insane story, this - a note was sent over the summer to the cleaners of the RATP (Parisian equivalent of TfL) asking them to remove all plastic water bottles from the bathrooms in case they were being used by Muslim staff to do ablutions before prayers???

Seems bad!

The ADL has decided to treat fascists as allies and progressives as enemies. For a group that is tasked with protecting American Jews, that is a world historic fuck up. I will never forgive these people for their moral decrepitude.

Kid at kindergarten drop-off this morning with monogrammed backpack with initials “WMD.” Tell me your political consciousness wasn’t formed in 2003 without telling me

One like, one Presses universitaires de France book cover from the 1990s

Thing I am an absolute complete total reactionary about: there has not actually been invented a better model of conveying information in a learning environment than the basic structure of a traditional lecture. A speaker standing in some sort of unique focal point for the attention of listeners...

As a historian, I have been curious (and appalled) by this choice of pseudo. The interpretation below is quite common, but not in fact correct. It was an 1865 law (sénatus-consulte) that made “Muslim Algerians” (a racial category divorced from actual faith) French nationals without citizenship 1/

'“I don't think that people appreciate how few people are working to keep these collections online, even at huge institutions,” Weinberg told me. “It's usually an incredibly small team, one person, half a person, half a person, plus, like their web person who is sympathetic to what's going on.'

found out tonight through some slightly random googling that Charlemagne is known as "Karl der Große" in German, a fact I find to be hateful and undignified

“The Left controls universities”

🗃️ Sad news of Pierre Nora’s passing away.

Watch out bosses, the 5 year old has turned his attention to labor organizing

The tragic landslide in Blatten gives me the excuse to tell you the story of how we found out Ice Ages existed. It's a cool story and the most important bit is rather similar to what's happening now.

very cool that for ten years people at the heights of political commentary insisted to the point of rage that the paramount threat to free speech was “censorious” college students

say it again: 4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN was mediocre if entertaining, but it did afford me the opportunity to learn that @jamesfeigenbaum.bsky.social thought “threw the bums a dime in your prime” was “do the Bumpsy Grind”

“has let too many people leave their sticky fingerprints on her book” wtf? i finally read pedersen’s review of sasson’s ‘the solidarity economy’ and i just think there’s just a fundamental disagreement about scholarship, community, and gratitude here www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Outrageous behavior from the chief of Harvard University Press and kudos to the Crimson for exposing this.

Thrilled to share this very special issue of French Politics, Culture & Society in honor of Herrick Chapman that I co-edited with Nicole Rudolph. The intro is open access: www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journal...

Help, my child is reading royalist propaganda

among other things, this is literally and explicitly an affirmative action program for conservatives - galling to announce this at a time when any efforts to support and encourage research by women and students of color is branded illegal DEI

"His son spent days crying...and has now stopped speaking." This is our Georgetown colleague, whose office is down the hall from where I teach. The mind can't assimilate how the University has mounted no public response; I had thought the usual institutional cowardice might have some moral limit

"Prime, but with human beings"

Shadow docket edging into the night and fog docket...

I am so angry that so many people, here and elsewhere, were willing to pretend they thought that protests against genocide were antisemitic. That playacting allowed them to get here.

Big ups to the Columbia trustees and administrators who convinced these absolute cretins they had the recipe to destroy American higher education.

Was waiting for slightly more official news to RT one of these threads: Jason was a senior program officer at NEH for 12 years so seems fair to say the gutting of the National Endowment of the Humanities has commenced.

regional public Us serve the vast majority of the 20 million students enrolled in higher ed, are largest employers in countless regions, and are being demolished for the oligarch’s pleasure

Universities globally are now receiving such letters; the British Association for American Studies (founded in 1955 'to promote, support and encourage the study of the United States' lost their US embassy small grants funding in January for refusing to scrub 'DEI'. Which way will these groups jump?

Deeply disappointing to see my alma mater cancel a talk by former MSF president Johanne Liu, apparently out of fear that she would address the destruction of Gaza.

Boston folks--rally this evening to support the Tufts PhD student, here on a visa, nabbed off the street yesterday 👇👇👇

The real “New Antisemitism”

Le Monde reporting that a French scientist traveling to Houston to attend a conference was denied entry to US after a search of his phone & computer revealed messages critical of Trump's science cuts, "which [says CPB] conveyed hatred of Trump & could be qualified as terrorism". Computer confiscated

Columbia President email confirms DHS raid tonight in University housing (dorms?). Truly, get us all the fuck out of this place.

our drafty Victorian house with original windows is (finally) going to bankrupt us

Since the 1950s, Summer Language Workshops at Indiana University have provided training in Russian, East European, and Central Asian languages. Generations have come to Bloomington to study Romanian, Polish, Kazakh, etc. Rubio just cancelled all of them languageworkshop.indiana.edu/summer-langu...

Not very fun fact: thousands of Jewish immigrants with whose presence Germany has decorated itself, my parents included, are not voting today b/c they don’t have a path to citizenship, despite living there for two decades or more. www.juedische-allgemeine.de/gemeinden/ke...

If I ran a newspaper in the higher education, health care, and biotech center of the country, I might stop the presses and put the White House's order to kill universities and med schools via illegal NIH changes somewhere on the front page

Dude this is so fucking bleak; I know I’m naive but I still genuinely cannot believe we have people in the humanities normalizing this stuff

Your baby, in reply:

Telling my baby “if you’re tired you take a nap-a, you don’t move to Napa” every day until morale improves

Overcooked pasta with sauce from jar (Rao’s, at least) Wilted arugula Animal crackers eaten behind 4-year-old’s back Terry, can I come over

In 2013, I started a French Studies channel on the New Books Network & hosted it solo for over a decade. This interview w/Emily Marker re: BLACK FRANCE, WHITE EUROPE is my last official episode (for now, anyway). Biggest gratitude to all the authors & listeners out there. I had the best time!✌️

In fairness, German media also likes to pretend it doesn’t understand why the AfD’s stronghold is in the former East: one of many consequences of the impoverished memory politics of toothless denazification.

This Haaretz piece of IDF soldiers’ confessions of human rights violations absolutely wrecked me www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024...

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