"This new album by these twenty-year-olds sounds a lot like my friend's band," I say to myself about someone I haven't spoken to in fifteen years

My actual answer to this question is Western music before equal temperament took over. A choir that has never tuned to a piano hits different

Wealthy people in medieval England kept squirrels as pets

I wish more journalists would point out that Sen. McConnell and Rep. Tom Kean (missed 4 months of work) are/were essentially on paid sick & medical leave. The same employment protection they’ve spent their careers blocking other Americans from having.

where IS the castellan? dragon show asking the right questions

i find both the fake outrage about anodyne democratic party member statements *and* the chiding about gravedancing both to be pretty childish

medievalist avengers, assemble

I actually lost followers for saying that gay jokes are harmful no matter who the target was. This website is incredible

This is what I was talking about in my thread about gay jokes and the closet. There is absolutely room for nuanced criticism and nuanced humor. This kind of “joke” is neither.

Friends, if you consider yourself a supporter of LGBTQ people but refer to the late Senator as "Lady G" - that's straight-up hypocrisy. Don't do it.

200 years ago today, Fanny Hensel composed this lied, Mignon (H176)

Good fucking morning we will outlive them

Michael Fanone's take on Lindsey Graham is one of the most powerful I've read:

you know what, I don’t have time to be relentlessly misinterpreted today

I see the gay jokes have already started so maybe we could all take a minute to remind ourselves that being closeted isn’t funny and you would know that if you ever had to do it.

It’s important to remember that the vast majority of humanistic / historical scholarship is done to a high scholarly standard and is just as legitimate as STEM scholarship in so far as it has been peer reviewed. There is no general crisis of low standards in historical or humanistic scholarship. 🗃️

I really have to stop posting about academia or else I might wind up going to grad school for the third time just for the thrill

"how did people write a 10 page paper without AI" as if it was 1000 years ago instead of like 3 years ago

Bringing one of the best tweets of all time over to Bluesky in honour of the Three Lions QF victory

Professional sports and academia are actually pretty similar in that a) no one gets to choose where their job is; b) only a few superstars get paid the big bucks and everyone else has to either suck it up or quit doing what they love; c) if you have a chronic illness or serious injury, you're fucked

Hello from academia

I love this so much

When I get my time machine, as soon as I have finished doing important things such as preventing a pandemic and pre-empting the Iraq War, I shall travel back to the 1990s to stop idiots from slapping seven coats of polyurethane finish on solid oak furniture like it's American buttercream frosting

You cannot discriminate against one group of people without it infesting the entirety of your soul. It is as true on the “left” as it is the right. Once you decide it’s cool to throw vulnerable people under the bus, you’re cooked completely.

thank you but I'm actually not interested in the "feminist thought" of a lesbian who uses her platform to dunk on bisexual women. leave that shit in the 1970s where it belongs.

this sucks. a lot of stuff he does sucks, but this also sucks. it sucks.

call me crazy but I don’t think anyone should find out they might have cancer from a text message

"There may be some institutionally backed misogyny on the left" -- men who have worked, doggedly, over many years, to create a culture of institutionally backed misogyny on the left

genuinely cannot imagine possessing the hubris to use this tech for scholarly purposes. you have to imagine that you’re so right about everything that the machine agrees with you only because you are The Smartest rather than merely because it’s programmed to be a slapdash sycophant

Help help I accidentally went to Tumblr and there is so much terrible literary analysis there. They don't know what an unreliable narrator is. They don't understand the difference between what a character thinks and what an author thinks. They think Roland Barthes was suggesting they do a murder

sure, sometimes this website feels like kindergarten but that doesn't mean you need to illustrate every one of your dumbass posts with a cartoon or AI slop image

having said this, everyone should listen to some medieval music as a little treat. a lot of it is extremely sick, and I don’t mean in the black plague way

I am reading some stuff for an essay about a thing and I'm starting to think that maybe tv critics should not be allowed to write about music.

It is truly incredible how some of these male leftists who correctly criticize the police and court system will turn around and say a rape allegation can’t be taken seriously unless it passes through the cops and courts

I don't really care what other musicologists think but when Sofia Coppola stacked the soundtrack for her Marie Antoinette biopic with post-punk and new wave bangers, I cheered.

not saying anything new, but if these folks actually believed in genAI writing, they'd disclose it, tout it, and build their own audiences elsewhere and leave others be. hiding and sneaking it to markets who want no part of it doesn't prove you're good at writing. just proves you're good at fraud.

There are organizations that could offer many $150,000 fellowships that could support independent researchers to continue their work and get healthcare and they mostly do this on the Right.

it’s undemocratic to run a candidate accused of rape, period, do we have to keep saying this?

that’s hot

It’s not a guarantee that if you’re for racial justice, you‘ll have good gender politics. But a lot of lefties with terrible gender politics are racist and it’s often expressed in their class commitments and virulent anti-identity politics.

tapping the sign

Except that is literally the playbook for every sexual assault allegation???

As a scholar of gender and race and the fate of 90s alt rock, I mean of course you tank the ship when you try to appeal to men more than anyone else by bro-ifying what should be and is a generally diverse and left leaning space

Sure it is. The Left is as full of covert misogynists as any other political group. Just ask Dolores Huerta.

Everything continues to be gender.

This sums up the frantic and coerced deployment of "AI" throughout public and private sectors. Results of even cursory audits are horrifying every time, invariably paired with forced adoption and retaliation for asserting professional norms. Colonialism is a cherry on top.

Misogyny. This specific political tendency is called misogyny.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but please do not ask your students to cold email independent scholars for reading lists in our areas of expertise. You want to use my work? Check the bibliography I didn’t get paid to publish.

if you followed me because you wanted to read what the blonde lady posts about music history you are going to hate when I start actually doing it