Federal agencies' overwhelming focus on immigration has suspended work on the repatriation of stolen cultural property - investigations that once won us friends around the world. From @samtabachnik.bsky.social in the @denverpost.com: www.denverpost.com/2025/11/06/u...

I have submitted my book manuscript! And then, of course, immediately come down with a cold. I told my classes today that if I collapsed at the lectern to just leave me there so I could get a little nap.

Incredible survival of 2,000 year old cake

This guy would have absolutely killed on Tinder

Considering making a similar sign for the next time I go out dancing.

♥️

“The [MFA] has reached a historic agreement with the known descendants of David Drake (also known as Dave the Potter) regarding two monumental stoneware vessels in the MFA’s collection that were made by the enslaved potter and poet…”

Halloween costumes: British Museum exhibition planning team.

When I was sick as a kid, my parents would throw some ginger ale and saltines at me and take off, but somehow I'm at home producing charcuterie trays for my sick kid. Feels like I'm getting the short end of both sides of this stick...

My "A Burglar Bitten by a Skeleton" illustration has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my illustration.

Two suspects arrested in Louvre theft. One of whom was preparing to board a flight to Algiers. www.20minutes.fr/societe/4181...

‘Bone Box’ by Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas at the Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, BC. “Fabricated out of discarded trays that once stored archeological collections, this interactive work calls for us to engage with one another.”

I was interviewed for this! Fingers crossed I sputtered out something of use...

I'm very happy to announce that the website (w/front cover) for my and Dr. Evie Handby's new edited volume is now live! We are very excited to see this out in the world next year. www.berghahnbooks.com/title/Huffer...

Anybody in NYC have a high-vis vest I can borrow for Halloween? 🙏

"The idea that historic preservation is best left to wealthy nations that make money putting the spoils of their imperial conquests on display has already aged poorly. The failures of security exposed by Sunday’s events just make that defense that much more hollow."

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.

This was a fun interview! And they let me point out that museums, full of colonial loot, are both victims and perpetrators in the black market for stolen art… www.bbc.com/audio/play/w...

Getting a head start for my costume for the @hyperallergic.com Halloween party…

My kids are real big fans of the Louvre theft (because it's a day off school and I told them they could play Legends of Zelda whenever I'm on the phone with reporters which is... proving to be quite a lot of Legends of Zelda).

Who robbed the Louvre? Right answers only.

Today's theft from the Louvre ( art-crime.blogspot.com/2025/10/jewe...) is making me think about my favorite series of museum heists. Buckle up for a 🧵 on priceless porcelains, the Dead Zoo Gang, a Pekinese named Looty, and the unsolved mystery of who's stealing Chinese art from European museums.

We've added some of the Louvre theft details here. I will keep updating as things get clarified. Fingers crossed now that there is DNA on the abandoned helmet. art-crime.blogspot.com/2025/10/jewe...

Louvre was robbed! www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Holy crap Kara Walker chopped up a Stonewall Jackson statue and revealed a monster

Today I toured The Elms in Newport, RI, and learned that sometimes Herminie Berwind, the owner, asked her staid English butler (center of the group photo) to make a fourth for an afternoon round of bridge… but to retain decorum, he remained standing as he played!

UGH finishing a book means formatting citations and tracking down missing first names and not allowing myself to follow the rabbit hole that opens up when I find out an author was involved in a blackmail scheme involving sheet shooting, Van Dyck, and possibly fake royal titles. NO FUN.

I'm currently writing about Harold Woodbury Parsons, an art consultant who lived in an absolutely transparent closet from the 1910-60s. He fled Boston as soon as he could and set up shop in Rome (sharing an apartment with his mother, naturally), and then went everywhere with handsome young blonds...

Look - I could get embarrassed thinking about how every time I meet a celebrity, I end up telling them some incredibly grim story about museum collections… or I could just acknowledge that any time I meet anyone, I end up telling them some incredibly grim story about museum collections.

The fruit and nut bar of my dreams

It's proving surprisingly hard to write for the public about ancient art that I love without sounding like "here are my weird little guys look at my weird little guys!"

I'm so tired today because the secret society dinner at Yale ran so late last night (is a sentence that is true and that I most likely won't get to say again)

Ate breakfast with many little photos of me

William Blake’s illustration of my upstairs neighbor

Edited down this chapter by 5k words!* *Let's not talk about how many of those words ended up in the footnotes. Hush - you're safe there, my preccccious, my ccccccitations!

This piece is wonderful wonderful wonderful

For the introduction to my book, I put together a list of my favorite unusual fakes, which includes: “Fauxbergé” eggs hermaphroditic butterflies historical harpsichords mprobably old bottles of wine entirely fictitious artists both fake Van Gogh paintings and fake tickets to the Van Gogh museum...

Me every time I check the word count on my book manuscript

Today I learned that I sprinkle nutritional yeast on popcorn because of a marketing scheme launched when Prohibition meant the Fleischmann Yeast Company couldn't sell gin 🤯

Attention fellow culture heritage nerds - I couldn't find a good photo of Fred Drew, a middleman dealer in the looting of Huaca Rajada/Sipán (a Moche site in Peru) so I bought this news file photo. Voila!

Apparently this is a real thing that is happening although like 10% chance I show up and the lights are off and the room is empty except someone saying “haha you think you think you write journalism? and you think that journalism is good enough for Yale?!?”

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!”

"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...