Sh!t is crazy I may have to watch Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth again.

I am so very disappointed in some people. They think they can ride the tiger. Such hubris.

This isn't scholarship—it's mimicry. Not science—a performance. When the "writer" understands syntactic patterns but not the underlying meaning, the product loses its soul. Sure, it's in APA format. But under the hood? Slop. Scientific writing isn't just ritual. It's where true creativity resides.

Yeeeessss, always. Unless we are talking about race, gender, class, sexual orien—sh*t.

So many primary sources in this thread ⬇️ I hope some archivist is out there downloading

So yeah, if you hate academia so much that you don’t want to participate in academic work, you can literally just leave. No need to announce your departure.

always raises a red flag when people keep just asking questions that have in fact been studied and answered

SMDH

VA250 content right here

Neither travel nor snowstorms can keep my #ScholarSunday threads from their appointed rounds—so here’s my 264th of public scholarly writing, podcasts, new & forthcoming books from the past week. Add more below, share widely, & enjoy, all! 🗃️ + blackwhiteandread.com/scholarsunda...

I would not be me w/o public libraries. Mom took me as a small kid to get books. By 10, I got to roam free under the librarians’ watchful eye, while she ran errands. Big stacks of books came home. Research later for school essays & college scholarships. Tragic to see defunding accelerating.

“We are not customers at the public library & many in the US simply cannot fathom any other way of relating to institutions or to the government. The public library is therefore a basis for reclaiming a grammar of the commons for the average person…” An inspiring thread w/powerful concluding essay.

One of the characteristics of MAGA, and reactionary politics in general, is to naturalize and depoliticize various hierarchies (between “high IQ“ people and the rest of us, between “heritage Americans” and recent , or even not-so-recent immigrants, between men and women, etc.)/3

Reader, this historian chortled. And sobbed.

I’m in the mountains. Crap.

This is delightful. Not that I’d eat alligator, mind you.

Something is awry in higher education. Indiana University agrees to pay the football coach more than $100 million, shortly after cutting hundreds of academic programs. www.espn.com/college-foot...

NH state house passes "CHARLIE Act," which bans teaching, I kid you not, "critical consciousness" & "prohibited world-views," such as that queer people exist, or that slavery involved race, or, implicitly, that the Nazis murdered Jews based on identity. newhampshirebulletin.com/2026/02/19/h...

I am never going to get over the fact thar so many Americans died that corpses stacked up in nursing homes and hospital morgues, that refrigerator trucks had to be brought in for the overflow, and that the big takeaway from Important Pundits is there should have been *less* mitigation.

April, you say

Gasping!

I have watched it three times and can’t quite place it. It’s so familiar.

It is astonishing how fast univs fell into line with data analytics and AI and workforce development plans which are really anti education plans.

I missed this yesterday. It’s tragic & infuriating that the US govt is once again incarcerating people. And while there is outrage (properly) about conditions in today’s camps, incarceration would still be wrong even if the conditions were comfortable. Human rights and civil rights are unalienable.

Roses are redde Violettes are blue Sayinge that the adoption of a technologye ys inevitable Ys a way to trick you

Exactly, David. They did what they wanted to do when Trump admin was more than willing to take the blame.

Getting closer to the Matrix every day.

Every day, now, I’m like, wait, I AM THE CURMUDGEON??!!

Other sen. administrators at my uni are using Grammarly and other AI tools for “routine” writing tasks. Just a devastating betrayal of our mission, if u ask me. But I’m a curmudgeon now.

lol little guy in the corner I feel you

Amen and amen

In June 1970, Colonel Anna Mae Hays was promoted to brigadier general becoming the first woman in US Armed Forces' history to attain general officer rank. She served in 3 wars (#WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War) & was the 13th Chief of the US Army #Nurse Corps (1967-1971). She was born #OTD in 1920.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore an exhibit about slavery at a historic site in Philadelphia, quoting George Orwell’s ‘1984’ in her scathing decision. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

JUST IN: Judge Cynthia Rufe (GWBush) invokes Orwell's dystopian "1984" as she bars Trump admin from memory holing slavery exhibits at Washington's Philly home. w/@kyledcheney www.politico.com/news/2026/02...

Also, do we think Elon knows enough about US/British history to pick up on the implicit anti-Catholicism in this definition of America’s “common culture,” or no?

Historian of Irish Americans here. Seconded. And it’s disheartening how many in the US still don’t know that Scots-Irish isn’t Irish-Irish.

A dreary, chilly, rainy day here in Virginia, but signs of spring are evident and that means summer is not far behind.

Pew Research, as always, bringing actual evidence from big data sets. While I’m here, a reminder that faculty can assign Pew reports in many, many classes. You’ll thank me later.

The SAVE Act would disenfranchise millions of Americans of all ages and races, but younger voters and voters of color would suffer disproportionately. bit.ly/4rA2p4R

Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.

“It does not abrogate the Fourth amendment.” Omg that it even needs to be said

Also, there was a big anti ICE protest march here in the central Shenandoah Valley last week. And a local hotel canceled ICE reservations.

I enjoy reading about W.E.B. Du Bois's teaching. Here's a short thread about it.

These are concentration camps and its our duty as citizens to ensure these things don't get built.

This was delightful! I may bookmark.

ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps. If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight. www.ajc.com/politics/202...

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

“Puerto Rico has been undergoing a series of fiscal, political and social crises since at least 2006. In “Puerto Rico: A National History,” I trace the longer history of that crisis.” 🗃️

The halftime show is the only part I ever watch. I have my priorities straight.

Like seriously, rewatch the Ring ad. It's worth outlawing and then breaking up Amazon. This is surveillance state technology the worst authoritarian dictatorships of the past always dreamed of.