new." — Inquirer columnist Luis F. Carrasco

Bad Bunny’s performance began in the plantation, featured broken electric poles, and ended by centering a hemispheric understanding of “América”—among many other things—and some Anglo journalists are like “his performance wasn’t political.” This is why we need to be telling our stories.

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

“I’m mad I can’t understand Bad Bunny’s lyrics because they’re not in English” my brother millions of metalheads around the world have been happily listening to incomprehensible Finnish shrieks and Japanese death grunts since we were teens, you’re just boring and racist

“Bad Bunny’s performance isn’t just the story of the ascendancy of a single performer, or of one genre, or even of Latin music more broadly. It’s the sign of something bigger still. America’s pop culture today is multilingual, polycultural and international at its very core.”

Please share widely! The JCB is hiring two three-year research associates for collaborative work on religions and freedoms in the early Americas. Details at jcblibrary.org!

The CfP for the 2026 Puerto Rican Studies Association Conference in Chicago is officially live!!! The theme is “Rooted Rican Pasts, Solidarity Futures.” www.ricanstudies.com/2026-cfp

"Puto" is the first collection of the works of Ricardo A. Bracho, a playwright who has been breaking ground since the 1990s by dramatizing the lives of gay Black and Brown partisans of anti-capitalism and decolonization. Read the intro for free now: buff.ly/feyuzc6

👀👀👀 LASA Central America in Costa Rica? Yes please. “Centroamérica en la encrucijada: Resistir en tiempos de asedio” americas.lasaweb.org/es/call-for-...

Want to learn more about what’s going on in Venezuela? Check out this curated guide from NACLA (cc @llchristyll.bsky.social @gabrielhetland.bsky.social): nacla.org/a-curated-gu...

Here's a notable new acquisition:

New: I spoke with a Colombian asylum seeker who was the victim of a ‘Kavanaugh stop’ about what it was like to be racially profiled, abducted in front his family and held in ICE detention hours from home for more than a month—despite doing everything “the right way.” This is Nick’s story.

Eso!

Apply to be the 2026-7 Munby Fellow in bibliography and history of the book @theul.bsky.social www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPZ688/m...

My latest newsletter of Latin American collections at Penn Libraries! View the new issue or past ones and sign up to receive them in the future! mailchi.mp/f9fd44465891...

My latest newsletter of Latin American collections at Penn Libraries! View the new issue or past ones and sign up to receive them in the future! mailchi.mp/f9fd44465891...

Hey folks, you can preorder my new book Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves at a 25% discount right now from @basicbooksgroup.bsky.social: www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/stuar... (and it's also discounted at bookshop.org, if you prefer that!). Published in April!

WH sources say Venezuela's opposition leader committed the "ultimate sin": She accepted the Nobel Peace prize. “If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” one said. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Watch Trump give himself the $50 million reward

Fantastic news for a new year www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/u...

PSA: Penn Press 40% off holiday sale continues through 12/31! If your loved ones didn't give you enough books, treat yourself! www.pennpress.org

modesty laws prevented showing even one lousy frame of John Waters' PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) in the trailer, so the only footage in it is of people reacting to a screening they just came out of. every single type of extant queer person is contained in the specific sequences I have selected here

With CECOT being in the news, I want to repost this article my wife wrote about our adopted kids' birth father. He finished a prison sentence and was deported to El Salvador and landed in CECOT. If anyone can help with this, please contact me. We're feeling pretty helpless.

I don’t mean to sound extreme, but I don’t think we should have torture camps for people with criminal records either.

!! Here’s a link to full video of the 60 Minutes segment that Bari Weiss killed last minute, via @jasonparis.bsky.social: is.gd/paU8Ko (It was uploaded to the Global TV app in Canada, seemingly by accident, and has now been taken down)

This has been made available, so for purposes of commenting on Bari Weiss's decision to spike the story, here's a live-post of that segment. It begins with a "you may recall" summary of the deportation to el Salvador. Describes the admin's claim that it could deport the men without due process

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.