Starting out 2026 strong by writing a letter to the to the London Review of Books editor re: pubic hair in Archaic Greece.

My kid: “I’ve read the Calvin and Hobbes books we have a million times. Can we go to the bookstore and get more!” Me: … My kid: “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Every time I start reading a collector's archive, I think "this will be a waste of time - no way did they preserve any incriminating details"... and every time I find they left themselves little notes-to-self like "bought this from a thief at [extremely sacred Nepal site]."

Archive tech advice, please! How can I improve my captures of prints in plastic sleeves? My previous tries, like below, with iPhone and my meh digital camera, aren't getting all the detail when I zoom in and often have distracting glare from nearly unavoidable overhead lights.

~ancient art historian voice~ “You know who else liked to show off their bubble butts while playing sports?”

One last moment in snowy Vermont before I head back to NYC!

My nine-year-old has started a cartoon called "Drunk Santa No Elf" and I couldn't be prouder

A student in my class (required research methods seminar for all first-year honors students) snuck this into their final presentation and I'm verklempt/ a little horrified at the thought that I might have just turned a forensic science major into a historian......

Was tested for hyper mobility, which involved the practitioner saying in disbelief “you didn’t know your elbows aren’t supposed to do that?!?” (I didn’t.)

Friends in/knowledgable about Kathmandu: can you tell me more about this sculpture in Maru Tol, identified by Slusser (shown scrubbing it with household cleaner in 1971) as Parvati?

Are you a professor planning to incorporate THE INTERMEDIARIES (medical #history, Weimar, #Jewish history, #transgender history, #LGBTQ fighting Nazis) into your course? I have pdf to share, additional teaching materials, images, and resources for use. Please ping me. wwnorton.com/books/978132...

My 4th grader, after coming home from a class Zoom with an expert on Frank Lloyd Wright: “I want to live in Falling Water!” Me, delighted to discover I’m raising an architectural historian: “Oh? Why?” Kid: “Because the guest house has a full pool!”

I had thought I knew the essentials of this case and hoooo boy I was wrong. Fantastic piece: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/m...

AI is weirdly bad at making convincing selfies. …at least as demonstrated by the ones a few of my students submitted this semester as “proof” they visited the Metropolitan Museum for an assignment.

Do you want a nail-biter of an impeccably researched heist story with impressive outsmarting of tech and oodles of human stupidity? Of course you do. So, check out Flawless: www.google.com/books/editio...

When the heist goes wrong

This is incredibly satisfying

Carol Rosenberg is the empress of the Gitmo press corps, but in her spare time she wrote this deep dive into an instance of the Pentagon’s restoring the names of Confederates to military bases through cynically obvious dishonesty. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/u...

A small good thing: @stephenharrigan.bsky.social, fired for discussing slavery in his draft interpretive panels for the Alamo, published this gem of a piece about another artifact on display: www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/...

Vegetarian query: any substitutes for the salty, substantial hit of pepperoni on a pizza? Don’t know why I’m craving this after like 30 years but I am.

"I recommend students do not go on to graduate work until they’ve had some success elsewhere" AMEN

Learned an important hidden curriculum lesson: offered to give a student an incomplete; student vehemently said no; student later returned to say they hadn't understood what an incomplete meant and actually, yes, they did want one. (They thought it required retaking the entire class.)

Is it weird to say I had a lot of fun talking with @alletson.bsky.social for @motherjones.com about Trumpian aesthetics? But it was a blast trying to figure out why there’s so much gold when, you know Versailles didn’t end that well for the folks in charge… www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

I’m doing a kid’s nonfiction book on art heists and just got the first sketches back from the (brilliant!) illustrator. This is going to be so awesome.

Doing a museum heist to grab gold and gems? So boring, so basic. Doing a museum heist to steal a Rembrandt to bargain with prosecutors to reduce your sentence for other art thefts? That's Myles Connor. hyperallergic.com/the-rembrand...

They’re apparently selling freshly cut lumberjacks on the streets of NYC now

The Met’s “Divine Egypt” show is spectacular, but instead of calling the section with these representations of Horus “Expressing the Divine,” they really should have just gone with “Angry Birds”

A beautiful hairpin that belonged to Prince Alemayehu's mother - Empress Tiruwork - is going back to Ethiopia c. 160 years after it was taken by the British military doctor who treated her last illness. Congrats to all involved @alulapankhurst.bsky.social royalethiopiantrust.org/the-return-o...

Lead item in the LRB blog newsletter all right all right all right! www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

It's only now, nearly a year later, that I want to think about how close the Palisades Fire got to the Getty Villa. Close enough to fill the reflecting pool in the courtyard with black ash...

Kid review of shabu shabu: "If Link ate this in Legend of Zelda he would get full recovery plus 10 hearts and a defense up!"

The bots are getting better at profile text but not so much at the other stuff…

Bless the youth librarians who ask your kid like two questions, peer deep into their soul, and hand them a pile of books they will love. (Also no I don’t know why he reads like this)

Seriously temped to scrap my plans for the final exam for my art and crime class and instead give the students this Playmobil museum heist set and ask them what they got right and wrong... (h/t @karenho.bsky.social, who always sends me the best stuff!)

‘By his own estimate, Jonathan Tokeley-Parry smuggled three thousand antiquities out of Egypt in 65 trips over six years. His success was down to his skill as a “fabricator”.’ Erin L. Thompson (@artcrimeprof.bsky.social) on the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/no...

Not to brag, but all of the lifelong learners auditing my art and crime lecture this semester have now asked what I'm teaching next semester and expressed disappointment that it's the same course... 💅

A small good thing from social media - I visited a church museum and posted photos of a cool thing and then heard from a scholar who said my photos were the best he could find of said cool thing and could he use one for his article? And now it’s out!

One of the most colorful figures in the black market for ancient art has died. For @lrb.co.uk, I wrote about Jonathan Tokeley-Parry - a smuggler who made fake fakes to defeat border inspections to get Egyptian artifacts to the UK and US, whose downfall both changed and didn’t change the market.

I was the weirdo kid stuck in a normy family and now my daughter is a normy kid stuck in a weirdo family.

When I was snuggling with my kid just now, she told me she was disappointed by her book about the Donner Party, “because I thought they were going to feast on the people when they were still alive.” Then she asked if cannibalism was illegal. Then she asked if she could sleep in my bed.

I wrote about sitting shiva in the American Museum of Natural History for a man who died centuries ago: brooklynrail.org/2025/11/crit...

Best. Art. Crime. Costume. (from Hailey Fuqua, a Boston coloratura soprano: www.instagram.com/p/DQhrnW9kpx...)

Will remember this excuse next time I want to cancel a class...

Love that my kids are loving James Herriot, even though that meant they demanded I read the chapter about a cow’s uterine prolapse out loud on a city bus this afternoon…

At the 2024 funeral of Pål Enger, who stole Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” from Norway's National Gallery in 1994 (leaving behind a note: “a thousand thanks for your poor security”), not one but two photos of his getaway ladder were displayed, and his coffin was draped in a reproduction of "The Scream"

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.

♥️

Halloween costumes: British Museum exhibition planning team.