I suspect American measles vaccination rates will eventually return to near-universal levels as people rediscover how bad the disease is and that knowledge will outweigh the vague blaming of nebulous harms on vaccines. But a lot of people--and their kids--are going to pay a price on the way there

for RSA I'm talking about portages and cartography. Two parts: #1 is about how Europeans--who didn't have the tech that enabled portage--slowly learned what portage was and how to represent portages cartographically, as part of a bigger uptake of indigenous knowledge in maps of early Canada

Prynne on love-locks(1633): "long unshorne womannish, frizled, lust provoking haire and Love-lockes (growne now too much in fashion with comly Pages, Youthes, and lewd effeminate ruffianly persons; as they were with these unnaturall Pagans, I dare not write, to amorous beastly purposes, to which +

Fellowship Opportunity! The Eloise Quiñones Keber Fellowship Deadline March 1, 2026 $2,000, the fellowship supports research travel for a scholar working in any area of pre-Columbian, early modern, or colonial Latin American art history for the period 1300–1700. www.rsa.org/page/keberfe...

One of the many reasons I oppose Ring doorbells is the way I have seen them used on Nextdoor. People really do start thinking sidewalks and the street in front of their house are their private property! Which it is not!

getting ready to teach Knight of the Burning Pestle this week, which Pepys did NOT like

I have always reflexively supported Puerto Rican statehood just because them having better representation seems like basically a good thing? But it also seems like a very complicated topic on which this particular gringo is not well informed

Macbeth: SHIT

scrolling through my photo archive trying to figure out when the first snowdrops usually break the ground in Binghamton. Looks like the earliest I have in my camera roll are around the first week of March. That's not so long to hold on!

Didn’t have coffee and am on a long drive. Am so tempted to try my first ever Monster Energy Drink but am worried it might shatter my delicate constitution, like that fatally delicious Panera lemonade

Taschen sale got me. One large coffee table book of Breughel paintings (50% off) coming right up!

It is #Caturday after all. BnF Latin 12048; Sacramentarium gelasianum; 8th century; France (diocese of Meaux or Cambrai?); f.92v @gallicabnf.bsky.social

Good morning winners!!!

the first time I saw previews for the new Wuthering Heights it was being marketed almost as an erotic thriller. Now it’s being marketed as “The Greatest Love Story Ever Told,” with lots of swelling, schmaltzy music. I am going to see it with a bunch of English professors on Valentines Day obviously

I do think it is funny that it is Penn Station under dispute: literally the dirtiest and most unpleasant building in NYC

still hellishly cold in the US northeast: current “feels like” temperature in Binghamton is -22 F / -30 C. Seems like if we can make it to Tuesday without everyone’s pipes exploding, then we will be back to normal winter temps (and maybe some of this dirty, ossified snow might start to melt)

Rewatched One Battle After Another tonight with the bf, who hadn’t seen it yet. I have so many favorite things about this movie: machine gunning while pregnant; how lame the white supremacists are; “the daughter of a rat….is a baby rat”; Junglepussy’s speech; the highway sequence

I made the NYT lasagna, the fancy one that takes four hours. It really is absolutely incredible. Also cost $80 (!) in ingredients, but I guess given the number of servings that’s not SO bad

there’s never been a movie that gets it right about being a professor

i think we all need to step back and realize that peak art was made when neolithic pot in the shape of a pig was fired

cannot WAIT to read this

the Spectator accidentally recycled a subhed from a previous day’s article about Tehran

I do like it when students say "thank you" when they leave a lecture. It makes me feel like someone important, such as a bus driver.

JOB!! early modern VAP at Wesleyan! I had this exact position out of grad school and I can say firsthand that the Wesleyan English dept is wonderful, supportive and protective/welcoming. And the students are great! If you know anyone who wants a very good one-year gig, please tell them to apply.

The restoration of the New York City to Scranton train line inches forward, with public comment on the proposals happening on February 19th. Long-awaited: it's been like Lucy with the football for decades..... www.thetimes-tribune.com/2026/02/05/p...

actually, upon reflection, The Alchemist would be better adapted to modern America as a cryptocurrency satire

Thrilled for my colleague, Laurence Publicover, and his appearance on In Our Time today, joined by the brilliant @oldfortunatus.bsky.social and @lucycmunro.bsky.social - what a trio! Have worked on H4 quite a bit and still learned lots! www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

the perverse masculine urge to re-read Ben Jonson's unfinished, posthumously published history play MORTIMER HIS FALL (1641)

someone should remake Jonson’s The Alchemist set in modern America and focused on unregulated vitamin/health supplement purveyors. You could set it in a GNC.

I rewatched LOTR and my best friend from my PhD (a novel specialist) has been rereading the books. I asked him what his opinion was about Tolkien's place in the lineage of the English novel (oddly, not a place he is usually put) and he said "Tolkien is one of the many children of HENRY FIELDING"

I have five million other things to do but I cannot stop thinking about an idea I have for a SEVENTH article about George Herbert. it is like I have some kind of very specific mental illness.

went to a great talk about a Velazquez painting called SAINT IlDEFONSO RECEIVING THE CHASUBLE FROM THE VIRGIN. I do not think I have heard anyone say the word "chasuble" outside of productions of The Importance of Being Earnest. She said it like x100 in 30 minutes and it started feeling very surreal

ever since the deportations / immigration crackdown began in the US, I have been sure in my heart that most Americans, when they saw what it looks like in practice, would reject it as morally wrong. And polling shows that I am right! And I suspect we are just at the beginning of people waking up.

your dead wife wants you to take her on a date to STARBUCKS followed by a walk to TOYOTA DEALERSHIP

Just noticed that Quin Hall's incredibly hideous hairy dinosaur in Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1918 novel The Land that Time Forgot (right) is based on the incredibly hideous hairy dinosaur from Lawson Wood's c. 1907 artbook Prehistoric Proverbs (left). And here I assumed Hall was just winging it.

starting Shakespeare's Richard II tomorrow. Am just lying awake thinking about Mowbray's beautiful description of what being exiled to a country where you don't speak the language is like. Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue.....

Saw this in a book about the history of ceramics. I cannot unsee it ... I can only make you see it with me. www.ashmolean.org/dish-composi...

I swear to god if I see a single Celtic foot in the new Odyssey movie I’ve gonna fold Chris Nolan in half

i....would eat this. @sharkebauer.bsky.social !

Ann Bacon Drury, one of Donne’s patrons, had a prayer closet covered in emblematic panels(constructed before 1615). My favorite of the painted scenes is this rather mysterious and whimsical one, depicting a mole reading the Bible with his little spectacles [from H.L. Meakin’s book about the closet]

if you take each grandparent and go up the paternal line until you hit an immigrant: 1. invited by W. Penn w/ other Germans in 17th c (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thones_...) 2. irish potato famine x2 3. fleeing German econ collapse after WW1/excited abt growth opportunities for anti-Semitism in US 🙄

experimenting this week with removing email app from my phone and forbidding myself from looking at email except during "email hour" once during the workday. We'll see. I feel like it has really been sapping my attention.

JOB!! 🚨 Binghamton's History dept seeks a Latin Americanist for an endowed 2-yr postdoc. Your work should have a spatial dimension: "digital mapping, the history of map making, migration, urban history, and/or borders". $60k, with benefits. Please share widely! www.binghamton.edu/apps/messagi...

Back on my bullshit (making cinnamon rolls to procrastinate). Pictured here before and after their second rise

In honor of Groundhog Day let us celebrate when the Mayor of New York was the fun kind of embarrassing

I forgot to celebrate Kansas Day on Saturday!!!!! Belated Happy Kansas Day, to all of her children near and far, wherever they may roam. Ad astra per aspera!

I will pay someone to assassinate Punxsutawney Phil so that his prophecy will not come to pass

this is why we’re all on Bluesky rn

one thing that has served me well over the last 20 yrs: not learning the names of NYT opinion columnists / refusing to learn anything about them! It’s great and I plan to continue doing it. Also a great way to conversationally punish people (ahem male historians) who bring them up at parties