US-Israeli bombing destroys the Pasteur Institute “Established in 1920, the institute is the first and oldest public health center in Iran—where staffers pioneered vaccine development and research on the prevention of infectious diseases.” www.cnn.com/2026/04/02/w...

Science is a social practice that is continuous with the culture and the people who practice it.

Here’s why this argument falls apart

“If they had welcomed me, it would have meant that we would have entered a different epistemological era. We have of course, but it will take a couple of decades before the establishment realizes it.” - Bruno Latour, 1991.

For whoever needs to hear this I'm the only Jewish person to lead a political party - third largest in the country. The Daily Mail have been & always will be my enemy - they historically supported fascists & continue to do so. I'll take no lectures from them on Antisemitism.

So, how many of the 18K+ people who've clicked on the original article have looked at the CORRIGENDUM? Only 703! And I just found a major new study (and I mean MAJOR) that cites the dating claim from our original 2021 study but not the corrected information from 2022. 🗃️

This 2021 study by me & @fancynahyan.bsky.social has had 18,385 views since it appeared, most of those in the past 4 years. In 2022, we issued a correction, explaining that we had accidentally misrepresented a date of a source we were citing: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

A word to the wise: when a study you're interested in issues a correction (CORRIGENDUM), it's always smart to check it out to see what they're correcting. Sometimes it's just fixing a typo in a data reference. Sometimes, however, it's correcting something more substantive.

Sit with what this says to the descendants of enslaved people. March 25th at the United Nations: 123 countries voted YES. The US, Israel, and Argentina voted NO, rejecting the idea that slavery is a crime against humanity. 13 million people. The defense? “It wasn’t illegal when we did it.”

Here we go. Same management consultants ruining our universities one by one.

if Wikipedia, an org with a shoestring budget and volunteer workforce can ban use of llms, what excuse do large orgs and universities have

It’s coming to something when Wikipedia—once synonymous with sloppy research and widely derided by academics—is setting higher intellectual standards than many universities…

Why I do this. And why it's #OpenAccess. #GlobalMiddleAges

And here's the link to the podcast & notes: www.multiculturalmiddleages.com/post/pandemi... #MedievalSky #EpiSky #histmed

Stunningly horrible tweet from the Home Office. Tars everyone from 4 countries with the same brush.

Congratulations to Mehdi Berriah and Arjan Post for a fascinating collection of new studies on Ibn Taymiyya and his legacy. Available in hardcopy or open access (next post) lup.be/book/ibn-tay...

Very thoughtful and forceful, levels up my disgust with and worries for American higher ed.

I would do the same in my Histsci classes. When discussing science as a term, even in my pre-1500 classes, I would bring up examples from eugenics to phrenology and even to 20th c. brain lateralization theories and active sperm/passive egg...

I describe it as such as a historian of disability because I want to remind scientists and the world that the history of science IS the history of eugenics, scientific racism and medical racism, and more. I’m not comforting them with the idea that it was a ‘pseudoscience.’ This is your history.

Its also an obscene, grotesque example of how the lives of millions must be decided and subject to the whims of a few billionaires worried about their bottom line

but i was told I was destroying capitalism/society/academia by working from home as a disabled person

The tone-deafness of Higher Ed admin never fails to surprise. On a discussion list of staff, vast majority of colleagues highlight all sorts of problems with AI. Admin announces apps for endowed chair (4 years) in Instructional technology, with this round's focus being on AI to aid instruction!

In which the US president tells you implicitly and then explicitly that they are not on control of events and indeed that they do not know what is happening. The intention, of course, is to bully and give an impression of exercising power, but the impression conveyed is the opposite.

I've had several former undergrad students who have gone on to graduate education in the healthcare field (med school, PT, dental school, etc.) tell me that the use of "AI" in their programs by their fellow students is rampant What this means for the future of healthcare is quite alarming

#histsci

I now teach this fantastic paper in fact as the corrective the author intended in enlarging the scope of modern public health beyond modernism and into astrology ... The anthology will no doubt provide much more for this effort! 🙏🏻🙏🏻 academic.oup.com/past/article...

What this shows is that Raffael Grossi is a US stooge. Also that Iran had agreed to a 3-5 year pause to enrichment & never enriching to weapons grade. No imminent threat! But “we regarded Witkoff & Kushner to be Israel assets who dragged the President to a war.” www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

As some say in the responses: the planet will be ok without us.

Key part here:

Palestinian activist Leqaa Kordia was released on bond Monday after more than a year in ICE detention.

just had to add seven new deaths to my ICE victims roster, which left off when I made the PDF with Alex Pretti. that was January 24. so that's six new deaths since then, and one from December I didn't have on my list (Keith Porter). just utterly soul-crushing

Colleagues from our Ajami Lab have continued their work on the Jos Museum manuscript collection at the Kaduna Museum in Nigeria. They established cataloguing and research procedures for identifying Ajami, and reviewed conservation principles relevant to the entire collection uhh.de/csmc-ajami

On strike today and tomorrow, joining @ucunorthumbria.bsky.social colleagues in making the apparently outrageous demand that the university not cut my pension by £100,000

To no one’s surprise at all… www.ft.com/content/0605...

An enormously important report for tracking ever more authoritarian police systems.

Holy crap. What an …just absolute gift. For those asking “Where can I start, if I want to be an ally?” -here. Look what someone else built up and gifted all of us. #Bookmarked

Following on my previous posts about there being no independent verification of what is happening (because of press censorship or self-censorship):

In re: Habermas, this anecdote from Irfan Ahmad's "Habermas as an ethnic thinker Par Excellence: on critique, Palestine and the role of intellectuals" (2025) was unknown to me. doi.org/10.1080/1356...

This piece goes so hard:

This is the only Habermas take I'm interested in.

i’ll save y’all the trouble: luddite faculty are scared of bold changes so it’s all their fault.

“Their viewpoints are backed by little data about the needs, tastes, and desires of their students — or those of local employers.” really? apart from rez life and advising, what other university personnel have this much direct contact with students?

‘Like enterprise zones free from the restrictions of long, arduous governance deliberation’ Meaning quite clearly: free of faculty and staff governance. They want to run universities like sweat shops and would really like it if the faculty would shut the fuck up

Note there is nothing in this piece about the benefit to students. "Success" is defined in this piece as capacity to further the program of commercial capture of education & revenue-generation through distance-learning. An example here and then a laughable follow-up in my next post.

Richard Tice: evading his tax so you have to pay more.

Adam Hanieh on the current war and its various consequences: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

McMaster university is hiring an Associate Professor or Professor with Tenur of History and Medicine. They are looking for someone whose work bridges humanities-based historical inquiry and contemporary infectious diseases scholarship. #histmed #histstm