Thinking of inventing an app where you can tell it that you, say, made a phone call to complain in French, and then followed it up with a formal complaint email in French, composed with dictionaries, not AI, and it just plays ten minutes of applause and shows you videos of fireworks going off.

I wrote a Substack post about garbage, and why I love it. irinadumitrescu.substack.com/p/the-libera...

When I negotiated the terms of my current professorship, I asked the chair if it was true that professors at our uni were entitled to pasture land for their goats. He said I could have all the goats I wanted. I still do not have a single goat, though to be fair, I haven't put it through purchasing

I know just what you're wondering: is there a French Bridget Jones' Diary with a lovable-goofy heroine, a brooding Englishman, a fantasy version of the literary world, and every beat both utterly predictable and knocked out of the park? I present to you: "Jane Austen a gâché ma vie".

🚨Job Klaxon🚨 Open rank Professorship in History of the Middle Ages with consideration of digital Methods 📍Institute of History, University of Bern (🇨🇭) 📆Deadline: 19 October 2025 ▶️ Information: tinyurl.com/56ywncuj #Medievalsky #DigitalHumaniities

One thing about the German labor force is that sales people often have a *lot* of training for their jobs. So I've made a habit of asking them how best to care for purchases. This is how I learned you don't need fancy dishwasher tabs. Powder is fine, much cheaper, and gentler on dishes.

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

High fashion has met high art at the Louvre for the first time – and the results are so eye-popping, Irina Dumitrescu hardly knows where to look

'The ones who make the most difference are those who see us for who we are and for who we might become.' Irina Dumitrescu: What makes a good teacher?

"Exercise seemed to be the hallmark of people who had mastered the chaos of life, who had ambition and the discipline to meet it. As long as vacuuming was my primary aerobic activity, I was doomed to be a lesser kind of person, a dabbler, a loser." www.the-tls.com/politics-soc...

I would read an academic murder book in which the murder was solved by reading the syllabus

“He died — of uncontrollable laughter at a joke by his jester, having just eaten a whole goose — with no surviving legitimate heirs, and the line which had begun with Wilfred the Hairy, Count of Barcelona in the ninth century, finally died out.” - Sicily: A Short History by John Julius Norwich

“Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces. Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.” Leadership, strategy, real action, common sense. #Paris

This might be of interest to some: my cherished colleague (once at Bonn, now in Tübingen) Uwe Küchler's book on an environmental humanities' approach to foreign language teaching is out on September 1! www.narr.de/environmenta...

A piece I wrote a while ago for Lithub on being distracted while trying to write, not at all pandemic specific. Let me know if anything resonates. lithub.com/someone-is-w...

"What makes me mad about AI in education" by Irina Dumitrescu https://irinadumitrescu.substack.com/p/what-makes-me-mad-about-ai-in-education

‘With its short jacket and faux-fur trim, the suit has a mid-century flavour, emphasised by the Disney cartoons woven into it. A plush headdress featuring oversized antlers completes the look’ – Irina Dumitrescu on just one of the startling creations in ‘Louvre Couture’

'The ones who make the most difference are those who see us for who we are and for who we might become.' Irina Dumitrescu: What makes a good teacher?

I'm in this photo and I don't like it.

'My favourite origin stories betray how children have not, in general, changed very much over the ages.' Irina Dumitrescu on childhood precocity and the saints

'How to read more in 11 easy steps: an idiosyncratic to-do list' by Irina Dumitrescu. #reading #books irinadumitrescu.substack.com/p/how-to-rea...

I didn't even realise that my @thetls.bsky.social column came out this week! This one is on Frank McCourt, Guibert of Nogent, and the difficulties of teaching. www.the-tls.com/regular-feat...

‘With its short jacket and faux-fur trim, the suit has a mid-century flavour, emphasised by the Disney cartoons woven into it. A plush headdress featuring oversized antlers completes the look’ – Irina Dumitrescu on just one of the startling creations in ‘Louvre Couture’

I have discovered that one of the great joys of life is reading novels about English people on vacation. www.the-tls.com/regular-feat...

Simply miserable time trying to get into writing headspace today, so I wrote down some rules for brutally pragmatic drafting. There is space for more -- what should go on here?

A question for those of you who read German lit in the original: which books make you feel grateful that you know the language?

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

Will also be hard to explain that some of the best universities on the planet dismantled themselves and destroyed their educational mission, both with and without Trump's help.

Will be hard to explain in the future that the US government went antivax, causing a lot of avoidable suffering and death, not in response to any negative incident with vaccines, but to the biggest, fastest, most successful, most impressive vaccine rollout in history.

You actually could replace most academic consultant firms with ChatGPT and get the same level of value, for less money.

Please tell me your favorite form or procrastiwarmup for writing!

Write dirty! :)

Anyone else, when they need to start writing, decide they first have to clean their desks, reorganize the desk drawers, throw out old receipts and coffee cards, test out every pen, clean the computer screen, close every tab, yell at a few loved ones, and post on social media about it? No?

Spread word! In memory of the late Walter Goffart, we kindly invite scholars to submit proposals for papers on a range of topics clustered around quintessential Goffartian subjects Maps, Migrations, and the Mechanics of Settlement & Taxation in Late Antiquity. To be held at @imc-leeds.bsky.social.

High fashion has met high art at the Louvre for the first time – and the results are so eye-popping, Irina Dumitrescu hardly knows where to look

'A Month in the Country has erotic tension and one revealed secret, but they seem simply part of the healing spell of Oxgodby, rather than an interruption to it.' Irina Dumitrescu on restfully contemplative holiday reading

'The author of Christina’s Life was keen to show that her visions could not be explained by other means.' Irina Dumitrescu on a miracle-working consultant

“Educators now spend a significant amount of their time detecting AI-generated work and seeking ways to assess whether students are developing essential skills.” Yes. Everywhere.

This is maybe the worst part about being an educator in the AI era. AI companies are *stealing your time* by making you work around it/find it/adjudicate it. Time that, 4 years ago, you would have used to improve your materials, or stay up-to-date on some area of research.

From David Bayles & Ted Orland's book, Art & Fear

On the whole, I really don't think a man fighting a dragon is on the same level of heroism as a man organizing a chaotic basement.

My first piece for @reviewcanada.bsky.social is a review of Mark Kingwell's Question Authority: A Polemic about Trust in Five Meditations reviewcanada.ca/magazine/202...

yoooooooooo flash sale of the ebook of THE BRIGHT AGES by me and @lollardfish.bsky.social only $2.99!!!!! #medievalsky #booksky bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

Please do share widely!

Dr. Gabriele Cocco (Bergamo) will be giving a talk on the Old English Apollonius of Tyre on July 1, at 6:15 pm CEST. Due to extreme heat, the talk will be streamed via Zoom for Bonn University students. Other interested persons are welcome to join us as well! uni-bonn.zoom-x.de/j/6612844836...

For this week's @thetls.bsky.social, I wrote about Christina of Markyate, medieval wonder woman and visionary management consultant: www.the-tls.com/regular-feat...

I recently talked with @naokan.bsky.social about book reviews, pitching, and how to deal with editorial feedback for her newsletter, Woman of Letters: www.woman-of-letters.com/p/how-to-rev...