Battling json errors doesn't sound as riveting as battling a dark wizard from another dimension but it sure is fulfilling. 🗃️

“Here we go” said Frog.

I love unnecessarily sexy statues. My favorite being Thirst Trap Lincoln from the LA County Superior Courthouse.

Alas, I'm far too beautiful for this advice to help me in any way

Someday we will talk about someone’s keen sense of systemic violence instead of their “obsession with victimhood”

Tired: Civil War Wired: Civility War

I'm with you, Jacob, this is my new job market/postdoc market strategy: be the ungovernable horse.

"the general anxiety surrounding the humanities major points to a broader cultural shift: we no longer treat advanced literacy as essential to education or citizenship." bit.ly/4mYHUg9

It’s true, I’m there in that big stack on your digital desk. 🎵Take a chance on me🎵

Intellectual “work” is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work -Twain, Conn Yankee

"We are again confronting a massive attack on the very foundations of democratic education + the stakes feel even higher. In the 50s the targets were individual teachers—communists progressives liberals +their leftwing unions. Now the target is the system itself" www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-g...

Just for fun, I'm going to give you some clips of the hate mail I got from being placed on Kirk's TPUSA Dangerous Professor list. Buckle up:

Life hack: if you never finish writing your books, AI can’t steal them.

Part of what makes AI appear to do creative tasks (it cannot invent on its own at present) is that it provides regular people access to academic ideas and creation. It has removed the barrier of education to understand our craft but at the expense of naming the people who built the ideas. 🗃️

The grief when I open up outlook to send an email to a historian whose article on trains in 1850s Arkansas is exceptional, edited flawlessly, and inspires me to write better as a result only to find a beautiful but year old obituary instead of an email address. 1/2

HACK! Replace 15 minutes of doom scrolling with 15 minutes of reading a book from a university press 📖

The “universal rights” of liberal democracy—never implemented & always “contradictory” & “aspirational”—have always functioned as a tool of empire.

I wonder how we'll parse human from non-human histories in 25 years or so, especially since everyone seems hell-bent on arguing with bots on this devil box. 🗃️

Letter signed by members of the Columbia History Department urging resistance to the Trump Administration's efforts to dictate university policy. "Should this control be realized, here or elsewhere, it would make any real historical scholarship, teaching, and intellectual community impossible."

This is now a Peter Coviello Stan account. Also, I will not be taking questions at this time. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” Virginia Woolf, born on this day in 1882

I beg of you, nonfiction writers, breathe life into your prose! Ignore the professor in your brain that's always ready to mark something as too colloquial. Make it read like something written by an actual human you might want to talk to at a party!

Who is theorizing what it means for all systems of governance when the goal is no longer to pacify/exploit the serfs because they aren’t needed/valued…?

Also, I'm going to re-up this very short law review essay. The right has had a lot of success fighting off serious uses of antidiscrimination law using the first amendment. We need to use it to fend off these egregiously unserious uses of that law. wm.billofrightsjournal.org/wp-content/u...

SCOOP: Naval Academy leaders sent an email to faculty this week that teaching about “divisive concepts” such as systemic racism + sexism is no longer permitted. Faculty also can’t talk about environmental justice or gender ideology. Our exclusive: www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/hi...

Are there conversations in 🗃️ about mirroring/archiving major digital NARA and LOC holdings— notably those records in categories already under fire in other agencies/departments of the USG?

I think the most frustrating part of the Gen AI debate for me is that there's apparently nothing you can do, and nothing that can happen, to convince people that human nature works differently than it does in Enlightenment fantasies

Friday vibes ✨

In the context of the second Trump administration’s numerous assaults on academic freedom in higher education, the AAUP urges universities, whose educational mission is to serve the public good, not to hide behind the pretense of remaining neutral.

@lilygeismer.bsky.social and I are thrilled that our new project, Mastery and Drift: Professional Class Liberals since the 1960s, is published today. When we began this work a few years ago, we had no idea how sadly relevant exploring the evolution . . . (1/10) press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Otherwise, universities cease to exist as places of free intellectual inquiry, and become mouthpieces of the government, where only one set of ideas can exist. To prevent that, we must say: hands off. Hands. Off. Higher. Ed.

Some higher ed organizations who are loudly circling the wagons against federal funding cuts were oddly silent or circumspect about the earlier attacks on CRT and DEI. I wish there was a better understanding that these attacks are coming because we failed to repel those.

Colonialism is not a thing of the past, it lives in the eyes of the powerful, in the structures that continue to benefit from the sweat of the dispossessed and marginalised, in the languages that silence the oppressed.

NARA is safe right? LOC? It’s not like we have a longstanding history of record loss during conservative regimes or whatever — 🗃️

The next seminar in the Mediterranean Emotions series will be delivered by @boddice.bsky.social at the University of Florence on 27/02/2025. The seminar is hybrid and open to all. Full details are available on the poster below and the MEEM website: mediterraneanemotions.carrd.co?fbclid=IwY2x...

Sometimes you have to let your past sink like a pebble in the water, so the ripples can fade and your future can rise to the surface. Read that again.

Share a character about to go full God mode 🖤

What an exciting conference CFP.

Wild how the category of “women” must both be ruthlessly defended by the right but also stripped from all direct research, support, or institutional funding.

Olessia’s book is out! Can’t wait to read it link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Pepe all day

1. Sabotage public institutions. 2. Claim they don’t work efficiently. 3. Eliminate them. — That’s the playbook.

🗃️

h-net is making me depressed

I don't know how many of y'all are watching the migration of American TikTokers to RedNote, but it's the most fascinating thing I've EVER SEEN HAPPEN ONLINE. 🧵

Excellent read in line with much 🗃️ work on the longstanding relationship between white nationalist paramilitary groups and LE. Out today from @propublica.org and @josh-kaplan.bsky.social www.propublica.org/article/ap3-...

2025, logging on: Yeah I'm not even going to pretend being subtle.

Which one of you neglected personal tasks is going to get some attention today before I get my post-semester illness?

Whew damn guys like we just finished grading finals can we wait a second before we open the “science invents a new ethical crisis” box? Sheesh

Chat is it normal that I’m sad and there was no point to all that (gestures wildly)