New disease alert! The gods of irony were working overtime when they created a potentially deadly allergy to Texas BBQ caused by the Lone Star tick. The Evil Eye of Texas is upon you.

#WorldToiletDay 🚽 The Latrines at Housesteads Roman Fort (Vercovicium) in Great Britain. They included wooden seats along the sides, set over a deep channel. A smaller channel in the centre of the building was used for washing sponges. followinghadrian.com/2013/05/09/h...

Donald, the first of his name, king of the #guano birds

Caves often stink, but this was the wrong kind of guano.

Cooperation between ecologists and historians has allowed a robust reconstruction of the historical introduction of the Italian crayfish, Austropotamobius fulcisianus, to Spain in the late-16th century @ebdonana.bsky.social @um.es New OA paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Hey #Botany2025 The Palm Springs Art Museum is incredible! Do go if you can (note it's closed M, T, W.) Here is artist Karen Kitchel's work American Grasslands: Prairie, Pasture, Crop, and Lawn #palmspringsart

I've been writing about 19th c epidemics in the Pacific. A common, deadly symptom of severe measles infections is unstoppable diarrhea (dysentery). Maybe get your kids vaxxed?

Trump's theatrical military deployment to Los Angeles will cost at least $134 million according to Pentagon officials. That's almost the same amount the NEH budgeted for all scholarly projects and state grants in the humanities in 2024 ($142 million) in our whole damned country.

Peru knows this problem too well. Check out Mark Carey's book on the subject. AI doesnt seem to know it (or for that matter, anything about Peru), so zero cheaters on this unit of my history of disaster class!

Starlink is trash--literal trash. It will slowly rain huge amounts of pollution into the upper atmosphere, which will filter down to the stratosphere, where they could cause the ozone hole to come back. And for what gain?

The AI book list and general enshittification reminded me that I've been credited as blurbing hundreds of books I never have, including books by Patti Smith, Amy Tan, Sidney Sheldon, Joyce Maynard, and Elmore Leonard? And I can't get these fake blurbs taken off publisher and bookstore websites?

Sure, let's study the efficacy of covid vaccine boosters! But don't ban them until *after* that lack is scientifically demonstrated. Exhibit n+1 that this administration hates personal freedom, hates evidence, hates truth, hates ME.

Could this be the biggest climate story of the year? For the first time on record, China's emissions are falling due to clean energy growth, not slow power demand Full analysis + outlook by Lauri Myllyvirta: www.carbonbrief.org/... 1/7

Sewertopia! The #guano streams must flow

This is bad. Hopefully this massive, invaluable archive will continue to have a host, but it won't have anything new added to it. This was the single most valuable online resource my history majors used for producing their senior capstone papers this semester, themselves an endangered species

A fantastic opportunity for postdocs working in Pacific History:

#guano birds ever at the ready when and where history is being made

For £79, an AI bot in the guise of Agatha Christie will "teach" you how to write. U of Illinois Business School is implementing these avatar bots in online classes in the guise of business faculty. This is the current end game of my job and profession and I'm pissed. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/w...

AHA executive director @jgrossman.bsky.social said about the lawsuit: “The NEH leverages its very small budget to support work in nearly every venue where Americans engage with the humanities. . . . It makes no sense to eviscerate the agency that helps all Americans.”

I just finished this by @siobhanangus.bsky.social, please all read it so we can talk about it. It's insightful and thought provoking and hits many of my interests (material-led histories of media, science, exploration and extraction). Now mentally curating the exhibition of the book...

If you've heard of the Great Acceleration, here's a view of its current endgame

Guanorific!

The sixth National Climate Assessment has been axed. As I mentioned in my history of disaster class today, seems akin to burying one's head in the sands of Galveston Beach in early Sept 1900 #climatecrisis www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/c...

A grim trend--natural carbon sinks are turning into greenhouse gas emitters, in this case Finland's boreal forests, also in parts of Amazonia though not Australia (see comments)

hahahahahaha

I used to tell my kids that the beavers built *everything* in Prairie Park (Lawrence KS). I was only slightly exaggerating.

Now that i've deleted Fb and all other Meta apps from my devices, I need someplace to post AI horror comedy. Today's story: AI writing cancer treatment textbooks for billion$ publishing companies. pivot-to-ai.com/2025/04/12/1...

As a former American Meteorological Society Dissertation Fellow, I approve of this message. If you'd like some insight into what can happen when storm prediction and warning networks are disrupted or demolished by politics, see the thread below. www.ametsoc.org/ams/about-am...

I love me a good article on "dung hill schemes" and "excremental flows".

I am the Lorax. I speak for the guano birds #envhist

New book: Ranjan Chakrabarti 's Climate, Calamity and the Wild: An Environmental History of the Bengal Delta, C.1737-1947 reurl.cc/RLoNRg #envhist #climate #disaster

New info here on how to bring places like Tanzania into our understanding of global climate history. Such concerns inspired our collaboration newly published in the AHR showing how past La Niña droughts affected Easter Island. The southern 2/3 of the world is still barely known. #envhist #climate

The Overkill hypothesis, esp. in Australia, has long wondered about the ecological and biodiversity changes resulting from Terminal Pleistocene mass extinction in the plant kingdom. Here we're gaining some new fine-grained tools to study this issue at the species level. #envhist

These people get me. They know my needs without even asking #guano

At the AHA annual ball, we had the privilege to be among the first to see the intro to Ken Burns & Co's new series The American Revolution coming this fall. I am very troubled by its thesis: "The American Revolution was the most consequential revolution in history"--**all #history** #skystorians /1

Welcome to the new world that #guano, Chilean nitrates, & the Haber-Bosch process made. Clear increases in N and N:P ratios in plant tissues over the 20thc--but coolest of all, using herbarium specimens as a physical archive. #envhist

a short thread of Nicolas Cage resembling various philosophers 1. Spinoza

THREAD This Is The Story Of The The Pernicious Rise of AI-Generated Papers and their Online Impact An Incomplete History Told In The Voice of Documentarian Adam Curtis 1/31

This tracks: two guys murdered *each other* because one guy criticized the other's stupid loud truck in a supermarket parking lot in Lawrence, KS, just before I moved from there to UofArizona.

NEW: A report from Everytown found that states that did not require a permit for people to conceal carry a gun had nearly triple the rate of road rage shootings in 2023 than states with the most protective standards.

Go Josh! Univ of Kansas #envhist PhD

I somehow missed A v Humboldt I; here's its successor. Too bad OG Humboldt didnt have a beer company to sponsor his Wanderlust. #histsci

Recycling has a dark past (and present.) The Nazi regime treated people like disposable trash, in part, to turn junk into something useful.

3% approval rating as Peruvian president. That requires a special talent

NE OH Sewer District is one of history's greatest sewage social media sites. And I should know, I'm a #guanohistorian

Some might say I wrote a seminal book on the history of #guano, to which I answer "Wooo!"

My article with Agricultural History, "Searching for Stability: Banana Blight and the Revitalization of Jamaica's Sugar Industry, 1910-1940," explores banana disease through the lens of sugar, showing the larger effects of crop diseases on agroecosystems #envhist read.dukeupress.edu/agricultural...

It's slightly more fun reading this in the Rio airport, but not as much as it could be.

Really interesting discovery at the Newberry Library, where one of their Nahuatl-language manuscripts turns out to have been made using by far the largest known example of a pre-Columbian Mesoamerica paper technology known as maguey paper: www.newberry.org/news/analysi... #paperhistory