non-brits and young folk: don't sleep on this. Arena was an incredible documentary series on arts and culture. Hard to imagine how it could exist today. If you know Paris is Burning, that was an Arena doc. So was the Wisconsin Death Trip film. So much gold here.

Who could possibly have seen this coming

‘The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what "works," but art opens up what is possible.’

Spoliation d'œuvres d'art en Tunisie pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale : "Un voyage sans retour"

TFW your extremely niche area of academic research is in the news! A 🧵 on some aspects of the building formerly known as the Pro-Cathedral (or the Metropolitan chapel as it was called first!) www.rte.ie/news/ireland...

Delighted to announce I have found my first published academic article clearly written by ChatGPT. Full of non-existent references. What are we even doing anymore?

I still stand by these, even as universities around the world, including my own, brainlessly capitulate to AI.

An excellent PhD opportunity for someone to work on family separation during WW1 or WW2. I've done some research on Italian emigrant families separated when the father was serving in the Italian Army and it's a really fascinating area of study. royalhistsoc.org/calendar/phd...

Working on a presentation and...JFC, we need to shut down the pulpy "[Thing] of Auschwitz" machine until we can figure out what's going on. These things are just stealing the oxygen of important Holocaust histories.

“We're seeing a level of proliferation of bodies & body piles from space that's unlike anything I've ever seen…” Human rights investigator Nathaniel Raymond explains how more people could be killed within a week in Sudan, compared to the past two years in Gaza. 🔗 zeteo.com/p/sudans-dea...

Two panels commemorating the contribution of Black American soldiers towards the liberation of the Netherlands in World War Two have been quietly removed from a cemetery in Limburg. It follows a complaint by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Viral video of crying Ukrainian soldier sent to front lines is fake Videos of a crying Ukrainian "conscript" have flooded European social media networks, particularly in Germany and Hungary, this week. The clip, however, appears to be created with help from Sora, OpenAI's new tool.

Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Not very important in the scheme of things really but may I just say it’s so often an excellent idea to agree to give talks for or donate time to community groups because then you get to sit in a café to revisit old books and realise again how good they are. Is it work or is it a treat?

What happens when nationalist history meets the horrors of empire? For @jacobinmag.bsky.social, I reviewed a new exhibition on British counterinsurgency at the Imperial War Museum jacobin.com/2025/11/brit...

Looking forward to Dr Selena Daly’s book launch @ucddublin.bsky.social War Studies tomorrow. All welcome.

Sheffield Hallam University complied with Beijing demand to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project on supply chains and forced labour being dropped. It was reinstated after threat of legal action but chilling effect remains www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Chicago Auxiliary Bishop José María Garcia-Maldonado at ICE detention facility: “Being here is an act of holiness…soon we will seek access to the facility to bring the Eucharist to our brothers and sisters; if they say no again, we will keep praying.”

We’re proud to highlight Jiang Zizheng, an early career researcher in history at Kyoto University, who has a particular interest in Japan's racial equality proposal at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference whose work discusses how questions of race, diplomacy, shaped China’s diplomatic position.

There is a much-lesser known short story, 'The Other Side of the Medal' by Stella Gibbons, 'The Other Side of the Medal', which imagines the experience of C15th archers flung onto the Western Front in 'Beside the Pearly Water: archive.org/details/in.e...

Elisabeth is the best and if this is up your alley you should apply!

Great to see @kbruisch.bsky.social’s superb essay on AI and Academic publishing and its extractive dimensions up on the DRB. @historytcd.bsky.social drb.ie/move-over-fo...

“Nathaniel Redmond, director of the Yale school of public health, said on Tuesday that the “horror, scale, and velocity of killing” in El Fasher had left pools of blood visible from satellites.”

"You’re drawn to this tragedy, but it doesn’t belong to you – you’re imposing yourself upon the situation. You’re not welcome or invited and you’re stealing in a way. You’re stealing other people’s emotional tragedies. You’re stealing images of people, dead, who haven’t given you consent."

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

A real shock: he hosted me just a couple of weeks ago for a talk and research visit at CWM, and was as always full of interesting questions and helpful ideas. I’m sad I won’t get to talk with him some more. I’m sure we all are.

It’s… what they would’ve wanted…?

“Our findings show that ChatGPT not only fails to recognise retracted articles but often evaluates them as high-quality research and claims that their discredited claims are true.”

I read Bede's Ecclesiastical History during the lockdown, and one of the things I thought was so excellent was the way he begins by emphasising that the thing you really need to understand about England is that it's really far North, so it's dark all the time.

Went to a prayer service tonight at St. Mary of the Lake, where they have cardboard cutouts throughout the church representing parishioners afraid to come to Mass because of ICE.

This week, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social about my recent book Emigrant Soldiers: Mobilising Italians Abroad in the First World War. If anyone has a commute they'd like to liven up with tales of war, take a listen! newbooksnetwork.com/emigrant-sol...

This is a "recommended" tweet pushed to a (very much not-Nazi) contact's iPhone lockscreen last week. Who knows how many millions it was pushed to by Musk's platform, including in this case, in the UK? It's now been deleted, but only after getting thousands of RTs.

Graduate seminar did a deep dive on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense yesterday. At the line, “in America the law is king,” they (14 students from 6 countries) burst out laughing. I've been doing this for 35 years and this is the first time that was a laugh line.

National Army Museum identifies portrait of Black Waterloo veteran: www.theguardian.com/culture/2025... #Hstory #BlackHistory 🗃️

I interviewed the very brave MSF coordinator Dr Mohammed Abu Mughassib who recently left Gaza after spending the last two years helping prop up its collapsing health system www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

Seeing as it's #IrishBookWeek, I've put together a Starter Pack of bricks 'n' mortar bookshops. Terrified I've forgotten someone obvious so please let me know of additions go.bsky.app/G4kmxVq

You're absolutely right — starting a land war in Asia wasn't just a bad call, it's 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰 𝗯𝗹𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀. Thank you for calling me out on that — really. I'll be extra-strategic from now on. Would you like me to get cracking on those 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿?

In today's least surprising news

I think we have a window of opportunity to stop AI from ruining us that is slowly closing www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

I got very curious about this. You can trace Shearer's unit (21 CCS) and you can see what looks like the echo of his little blaze of fame: in Sept 1916 you get visits from various grandees including ... the editor of the BMJ, who presumably came to see for himself.

This is fascinating - Dron’s religious sensitivity is striking. And in interviews elsewhere he has talked about how the ‘canonical’ western antiwar literature stopped speaking to him in a war of defence.

Fascinating to learn of Brian Friel’s Translations being staged in Senegal.

Restitution row: how Nigeria’s new home for the Benin bronzes ended up with clay replicas

Am I allowed to acquire one for research purposes though

Epic; no notes

Macron remarks are notable- some quotes: "We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies."

My goodness, this poem. A beautiful, savage, blunt explanation of why we study war and conflict and also why military history is not and should not be just 'for the boys.' The poem is moving in its unwillingness to whitewash the many tombs of war, as we should too should be unwilling.

by the way, all those benign AI bots crawling the internet for for-profit LLMs, yeah it turns out when 9,000 hit your archive catalogue or image database all at once they break the system. This is an emerging sector issue. The last weeks have literally seen humans labouring to feed the machines...

Finally read this superb piece by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social

So anyway I’m in the archives today ❤️