So many good points in this thread but jeez one's a big one: it is remarkable how the left-punchers never wring hands about how much right-wingers talk about climate

William John Burchell https://bionomia.net/Q1397207 collected the holotype FABACEAE: Lotononis pungens in South Africa https://gbif.org/occurrence/912345494 #TypeSpecimenToday

Happy Monday! 🌵 We're glad to say that this rescheduled Reading Club session is happening this week! Join us on 6 November to discuss Appadurai's article, a fantastically rich piece to raise questions connecting museums & collections, coloniality & the global/planetary, & the age of Anthropocene ✨

#BOOKGIVEAWAY Follow @coldwarpod.bsky.social then reshare & reply to this post to enter a chance to win a copy of this book. T&C's & other ways to enter here coldwarconversations.com/giveaway/ #eastgermany #GDR #DDR #Berlinwall @DDROnline.bsky.social @GermanAtPompey.bsky.social

The higher-ups across American mainstream media are desperate to ingratiate themselves with Trump *and* many of them have also been itching to go full anti-"woke" since at least the summer of 2020. The overall result is a pervasive rightward shift of the media and information landscape.

I can't get into the psyche of people who would cut off the world's best researchers from teaching their students because they happened to be born farther away from you than you are comfortable with. www.chronicle.com/article/flor...

DHS says our new piece is "dishonest, slanted, and fundamentally inaccurate" but won't say why. Here's the story where we show with evidence that DHS spliced together clips spanning years and multiple locations to create its own reality. Gift link wapo.st/4nuDGwf

After three days spent with AI researchers from around the world, one thing is very clear to me: we need the humanities and social sciences more than ever. We need philosophers to ask about ethics and responsibility. We need sociologists to understand how technology reshapes relationships, 1/

Nobody in authority ever suggested that "Essay mills are just an inevitable part of modern life, you should change your teaching-methods to circumvent them". They fucking MADE THEM ILLEGAL.

Belgian AI scientists are advocating *against* the use of AI in academia. “If independent thinking is no longer encouraged at university, where would it?” apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

In spite of the headline, there is the pesky legal matter that neither billionaires or anybody else can “give” money to “pay troops” or anything else. However, a great compromise would be for billionaires to pay more money into the general treasury through “taxes.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/u...

I've launched an investigation into the contracting and approval process for the demolition of the White House—and whether the corporate donors funding Trump's ballroom are seeking favors with the Administration. The American public deserves answers. www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/t...

Wow. It's comprehensive— tying together many of the incentives (grift) and implications of AI's infiltration in education— well-researched with plenty of links, and so well-written. It goes from alarming to enraging to bleak and is way worse than I imagined. Glad it ends on a mildly hopeful note.

Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document shows

built on theft and at massive environmental cost and most importantly, numerous studies keep demonstrating that genAI tools often work a little better than by chance. how is it that we can’t expunge these slop machines out of our institutions and communities www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Retired intelligence analysts confirm what the political scientists are telling us — and what the world outside is telling us — the goal of these people is the end of law, the end of democracy, and the end of a recognizable republic. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Calling all #skystorians! Does anyone have guidance that they give students on creating TikTok videos on historical topics as group projects? I'm considering doing this with first-year UGs as a switch up to my usual (a museum exhibition). Any advice is appreciated! ✨ #envhist #histstm #histsci

The costs of the UK’s Global Talent Visa looks a trifle high in comparison to competitor countries - largely through the Immigration Health Surcharge (which critics say is a form of double taxation as they contribute to the NHS through normal tax on their earnings)

'The British Library...has taken years to recover from a major cyberattack that disrupted its services and restricted access to its collections. The walkout is set to take from 27 October to 9 November, coinciding with the two-year anniversary of the cyberattack.'

To be clear: LA County has declared a state of emergency BECAUSE OF the federal government. The Feds, LA County is (correctly) saying, have CAUSED the emergency. This is a striking political moment of internal collapse. Local govts feeling compelled to protect their ppl from … their own govt.

Hate to be a 'ruin the kicker' guy but here's the amazing kicker: “If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr.”

I teach a history of antifascism course @ruhistorydept.bsky.social and figured I'd start an ongoing thread this semester to share some insights from course readings and recommend some great works on antifascism. 🧵

This collaborative PhD project with the LSE and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on Planting Decolonization: Plantation Science and Empire in the Twentieth Century, sounds amazing. I’m sure many of you might be interested. #STS #HPS #HistSci www.lse.ac.uk/study-at-lse...

Love following @bionomia.net & today is my lucky day! I've been working on Drège for several years now - he's a super interesting commercial collector who only left scant archival traces that I've been slowly piecing together 🌿 #nathist #envhist #envhum

This whole section really.

"In a study published in The Lancet in September, UC Davis researchers surveyed over 9,300 people. They found that those who hold racist, xenophobic, and transphobic beliefs and negative attitudes toward gay people are more likely to support political violence and be inclined to commit lethal acts."

ER doc here! This is a lie. Wait times are up because the American healthcare system is an unsustainable business model and a for-profit national healthcare system just doesn’t work. These problems will continue to get worse until we change that system. It literally has nothing to do with immigrants

Some good news. London is meeting legal limits for toxic NO2 pollution for the first time – almost 200 years earlier than predicted – following the Mayor’s "world leading air pollution policies," City Hall announces. The Ultra Low Emissions Zone - and similar policies - really do work.

This is part of a massive generative slop / plagiarism operation seemingly being run by one dude operating a bunch of similarly designed websites - "Krishna Pathak" (not sure if actual real dude) Also being syndicated on MSN. Registered at 'paper mill' address in Wyoming GenAI is the WORST

Please God. Can some mainstream news outlet explain properly how long and how costly the immigration process in the UK is? And that there is NO RECOURSE TO PUBLIC FUNDS the whole time. And you PAY A SURCHARGE for the NHS. And you pay your taxes.

We need more in-depth reporting on UK university finances like this. Research , research funding and their relation to teaching and teaching funding could do with a similar level of detail. Here's a sharing link for 3 non-subscribers: on.ft.com/3ImSMWa

What Trump said is a fucking outrage. It’s against democracy. If Donald Trump has his way on this, our democracy is over.

The Republican reaction to Kirk’s murder has been a campaign of state repression that ends with Trumpist toadies deciding what Americans are allowed to think, do and say. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

"...every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, convulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism...nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us."

Trump is posthumously awarding Charlie Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Vance flew his casket on Air Force 2. A memorial is happening at The Kennedy Center. State Dept and Pentagon are taking steps to prevent criticism of Kirk. This is NOT normal treatment for an extremist. It’s a message.

Elizabeth Warren on people who say Dems needs to tone down their rhetoric: "Oh, please. Why don't you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he's posted and every ugly word."

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

'The British Academy has warned that students in parts of the North, South West & East of England, as well as large areas of Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland, are losing access to social sciences, humanities & arts courses.' www.timeshighereducation.com/news/humanit... @timeshighered.bsky.social

Clearly the answer to this is to make kids spend more time on a laptop with AI.

This is the official spokesperson for the White House, stating that the President hopes to deploy the United States military to occupy every city controlled by the political party that opposes him. Explicitly.

In the last week of the 1936 campaign, FDR reminded a massive crowd in Madison Square Garden that "organized money" was "unanimous in their hate for me--and I welcome their hatred!" And then the country rewarded him with a 523-8 landslide in the electoral college. This is, in fact, good politics.

Almost goes without saying, but if this happened under a Democratic president, there would be at least a week of headlines and GOP lawmakers would demand hearings.

“The EU is continuously implementing major new policy rules on environmental protection. If the UK doesn’t keep up, it could find itself unintentionally out of step.”

We’re spending over $1 MILLION a day to deploy the National Guard in D.C. Trump says this is for Fighting homelessness & crime. But guess what... just a QUARTER of that million would house D.C.'s ENTIRE unhoused population. Think about it.

@elysegraham.bsky.social: "The health of the nation’s libraries is a national security issue." During WWII, the Office of Strategic Services...sent the war’s most unlikely spies, professors and librarians, overseas as undercover agents to hunt down maps and other documents. time.com/7024056/libr...

So excited to share my new article in @pastpresentsoc.bsky.social: "Colonial World-Making and Global Knowledges at the Early Modern Cape of Good Hope" (Open access) academic.oup.com/past/advance...

Thinking about how, in 1979, Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof, to provide hot water for the building. Ronald Reagan removed them.

Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.

Yo, historians, what the actual ****? I've seen how LLMs handle "history." This is... not good. 🗃️

Teach what historical erasure looks like as it happens. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/c...