This is exactly why I have decided to homeschool my kids in Judaeo-Arabic.

what happens when someone with full control of the “publish” button keeps running into the choice between really taking the time to do it right, and the twin pressures of Every Piece Of Content Yields Revenue and I Feel Guilty I’m Not Writing More For You? your foot’s gonna slip someday

what you really want in this situation is a crew that will help keep you honest, and a great editor you have the humility to listen to that is disappearing from the face of the earth, outcompeted by a lot of sleek little mammals equipped with take-generation incisors that never stop growing

Well, This is now my second favorite African-Syrian marriage.

My top 5 moments from the inauguration: 5. Someone pausing after "Now, let us swear..." and me yelling "FUCKKK." 4. Rama Duwaji's coat 3. Gaddi Red Challenger 2. Umm & Abu Zohran's (matching?) topis 1. "Those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty"

Without getting too sappy, he really does embody the traits I consider most "American," and which factored in heavily when I chose to return here nearly four years ago.

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing. You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics. That is all.

Look at these tirchhi topi wale 🥹

I got to do some pretty cool stuff in 2025 and I hope it will see the light of day someday. Since I spend a lot of time reading things that people wrote 70 years ago, I understand now that the work we do was always precarious. This brief period of expecting stability in academia was the blip.

I am being informed (can’t watch at the moment) that they are now performing GADDI RED CHALLENGER at the Zohran inauguration 😆 Desi millennials, this is truly our time

Can't wait to make hajj to mamdanistan

Zohran doesn’t realize that he’s part of my elaborate plan to convince my family we should move to NYC. Everything is going according to plan.

my desi muslim mom fully losing her mind right now as we watch this awesomeness together remotely

Disappointed to read on LinkedIn that the Library of Arabic Literature (@libraryarablit.bsky.social) is ceasing publication with the new year due to the end of grant funding from NYUAD

I got to do some pretty cool stuff in 2025 and I hope it will see the light of day someday. Since I spend a lot of time reading things that people wrote 70 years ago, I understand now that the work we do was always precarious. This brief period of expecting stability in academia was the blip.

In the new year, may all of us merit a Mayor Zohran Mamdani wherever we live.

Watching hockey for the first time in a year, and I guess I’m a little rusty. When does the sex start?

Wang Shishen 汪士慎 (1686-1759), October 1728: 每餐先备买鱼钱，曾记携归小似拳， 一自爪牙动黠鼠，傍人安稳卧青氊。 I set money aside for fish before each meal. She used to be no bigger than my hand -- Now with claw and tooth she routs the crafty rat, And drowses by her humans on her mat.

Mods are asleep, post blobby Qing dynasty cats

New Medieval Books: The Emergence of Arabic Poetry www.medievalists.net/2024/12/new-... #poetry

types of Persian word: very, very Indo-European (barādar, "brother"; sitāra, "star") inexplicable false cognate (bad, "bad"; mēz, "table") learnt it from an Indian takeout menu (murġ, "chicken"; gōšt, "meat")

Just a reminder - this book and most others in its series, such as Francois Soyer's Medieval Anti-Semitism and Darle Brooks Hedstrom's Desert Ascetics of Egypt, are available in Amazon Kindle editions!

the graduation of a cohort of gaza’s new medical professionals in front of the ruins of al shifa hospital. No words, really.

I recently peer-reviewed an article that discussed the 17th/18th c. context (not out yet). But there’s definitely something unique to the thinking in 19th/20th c.—e.g., Wheeler’s “Indo-European” framing or Bryce’s “The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India”—that elicit the comparison

Thank you, this matches my impression! I think there's a story to tell here not just about why we shouldn't use the term "Indo-Roman trade" any more but about why people started to use it in the first place.

Roman historians: Do you know of any writing about "Indo-Roman trade" that considers if/how the term invites implicit comparisons between the Roman and British empires? Something that situates the rise of the term in 19/20 c historiography? Feels just downstream of writing about why the term has 1/2

it is time. grandma must watch k-pop demon hunters

RE: Jinu's family

I would fall so hard for Jinu. Heck, by the end of this movie, I still wanted him to be saved. His mom and sister were probably terrible! He needed to betray them.

shh nobody say anything or you'll scare it, but i'm having my once-in-3-years run of several days in a row when i am actually able to write

Public discourse on this subject has utterly failed to direct citizens' attention to the actual problem, which is that a commercial industry is assaulting education. So every week we get another thoughtless op-ed on blue books or the death of the college essay, etc etc.

I will be trying to memorize this on this almost-first day of Christmas

There are many people who simply do not understand the stakes and either understate or overstate them. The issue is not that AI will replace writers or w/e: it can't. The issue is that AI will make our working conditions significantly worse and harm the development of new artists in our fields.

I have a big scary deadline ahead that is going to consume Christmas. What fiction books should I promise myself as a treat after the deadline? I'm interested in books like PARADISE by Abdulrazak Gurnah or SEA OF POPPIES by Amitav Ghosh because I have no work-life balance 🥰

Since it’s official. Thanks 🙏 @newyorker.com. This feels pretty surreal.

We need a position that's extremely anti AI but also very anti academics making a fetish out of 19th/20th century knowledge infrastructures & practices.

Important news for the Bluesky userbase (37-year-olds who went to the free Prospect Park shows every summer): Wolf Parade has the No. 1 song on Spotify right now because it's in the gay hockey movie.

I am amazed at all these epiphanies that people report having “in the archives,” because idk if it’s just me but I will trust anything before I trust my own eyes. There are no epiphanies, only gradual concessions to myself, and never “in the archives,” only in my mind and much later.

Archives. "Archival." THE archive. Ancient historians on the outside looking in, intrigued but excluded, a single tear running down our cheek.

I think about this so much with practicing/teaching historical writing. "Context" and "description" get short shrift in comparison to "analytical" writing, but without context and description, there is no dramatization, no understanding of people's actions as rooted in the fullness of their lives.

FB memories tells me that it is exactly 8 years since I received my unconditional offer for my Classical Studies BA at Birkbeck. I'm a little bit stunned to think how much I've managed to cram in since then. Seems like a good time to reshare this: ancientalexandra.weebly.com/blog/an-ode-...

I am so stuck right now with my work. I do not know what to focus my energy on, and I miss the feeling of working toward something so badly it is like missing a limb. But the ways I use AI can and will never replace the hard work of discovering what story I was yearning to tell.

How do historians process that kind of material? Well, I read it all. I learned how to recognize the handwriting of every family member (40 cousins in one generation) and other correspondents. I learned how to skim. And then I transcribed 2000+ letters that I needed more time to analyze.

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.

no maybe you can’t “read everything in your field” but you can die trying which is basically what a PhD is

The thing that is stupid about this AI argument is that it’s absolutely true that people can’t read everything in detail, but the way things work they’re pressured to pretend that they do. The exponential amount of literature was a problem pre-AI.

Does anyone have a good assignment to help history survey students understand how bias and context work in our discipline? I'm struggling to get them past "source is worthless because it's bias" to "evaluate the source's perspective using context and use that to help us understand things"

So much of my research process is searching anxiously for my insight while up against some extremely implausible deadline, becoming increasingly sure I’m going to crash and burn, then casually explaining everything I know to a friend, who looks at me like 😶 and tells me to write it all down

I am now being accused of promoting a Lamarckian view of evolution in my most recent voice memo, and I am egging on the accuser to please record their own rival series of voice memos outlining other theories. Let's let the 5-year-old decide what she finds persuasive.

My new favorite thing is recording voice memos for my 5 year-old niece replying to her many questions (also sent via voice memo) about evolution and linguistics. Then I send her parents scientific articles that might be "relevant to her interests." What a little scholar she is.