My favorite thing I saw in the Seattle Art Museum

Just 6 days left to get your #RSVP2026 proposals in! We hope you'll contemplate "Movements & Migrations" in and through the #19thC periodical press with us this summer @tcddublin.bsky.social. Our CFP deadline is THIS upcoming Friday, 21 November!

"A circular economy of loans and debts and froth and hype…all entirely dependent upon one another. This emperor has $1 trillion and not a stitch to wear. Wiley Coyote at the edge of a cliff doesn’t fall until he looks down. When are people going to look down? The finances don’t make any sense."

Next week @conwayhall.bsky.social is hosting what is sure to be a brilliant conversation between Daisy Dunn and Hetta Howes about the Lives of Ancient & Medieval Women. Looking forward to chairing! Join us in person or online 6:30 Wed 19 Nov. Details & tickets www.conwayhall.org.uk/whats-on/eve...

For years, people argued that there's no point in taking climate action unless China is onboard. I'm at a COP30 event where Chinese government officials and renewable industry reps are outlining the fast-paced renewable energy transition and long-term carbon neutrality plan. The story has flipped.

steam is apparently allowing "this game had AI in it that it didn't disclose" as a valid return statement, so if you or anyone you know actually paid $70 for slop, get that money back

📖 Colby Book Prize nominations open today! We're accepting nominations from now until 31 Jan. 2026. The Colby Prize recognizes original book-length scholarship published in 2025 that most advances our understanding of the long #19thC British press. More info: buff.ly/LIi76WJ

Yes, this is a reference to Kadue's brilliant contribution to Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century:

she’s a 10 but Excel thinks she’s October

HOLY SHIT. They found the genes for fibromyalgia - and it's *not* autoimmune, it's the central nervous system. It's very cool to see some progress made on the thing that's ruined my life since late teenage years!

I’m just never going to sign on to an idea for fixing [insert here: higher ed, your field, classroom, university, library] that adds more labor. *Reduce* labor. Supplant labor. Waste it. What would happen if you had more time to [insert here: think, read, stare, cook, sleep, muse, exercise]?

I find the phrase “makes history” nonsensical. Have you seen the stuff historians study? Just dropping an old piece of farm equipment down a well or accidentally freezing to death in a glacier gives you a good shot at the history books

Every ad now

"Everyone should have the right to refuse to engage with technologies that harm them, their students, and the planet."

It's so wonderful so I write it like this for my students

No no no begs every archivist. You are never going to be able to find anything. Please don’t start using emojis in file names. Who asked for this? What fresh hell is next?

I feel like I need you to see the texts my dad sent me this week

Holy shit, just learned about the typewriter art of Montserrat Alberich Escardívol, a Catalan typist. Using an extra wide typewriter and 180 color ribbons, she built up elaborate images from simple characters like 'm' and '.' and ';'. Here is her typewritten painting of the Cathedral of Barcelona.

If anybody would like to, or knows anybody who might like to, do a small amount of paid research work for me at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, I would be very glad to hear from them.

I love this nerd ass website

Can anyone recommend a good text / source for sea monsters and imagined marine life in early modern period? Niche request. Cheers!

HORROR FANS WANTED! My friend and colleague Mathias Clasen desperately needs horror fans to help with his new study. The survey below doesn't take long to complete, and your participation is appreciated by him and his collaborators. Details 👇 app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/brighton/i...

I asked about this, and one of our excellent librarians discovered that in fact AI summaries/"Research Assistant" can be switched off at the level of the library. Something to request. support.proquest.com/s/article/Eb...

the entirety of the british press talked themselves into believing this woman is trans based almost entirely on JK Rowling's judgement of the athlete's appearance.

Reminder: If you use generative AI for *any of your writing tasks* you are a Slopper not a writer and should be ashamed of yourself. The end.

I repeat, not a single student fell asleep! Ever.

Good morning to all those people who wasted the last decade saying, "there's no point tackling climate change in the UK, because China." www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

A reminder that we're hosting the first European Conference on the Fantastic, Fantasy's Present Pasts, in Glasgow next summer (23rd-25th June 2026). The Call for Papers and Sessions can be found here: fantasy.glasgow.ac.uk/index.php/20.... Closes 12th December. Please do consider submitting!

No slides, just words. Many words. Those were the days.

Does anyone in the #bookhistory or #history space know of a good article about the “publishing war” between the Old Farmer’s Almanac and the Farmer’s Almanac?

But on the bright side, the 18thC is clearly winning. @rezekjoe.bsky.social & @profchander.bsky.social bearing witness:

Henry Tilney read the entirety of The Mysteries of Udolpho in only TWO DAYS! This is what phones have taken from us.

AHAHAHAHA *incoherent sobbing*

is having sex with angels considered monster-fucking

It sounds great, but for my own personal tastes, I wish it had been written by someone other than Trollope

I finally caved and had a poke around using ChatGPT to suggest prospective popular digital products for 2026 and it gave me references for its answers which included, multiple times, some random guy’s blog which was clearly written with ChatGPT really, this is what all the fuss is about

one of the reasons I love dungeons and dragons so much is that we can spend two years of our actual real lives preparing for a quest to imaginary Hell only for the group to be accidentally sorcerously deported mid-adventure because of the small print in a 2nd rank illusion spell

Currently (just about) functioning between 5-8

So far my favorite unit pairs the Ludditites and AI conscious objectors with a focus on labor and environmental impact. I put in Earle's Obi and Female American to help us unpack the colonial underpinnings of technocapitalism. And the first day is basically this meme.

Because, as I have said, it’s only good universal use case is disciplining labor.

That’s before I reckon with the ethics of using a thing for ghost efficiency that is pretty societally devastating. And on a final personal note, I don’t want to become stupid before my time. I really don’t. I will keep mucking about so that I can keep mucking about, for as long as possible.

Today's a good day to remember Rosalind Franklin, British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose untimely death meant three men shared a Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA for which she'd done most of the work.

The world’s first trillionaire initiated a move that has left more than half a million people dead, most of whom are children.

The best bit is how Rossetti is roughly the same size and shape as the wombat, emphasising the wombat's humanity and/or the artist's wombatity. A tale as old as wombats.

Someone at a Russell Group university was moved to almost-poetry by their Faculty Meeting… Can anyone do better?

Somewhat astonishingly, here it is, a book, a thing in the world... More, including acknowledgements, soon❤️

“Turns out that AI is very bad at most jobs, and this pivot to leisure is likely indicative of the industry’s mounting desperation, … now that it has failed to ‘outperform humans at most economically valuable work.’” www.thecut.com/article/woul...

The great thing about working on early modern academia is you never know if the archive will a) overturn everything we thought we knew about early modern philosophy or b) be nothing but complaints about low pay