Our beloved Alice Wong has joined the ancestors. It was one of the great honors of my life to call Alice my friend, co-author & co-conspirator. She was a true genius, a force of nature the likes of which the world has never seen before. I love you, Alice, and am equal parts grateful and devastated

All of Congress should get onboard with this 💔 🇵🇸

Congratulations to @rachelschine.bsky.social for winning the Best Book Award from the Middle East Medievalists association for her book, Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race! Brava!!! 🍾🍾🍾 Here's the link, if you haven't already read it: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

everyone interested in the fate of American higher education should read former UVA president Jim Ryan's letter rehearsing the intense pressure placed on him to resign last summer it offers a precious glimpse not only on DOJ's assault on higher ed, but the readiness of many other stakeholders 1/

Evidence of the atrocities committed in Sudan by the Arab supremacists of the RSA, with the support of our friends in the UAE. www.theguardian.com/world/video/...

Ah yes Leicester, a tip-top History UoA in REF2021 currently eviscerating it’s History provision (among other subjects). Have they also won the THE irony of the year award?

We must resist this with absolute fury. Effectively asking staff to choose between pay or pension is diabolical. If they they get away with it here it will happen everywhere. Everyone in the education sector needs to get behind this.

The other site is still needed to uncover these stories which are harder for me at least to find on this site:

Predictable but still amazing to watch people who spent literally years accusing every librarian, teacher, and trans person they could find of sexually grooming children suddenly throw themselves in with "actually it's ephebophilia"

‘No! Not Larry Summers!’ Wails Devastated Nation

Just a couple of days ago, the Moral Avatar on the Charles (and Jeffrey Epstein pen pal) was trying to get an investigation launched against Harvard’s excellent student newspaper

Looks like we're going to have to keep returning to these narratives of how inoculation/vaccination was originally adopted, in order to understand the increasingly widespread rejection of it now. www.brepols.net/products/IS-... #histmed #EpiSky

Peter Thiel is in the Epstein emails, enjoying himself. Peter Thiel is an overt, convinced, outspoken Nazi. Peter Thiel's company is being paid by the UK government to crawl all over YOUR personal data. Oswald Mosley's grandson runs his UK operation. You can't make it up.

Some Black Death news I missed last week when I was traveling. Yersinia pestis has been retrieved from the remains of a teenage boy in an Edinburgh graveyard: www.bbc.com/news/article.... This is just a press announcement & not scientific findings yet. But this will be an interesting case to watch.

Israel continues its genocidal campaign of destroying the conditions of life unabated. www.bbc.com/news/article...

EPISODE 1: YEMEN’S SOLIDARITY BLOCKADE @lalehkhalili.bsky.social joins us to discuss Ansarallah’s naval blockade in support of Palestine, the politics and history of the commodities trade in the Arabian Peninsula, and "counter-logistical" strategies of resistance. open.substack.com/pub/turbulen...

Podcast (from @palfest.bsky.social) featuring @lalehkhalili.bsky.social interviewing Adam Hanieh, @rafeefz.bsky.social and me ou our @versobooks.bsky.social pamphlet Resisting Erasure. Some fantastic interviewing from Laleh, and I think(/hope?) a good conversation. www.podbean.com/media/share/...

Nothing illustrates the arseholery of the IOC and the British Press more than the use of the image of a not-Trans woman to illustrate a story about trans women being banned (because there are no current trans women competing at this level)

Study Finds Most Americans Can't Find Where They Are Being Deported On Map

But UK flying drones over Gaza for the last two years and sharing information with Israel was deemed by the UK government to not be illegal...??? This story actually makes the Starmer government even more complicit in Israel's #genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

I wrote this essay in the current Sudan issue of Transition Magazine titled "The Politics of Hunger" which argues that the current hunger crisis has been decades in the making. It begins with Nimeiri and looks at US engagement over the decades. transitionmagazine.fas.harvard.edu/the-politics...

Important to recognize that @monicamedhist.bsky.social had suggested the possibility of al-Maqrizi relying on Ibn al-Wardi's maqama, and how much of the historiographical edifice is built upon al-Maqrizi and Ibn Taghribirdi in her 2022 article: revistas.ucm.es/index.php/DM...

Congratulations to Muhammed Omar & Nahyan Fancy (@fancynahyan.bsky.social) for the global press coverage they're getting on their new piece on the "trickster tales" at the heart of Black Death narratives. General bibliography on the whole pandemic here (#OpenAccess): docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Medicaid Work Requirements Myth Vs. Fact https://theonion.com/medicaid-work-requirements-myth-vs-fact/

Climate change in the Polar regions is an under-recognised driver of global health risks, according to new research in @ambio-journal.bsky.social by a team led by Exeter's Prof Gail Whiteman. @arcticbasecamp.org #COP30 news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-e...

Scholars relied heavily on a single text: Risālat al-nabaʾ ʿan al-wabāʾ, (1348–49) by Ibn al-Wardi, & treated as a 1st-hand account of the plague. But it's a maqāma—a stylized, often fictional literary form. ARTICLE: archaeologymag.com/2025/11/medi... . STUDY: journals.uio.no/JAIS/article... .

Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage

During this week, I will also present some of the results of my PhD research at the Medieval Research Seminar in Exeter, both in person and via Zoom. I'm looking forward to it!

From a global low of 5,000 individuals in the 1960's, their numbers today are 135,000 globally. That's an astonishing recovery driven by research, regulation and public support that led to international cooperation on whaling bans. Take a victory lap, whale supporters!

Centuries of misinterpretation of a fourteenth-century Arabic literary tale have shaped misconceptions about the rapid spread of the Black Death across Asia via the Silk Road. doi.org/g9849t

There’s outrage in Israel over the leaked video of Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner. However, the outrage isn’t about the rape itself but the fact that the video was leaked in the first place. Cartoon by Carlos Latuff

The New York Times is the paper of record and has played a key role in enabling the Gaza genocide. To hold the newspaper accountable, we must sever our ties —not only as subscribers or advertisers, but also as writers who lend the paper legitimacy. mondoweiss.net/2025/11/why-... #Palestine #Israel

Reminder 𝐃𝐨𝐧𝐭' 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞! csmbr.fondazionecomel.org/events/onlin... #CSMBR #OnlineLectures #CompoundMedicamentes #ConstantinetheAphrican

man

Look out for this later #histSTM (And on Franklin, about whom lots of myths are circulating today, read this: www.nature.com/articles/d41...)

Reposting this 🧵 on the crucial importance of knowing where our pandemic narratives come from. #histmed #MedievalSky #EpiSky 🧪🗃️

Just reminded of this bit I had in my notes, where Ibn Hajar al-'Asqalani's (d. 1449) Merits of the Plague says this about Ibn al-Wardi's plague treatise. These chains of transmission are how we will show how Ibn al-Wardi's maqama came to have the influence it did. #histmed #MedievalSky

This is a hilarious, self-deprecating and insightful piece. It also contains far more generalizable advice than advertised because there are actually a lot of other circumstances in which ACAB includes reporters from the New York Times...

maybe don't talk to the NYT about zohran mamdani lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

A lot has been written about how a bunch of liberal, Jewish Americans are in love with a version of Israel that hasn't existed in decades but less has been written about how a lot of Israeli leaders think they're dealing with an America that no longer exists...

In a way it's about not wanting to know because the developments are very much in parallel: the global right has increasingly shed any commitments to formal civic equality in favor of doubling down on a violent and exclusionary racial order. None so blind as those who refuse to see, etc..

Several years ago a young woman went to prison for encouraging her boyfriend to kill himself. Suing these companies into oblivion is not enough. Their leaders are criminally responsible.

This crime is horrific on so many levels. The Jewish community that feels fear, the racists who are emboldened, the brown/Muslim community that’s demonized, and degrading hope for change under a progressive new mayor. And if a false flag, undermining the fight against real bigotry. Makes me so mad.

All these universities should be sued.

Never think that just one person cannot change the course of history, because it happens every moment of every single day

If you haven't already cancelled your subscription for all of the other nonsense they've published, this seems like a good reason to do so. Be sure to tell them why too:

The latest Pasts Imperfect is out! @rhigarthjones.bsky.social discusses Ottoman receptions of Roman antiquity. Then, Black Death mythbusting; wampum beads in Canada; celebrating Native American Heritage Month; ancient Mexican coprolites; ancient world journals by @yaleclassicslib.bsky.social & more!

She knows it, and it has been acknowledged several times, but I can still never thank @monicamedhist.bsky.social enough for all her work, help and conversations over the last 13 years in transforming my work, generally, and more specifically related to plague and disease history.

Thanks to @mollyglick.bsky.social for this write up of our recently published article on plague maqamas for @nautil.us #plague #histmed www.yahoo.com/news/article...

You guessed it! From Ibn Taghribirdi's (and al-Maqrizi's) inflected 15th-century readings of Ibn al-Wardi's 14th-century maqama. Here's the summary from Omar & Fancy: