Incredibly specific question time: if you were an not-rich (ie, no private car) person traveling from Tehran to Paris in the early 1920s, what means of transportation would you take out of Iran? And would you pass by Kermanshah? Thank you for any ideas!

Now this is a monument I can really get behind

Went out two nights in a row this weekend and now I will be falling asleep at 7:45 p.m. for the rest of the month

Today I saw a kid whining to buy a plastic skull whose mom sighed exasperatedly and said “all of us already have one of those!”

Them: you came to a women’s sports bar to watch a NY Liberty playoff game - why aren’t you wearing any team gear? Me: my shirt is Liberty Them: … Me: Liberty fabric Them: …

To haunt your dreams, here's a late 2nd c. fragment of a portrait bust of the emperor Commodus once the face added in the early 19th century was removed... (Liverpool, Merseyside Museum, from the collection of Henry Blundell)

Very weird to ask professors to both research and teach. “Hey, introvert who communes with rocks/microbes/people who died centuries ago - could you also perform up here on stage for several hours to an audience who doesn’t want to be there? Thanks!”

I’m giving a talk at e-flux on Thursday 9/25, 7:30pm, “The Fluxhouse Cooperatives and the Future of the City.” The program will also include a performance of Maciunas’s “Solo for Violin” by Laura Ortman. www.e-flux.com/events/67832...

"a former museum curator advised [a collector] to keep the fact that he owned [a looted antiquity] on the down-low, investigators said. 'If you limit access to your emperor to dinner guests and clueless meter readers, you should be fine'..." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/a...

Love it when an event photographer just gives up on capturing me not making a squinch-face and sends me pics like this

Another class prep day, another far too long time spent amusing myself with lecture slides

Prepping a lecture on the difference between looting and archeology and have just made this cursed image

Teaching a research methods class today, so I had to wear my new tshirt…

Great article about a great work! So excited to see this -

Awesome tour of the Met with Neal Medlyn, performance artist/ museum guard. My favorite of his stories of memorable encounters with art, ghosts, and guests was the visitor who barreled up to him in the Egyptian galleries to say “are you tryin’ to tell me they got dead people up in this bitch?!?”

Tlingit artist Nicholas Galanin, “Architecture of return, escape (The British Museum)”, a deerskin map a floor plan of the British Museum and possible escape routes for various Indigenous cultural belongings held there.

I don’t know what weird ritual resulted in this Labubu of the damned I spotted on a SoHo sidewalk this morning but… next time I want in, ok people?

Tomorrow (9/5) I'll be talking about iconoclasm and AI images at a philosophy conference at the New School - including melted Confederates, Houdini's fight against spirit photography, and a 12th century erotic dream. Come see if I pull it off! 4pm, Starr Hall at 63 5th Ave.

History of text friends - what's the author holding in this c. 1290s illustration? Thank you! (@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social?)

Getting your kids to try lots of new foods feels good at the time but then you find yourself being whined at to buy prosciutto because that’s what they want to pack for their first day of school lunches

Excited to share my friend/colleague Melissa Kerin’s hot off the press @hyperallergic.com piece on Tibetan Buddhist museum shrine rooms. It’s likely to ruffle some feathers of our curator colleagues, but it needed to be said hyperallergic.com/1038180/the-...

I made a stop-motion animation about Cuomo's harassment using images from his deranged Covid-19 celebration poster

While I was recording a lecture for my online class, my kid kindly lent verisimilitude by falling asleep next to me

This is my holy sacrament

It’s my birthday and I just passed this intersection. Coincidence? I think not.

Happy first day of school! To me. My kids’ first day of school isn’t until next week, which means they’re being subjected to my teaching…

I love that in 1859, you could roll up at a photographer's studio in Paris and say "so, after you take a couple of snaps of me and my... friend looking soulfully in each other's eyes and posing in our finest frock coats, he's going to strip down...

The Heinrich Schliemann has a playground with a slide shaped like the Trojan Horse 😂

Should really be popcorn devouring seed corn

The aftermath of celebrating our return to the city with food you can’t get at camp (hot pot). Next step: haircuts…

My paper grocery bag disintegrated and a half-dozen people on the platform came up to give me replacement bags for my stuff - all skinny little plastic bags from liquor stores because it was New Year’s Eve and that’s what they were carrying on the way to parties.

No letters of recommendation required!

Seems appropriate that Hurricane Erin looks sort of latently powerful but will mainly wind up causing minor annoyance to people across the land. Same!

Went to a American Revolution-era historical site with reenactors, and was worried that they would whitewash history, but once there I realized that if you’re committed enough to history to spend your summer cobbling shoes or cooking over a wood fire or tying a net by hand…

Saw a tomato that wants to beat me up

Sky was right purty over Marblehead, MA tonight

Cambridge, MA is a delightful parody of itself even on the construction signs.

Today I learned about Billy's Topless Bar, which avoided being shut down by Giuliani's "quality of life" campaign in 1998 by putting its dancers in bikinis and removing the apostrophe from its sign to rechristen the business Billy Stopless. I ❤️ NYC

Interesting that the scene on this gold tray is exactly the same as the one on the famed ‘Dionysus Cup’ at the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich. If the tray weren’t gold, I’d suspect a forgery. Looted, so I guess no findspot known? 🏺 #ancientbluesky 540–530 BCE, found in Vulci. 📸 Exekias 1/

One thing I'll share here: we're hosting a symposium in November in Syracuse, for which we're collecting art/poetry/prose/photographs/memories from anyone affected, indirectly or directly, by the "War On Terror." You can read more about how to submit here: counternarratives.github.io

The restoration of the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery will cost $10 million, which means, in the end it will cost much more. apnews.com/article/conf...

Peth Hegseth has announced that the Arlington Confederate Monument - or, as I call it, the Monument to the Myth of the Loyal Slave - will be reinstalled after its 2023 removal. Here's why that's a huge insult to Black Americans, past and present.

This is why Charlottesville melted down its Lee statue. If the statue is removed and simply put in storage, it remains what @artcrimeprof.bsky.social calls “America’s strategic racism reserve.”

America’s strategic racism reserve being tapped to put a toppled Confederate back on his pedestal…

Made this when I was finishing my last book and now that I'm getting to the end of this one I'm sad to say it's still accurate

This is how your email finds me

Persian speakers - I'm looking for someone to watch about 1.5 hours of videos on the looting and forgery of Iranian antiquities. I'll pay of course! Any leads?

Writing about him today and somehow hadn't come across this photo before. Look at the awkward magnificence with which he strides!

May I present one of the all-time greats of academic trolling.

One could base a whole study of American imperialism through exploration/archeology on the first paragraph of this 1930 article alone...