I curate the history series at public media's trade journal Current. We're looking for pieces on the history of NPR, PBS and its affiliates, with some space to imagine public media's future. We accept academic articles repurposed for wide readership. Plus, we pay. Please circulate!

fireworks in our neighborhood

I think this Bears team might be the ultimate Chicago team: always down, never out.

welcome to chicago, #AHA26! i won't be around because i'm pregnant (surprise!) & want to avoid the inevitable post-conference illness, especially with flu rates so high right now. but i would *love* to connect with others who have done the phd thing while pregnant. please get in touch if that's you!

“He reads it. He cites it. And he makes it accessible to a national audience.” Very cool moment @historians.org #AHA26 recognizing @jamellebouie.net’s exceptional engagement w history and historians in his brilliant opinion writing.

Remembering today that having your heart broken is a necessary step on the path to becoming fully human. Whichever heartbreak is your first, it’s probably critical that a state break your heart so that you can develop a political imagination. If this is your first, I’m sorry and also welcome.

been years since my job was to write & ship code, but i just heard an argument that agentic coding has majorly increased amount of code being merged into systems, w/ no increase in error rates, therefore gen AI is good, and i am begging ppl to grasp: more does not mean better, often more means worse

One of my goals with the class this quarter is to encourage non-engineering students to push themselves to understand unfamiliar technologies in a bit more depth than they might otherwise. With this assignment, I tried to systematize the way I tend to do this. miriamposner.com/classes/is29...

One interesting thing about this is how few articles covering this mention OpenAI’s coming move to integrate ads, which merged with people’s health data, presents a wide range of predatory scenarios.

The Midwest Junto call for abstracts is up! 15-min presentations on any aspect of the history of science, technology, or medicine. Grad students from Midwestern programs particularly welcome to participate. At Purdue this April. Holler with any questions! midwestjunto.wordpress.com

I'm glad to share this new book chapter, written with one of my undergrads. Drawing on interviews during/after Covid lockdowns, we show that moms varied in how they approached remote learning, and that intensive approaches led to more burnout, leading to more interest in a return to in-person school

“ChatGPT started coaching Sam on how to take drugs, recover from them and plan further binges. It gave him specific doses of illegal substances, and in one chat, it wrote, ‘Hell yes—let’s go full trippy mode’” www.sfgate.com/tech/article...

Semesterly reminder to everyone - Canvas in many cases defaults to showing students the course's grade distribution and student's place on it. If you *don't* want your students to be aware of where they "rank" at all times, take a second to double check it's turned off. #TeachLearnSky #EduSky

Seeing lots of folks incorporating "critical university studies" lessons into their spring classes. For what it's worth, my 2022 Redesigning the Academy class site is totally open, and I've got a bunch of relevant (open) Arena channels, too... [1/2] redesigningacademy.wordsinspace.net/spring2022/

The amount of money we're spending to terrorize neighborhoods and snatch tamale vendors should radicalize anyone.

the pure magic of historical research, in one skeet

One thing I wrote about here is how technology has made buses *way* more convenient while techno-futurists were obsessed with flying taxis and self-driving cars.

new quarter century more art more good

Happy New Year! We love sharing these pro-book posters from the Works Projects Administration Poster Collection in the Library's Prints and Photographs Division. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the Library of Congress's collection of more than 900 is the largest.

it's important to have family traditions. in our house, we do loaded nachos on NYE. studying previous iterations before beginning prep for tonight's...

EXCLUSIVE: @laurenweberhp.bsky.social & I have spent the last year collecting school+county-level vaccination data from across the US and found that only about 28% of counties now have herd immunity for kindergartners from measles—that leaves about 5.2mn kids unprotected. Gift link: wapo.st/49zDc43

for all considering returning to masking, given current flu rates: i masked while teaching this past fall term, and my undergrads were *extremely* chill about it. i started the quarter with "i don't want your germs" and they were like, "yeah that's so reasonable, sara." literally that easy!

Question for the historians and public historians on here: Who teaches you how to write history for various audiences? Serious Q. Are there classes in academic programs? Residencies? Working groups?

"Flu is spreading very widely. Right now, we’re seeing pretty steep, almost vertical growth curves across the country, including a doubling and tripling of the indicators that we measure like emergency room visits from week to week in Illinois."

EXCLUSIVE: @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social will be sworn in as mayor on midnight on January 1 inside the old abandoned City Hall subway station, saying that he sees the venue as a symbol for the aims of his upcoming administration.

I've enjoyed reading various definitions of slop, the word of the year according to Merriam-Webster. But they all focus on its attributes, which misses the resignation to a cynical instrumentality that I think explains why many people find slop repulsive

excuse me

chicago, is it really supposed to drop more than 30 degrees in the next, uh, 12 hours?

A pair of happy hammerhead sharks (ca. 1735 Edo period Japan)

we have so much chicago pope swag in our house. multiple fridge magnets, a chicago pope tote, etc. truly a highlight of this year

Requested a correction from @princetonupress.bsky.social. Let's see what happens.

Since they have all deleted their original posts, I want to make clear that this was said in response to some AI enthusiasts arguing that existing AI could do the job of a historian in part because all existing information you would need to do history research was already on the Internet.

“New York City’s syndromic surveillance system, which collects information about every patient who visits an emergency room, reported 9,857 visits for “influenza-like illness” last week. That was higher than in the worst weeks of the 2017-18 or 2024-25 flu seasons, both ranked as “high severity”

Chicago is once again hosting collection sites for real trees at 27 locations around the city (see the map in the link). Drop off trees in the designated corral at any participating site, Jan. 3-17. 🎄 news.wttw.com/2025/12/26/c...

campuses have learning opportunities, social space, entertainment, and universities ARE healthcare. multigenerational access is net social good.

Time for the annual debate: what decade exactly is A Christmas Story supposed to be set in

Well, my review of flu A is in. 0/5 stars, with only three people in our crew having caught it so far. You may want to mask up for travel/crowds rn even if you’re not normally a huge preventative masking person. The vax apparently is not well matched with this strain, and it’s raging

Edward Hopper, Christmas card, 1928 whitney.org/collection/w...

Pleased to partner with Philip Morris on our “healthy smoking in schools” initiative

not quite what this thread is getting at but once at the LOC reading room, i saw a husband & wife duo straight out of central casting, by which i mean she was doing all the physical & intellectual labor, while he was simply looking at whatever individual documents she put in front of him

me taking a selfie for social media:

Can confirm Jeff Passan’s report that the White Sox are signing Japanese slugger Munetaka Murakami to a two-year, $34 million deal

i think this is a tricky but important point. i did three years in a way less resourced phd program before starting over (i know) at my current school. taught me to be very thorough w research, bc i had to request everything anyway. by contrast, these days, i have so much at my fingertips

This, for the record, is what goes into a footnote. It’s the key part of the research process where I examine the practical, methodological, ethical implications of my sources before I join the stream of interpretation. It cannot be outsourced to an LLM.

the epstein files as rick owens fall/winter 2024

I have a weird question for the #bird people on here. Do you think someone could tell that a book was pooped on specifically by a sparrowhawk (or perhaps hawks generally) just from the feces? I'm looking at a 16th c. case where witnesses claim books were pooped on specifically by sparrowhawks!

for anyone who needs a book rec for the young reader in their life: i have discovered BOG MYRTLE by sid sharp, and it's fantastic www.annickpress.com/Books/B/Bog-...