This semester, a guest lecturer told my students about the rise of Holocaust-related AI slop (generally fake/altered photos based on real people/events), created by content farmers as social media clickbait. Today, I finally encountered AI slop on Soviet deportations in the Baltic States.

You're right I did make that up. I'm sorry. Let's try that again.

It remains very weird to me that in a world of actually useful technology -- photovoltaic power generation, mRNA vaccines, maglev trains, smart phones, etc -- the tech sector has gone so all-in on bullshit generators and plagiarism machines.

Mark your calendars: on May 6, AABS member Dr. Paula Oppermann will present her 2025 book "Thunder Cross. Fascist Antisemitism in Twentieth-century Latvia" (University of Wisconsin Press) in discussion with former JBS editor Dr. Matthew Kott. Join on May 6 at 15.00 CET: vist.ly/42esz

My review of Oleg Beyda's fascinating book, "For Russia with Hitler: White Russian Émigrés and the German-Soviet War," was published in the current issue of the American Historical Review. academic.oup.com/ahr/article-...

An exciting forthcoming publication on an understudied topic (and one with very little written on it in English)--the Duchy of Courland (Europe's smallest colonial power), its encounters with Africa and the Americas, and its many entanglements with other European states. bsky.app/profile/john...

It Happened to Me: my family and I live nearby and are frequent patrons of a restaurant that turned out to be owned by a Real Housewife™

A case I've encountered was Latvian officer Voldemārs Johans Šēnfelds (cf. Schönfeld), who changed his last name in 1940 to Skaistlauks (i.e. from German to Latvian, but retaining the meaning of "beautiful field"), at the time of "repatriation" of Baltic Germans to Germany. bsky.app/profile/deep...

Demographer Ilmārs Mežs explains why Latvians have historically been keen to adopt German surnames (or, in some regions, Polish ones), as well as why they have generally been less prone than their Estonian neighbours to revert back to "native" forms deepbaltic.com/2026/04/16/f...

"The rise of extreme wealth is one of the clearest signs of this imbalance. In 1987, billionaires held wealth equal to 3% of global GDP. Today this tiny elite, just 0.0001% of the world population, owns the equivalent of *16%* of world GDP in wealth."

Sequence of events I've been thinking about: June 2022: Joe Biden declares that Putin "wanted the Finlandization of NATO. He got the NATO-ization of Finland"(repeated in interviews) July 2024: Biden tries to save his floundering campaign with a speech for NATO's 75th anniversary, echoing the above

Being an American in the 2020s means constantly feeling envious about the state of democracy in Brazil, South Korea, Hungary, et al.

The economic lesson of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine was to decarbonize. The economic lesson of the Iran War is to decarbonize. The economic lesson of the next war involving one or more aggressive petrostates will be to decarbonize.

Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.

"The targeting of minority groups has always been both a symptom and a tool of authoritarian politics and the dehumanisation of Romani communities, and other racialized peoples, does not happen in isolation." www.errc.org/news/interna...

"We are living through the nightmare edition of 'Great Men Make History'...there are few safety switches between today's maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands." -Mike Davis, 2022 newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...

“Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.” Geneva Convention Additional Protocol I and Department of Defense Law of War Manual, § 5.2.2

The best Easter card (in my opinion) / Manuprāt, vislabākā Lieldienu apsveikuma kartīte [Aleksandrs Apsītis, ca. 1920s/30s]

Artifact of American jingoism, 1991 (see if you can spot some familiar objects 🙃)

My position on the current situation

Today is publication day for my book, Latvian Soldiers of World War II: Fighting for the Homeland in Nazi and Soviet Service! This was a project many years in the making; I'm looking forward to holding it in my hands when my copies arrive and seeing it out in the world. academic.oup.com/book/62363

Thank you, Madam Education Secretary, for this confusing and factually inaccurate tribute to a portable gaming console! Really important work that you're doing here.

Underrated that the era of neoliberal globalism characterized by fierce defense of intellectual property as rents, patents, and copyrights gave way so quickly to a new paradigm marked by the blithe plunder of all human creativity for LLM training data.

Admittedly, coming up with a stab-in-the-back myth *before* even launching the war is a very forward-thinking perspective... bsky.app/profile/chri...

In honor of Remembrance Day of the Latvian Legionnaires (March 16) and "as a token of respect for the Latvian Legionnaires," the municipality of Ogre has installed a replica of the arm shield patch of the Waffen-SS Latvian Legion in a public display that will remain in place for the coming months.

The End of History™ has formally ended

Guards Captains Mavriks Vulfsons (left) and Eduards Berklavs (right), serving in the Red Army's 43rd Guards Latvian Rifle Division, near Staraya Russa, Russia, March 10, 1943 (photo: Latvian War Museum)

"Greetings on International Women's Day!" (Latvian SSR, 1978)

Unfortunately, "I feel like Batman or Halo" has become one of the essential texts for understanding a certain type of American mind in the 2020s... bsky.app/profile/rike...

Gotta love how academic books don't earn you money, but LLMs can make money off of stealing them in the aggregate and if you write enough, they can also profit from stealing your personality after you are dead.

The Azores islands are the westernmost point of Europe and the easternmost point of Rhode Island

Unlike some people whose names are Bret, I don’t think the answer is to give up on the fight against antisemitism and only invest in Jews, but instead to think more about how antisemitism interacts with the rest of society. For @forward.com forward.com/opinion/8072...

Reading about big Latvian brains (Arveds Švābe, The Story of Latvia and Her Neighbours)

0-3 minutes / 3+ minutes

Traces of Baltic immigration in Providence, RI (though this club is sadly defunct)

A bizarre and unsettling choice by the Latvian War Museum (an institution that I otherwise respect) to use an AI-remixed/upscaled 1942 Nazi propaganda poster to promote an event of theirs next month. The soldiers depicted in the original poster are German, not Latvian! bsky.app/profile/kasp...

"I have decided to shift from colonizing from Mars to colonizing an even more inhospitable planetary body, because I just realized that Mars is farther away with a different orbit" is quite the announcement from someone who already promised to land humans on Mars by 2024. bsky.app/profile/dbur...

IMPORTANT OLYMPIC NEWS: THE POLISH FIGURE SKATING TEAM HAS A PLUSH PIEROGI

This International Holocaust Remembrance Day, EU institutions mark Auschwitz's liberation but can't name its liberators, Russia names liberators but pivots toward a new holiday centering "the Soviet people" as genocide victims, and the White House uses the occasion to debate "illegal immigration."

I was always told that one of the central lessons of the Shoah is that legal, juridical regimes can still be immoral. The claim that Anne Frank was in Amsterdam "legally" is false, but more than that, the question "Was Anne Frank an illegal?" is so grossly missing the point of Holocaust remembrance.

I do not find this to be a helpful approach for understanding (or even opposing) Trump's fixation on Greenland. American history provides ample evidence of general expansionist aims and of longstanding interest by various U.S. administrations in the territory of Greenland. bsky.app/profile/timo...

This Indian restaurant in Rhode Island attributes its name to the Sanskrit word for "essence," yet it always made me do a double take since "rasa" is also the Latvian and Lithuanian word for "dew," coming from the same linguistic source.

The perpetrator of a November 7, 2025 school bombing in Indonesia made perhaps the strangest appropriation of the Latvian Legion I've yet seen by painting the insignia (backwards) of the 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Latvian) onto an airsoft rifle. gnet-research.org/2026/01/07/t...

Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, August 11, 1936 (echoing into January 12, 2026)

Don't miss out on this event! Join us on Tuesday to learn more about applying for AABS Grants and Fellowships. You'll hear from a former grantee about what to expect and prepare. RSVP now: https://aabs-balticstudies.org/2026/01/01/webinar-applying-for-2026-baltic-studies-grants/

Copy Editing Matters, from HHS's release on the new childhood vaccine schedule: All the diseases will still be available to anyone who wants them

The invasion of Venezuela is being defended as a law enforcement operation and ”self-defense.” It is neither. It is imperialism, pure and simple. And illegal seven ways to Sunday. www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...