I do want to shout-out my fellow sociologists, who have collectively created a discipline so woke that not a single one of our introductory textbooks can make it past Florida's censors. Great work everyone.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: With the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, "Trump has clarified an inconvenient fact—the culture war is an actual war"

I knew about the tow truck wars in Toronto but I did not know that MORE THAN 1 IN 8 bullets fired by guns anywhere in Toronto in the year 2024 were related to tow truck driver turf wars??? And the police force is not just complicit but LEAKING INFO TO HITMEN????

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue

It feels like it's been impossible to get people outside of higher ed to understand that eliminating staff/programs/majors is primarily an ideological project, whatever claims are made about finances. What's happened at the Post is what's been happening in higher ed for ages.

“Before we uncovered the first remains, our best find was a 1960s Smarties lid. I had never encountered human remains on a dig, and I was struck by how close yet distant these people felt. We were separated by only a few years in age, but over a thousand years in time.” #MedievalSky

Devastatingly sad. Every Labour MP should be forced to read this. In fact, every MP, who rushed back to Parliament to vote to save one steel mill, whilst hastening the collapse of dozens of universities - and harming the students, staff, communities and economies universities sustain and support

the earliest depiction of Christ’s crucifixion is among the ruins of a Roman palace turned messenger boy’s school - a student mocking one of his Christian classmates with a doodle of a boy praying to a donkey-headed figure on a cross captioned “Alexamenos worshipping his God”

Milton tangent complete, I am returning to my work on erased/struck out/obliterated inscriptions. For many reasons they aren't the easiest things to locate in online catalogues. So if you come across any fun ones (esp. in books published prior to ~1750), here is a public request to think of me.

Here it is! @cjg70.bsky.social blows the doors off the question of why papyrus went out of vogue in the early Middle Ages. Follow the money! An instant classic that belongs on every manuscript studies syllabus.

To avoid the possibility Holocaust remembrance might lead to empathy for migrants, Trump's antisemitism envoy claims Anne Frank "was in Amsterdam legally." In reality, Margot Frank received a summons to go to a labor camp on July 5, 1942. After ignoring this call, they were in Amsterdam illegally.

One thing I found deeply moving about resistance in the Twin Cities was the universalism of loving your neighbor, the philosophy driving the opposition to the ICE/BP invasion. I couldn't help but notice the contrast with the blood and soil-ism of Miller and Vance. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to abandon it

Part of this is that thanks to the specific Christianity that evolved in the US over the 20th Century -- which then permeated culture -- is that many Americans are unable to effectively differentiate between shame, guilt, and responsibility.

and for the love of god do not use your camp stove or bbq inside

Cool new book alert! With an open access digital edition, too.

ok so one of the questions they ask you before an MRI is “have you EVER had metal in your eyes from any accidents, welding, grinding etc?” and: new body horror scenario unlocked

I always feel roguish to make such a basic point, but bias is an intrinsic feature of _data_, and transitively of any system of analysis or decision-making based on data. The fact that this point has to keep being demonstrated over and over for more complex systems is crazy-making to me.

help I’ve been away from the internet what is Bus Thread

one of the single worst elements of Soviet repression were the silent disappearances overnight; at least in Minneapolis, when fedl agents are doing their kidnapping, the whole street is aware and trying to help

this came up bc (thanks to many ppl on here!) we now have video of his arrest; when I warned him that the sounds on the video might trigger him he immediately said NO; he said the sounds of fellow activists' whistles and sirens would be the most comforting part of watching himself arrested by ICE

And while you’re doing that, start talking about it, and don’t shut up.

"But why do you insist on clinging to it, when there's an easier alternative now?" a pro-AI person, who doesn't really enjoy having a brain, might ask. "All that thinking has brought you a lot of pain over the years,”

If at first you don't succeed...

If you're looking for a sign to switch careers: this is the sign.

I'm sorry, but everyone in this story is unbelievably gullible, starting and ending with the author.

I have written often before - most notably in the context of Dee Farmer - that the freedom of the comfortable depends on the resistance of the marginalized. Why? Bc the comfortable have their freedom constrained in ways not worth risking their comfort, but the uncomfortable have little to lose.

It’s actually really liberating from the grip of paranoia to assume you’re being read or listened to and act accordingly. If you assume what you say is public, if you don’t want someone to see it or hear it, don’t say it or do it. But if you do say it, say it with your whole chest

I need people who don’t live in the Twin Cities to stop telling people not to join massive Signal groups right now. People are doing it. They’re going to keep doing it. Give them good advice about it. The actually practical advice is don’t say anything to 1000 strangers you wouldn’t say in public

Molly's being characteristically thoughtful. I'll be more of an asshole: THE AI COMPANIES HAVE USED WIKIPEDIA'S SHIT FOR YEARS. It costs millions of fucking dollars in infrastructure to serve up content to these companies. Should Wikipedia subsidize them? No? Then it's *good* they're getting paid!

Sure. AI companies have ALWAYS been training their models on Wikipedia content, which under the free and open access model is available to anyone — including AI companies. Agreements like these require AI companies to limit and offset the strain they place on Wikimedia infrastructure.

I once applied for £400 from my faculty for an airfare. They insisted on three separate meetings with three senior people including the Dean before approving the funds. Any one of those meetings probably cost £400 in wasted time.

Canada's federal gov has a new program to bring researchers to Canada & my uni is starting an internal nomination process for chairs. If you are a full or associate prof working on AI/democracy/community engagement/environmental justice and you may be interested in moving to Canada, dm me

In fact we have records of at least 65,000 immigrants in the late MEDIEVAL period. This means real numbers were significantly higher. In England more than 1% of the population was foreign born (never mind 2nd gen) with numbers as high as 1 in 10 in cities. There’s a database!

In the next four years you’ll see a lot of New York Post articles about City Hall that don’t make sense when you read them as an outsider because they’re just permission to hit the anger button in the reader’s brain. This is about seeing someone non-binary in power and getting permission to be mad.

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

I'd believe this anecdote because I've met guys like this at conventions. People do ask (politely) about their work and they can't pitch it because what makes it special is that they are the specialest boy. They go to panels and hear queer and BIPOC writers talk about their work and think "ah ha". +

Public discourse on this subject has utterly failed to direct citizens' attention to the actual problem, which is that a commercial industry is assaulting education. So every week we get another thoughtless op-ed on blue books or the death of the college essay, etc etc.

It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

THE MONTH OF DICK 2026 IS COMING IN JANUARY Get ready! 1. Follow the feed: bsky.app/profile/jaco... and ask me to add you 2. Download the planned reading sequence (source doc here bit.ly/4p4oYwA) 3. Get yourself an edition (book, free e-book, whatever) 4. Notify your bosom friends 5. Whale tattoo?

I RELEASED A NEW TTRPG!! it's very silly & full of jewish shitposting!! your attributes are "GREAT", "MIRACLE", "HAPPENED", and "THERE!", your progress clock is candles on a menorah, and these are the kind of tables i put in there. if we do $613 in sales before Jan 1 i'll do a trifold print run!

Just in time for Jewish Christmas, we have a new TTRPG 🎲: The Vatican Stole the Menorah and We're Going to Steal it Back! TVSTMAWGTSIB is a dreidel-powered heist TTRPG about reclaiming the Temple menorah from the Vatican. Itchfunding a print run till Jan 1! 📆 🔗: jumpgategames.itch.io/tvstmawgtsib

believe it or not there is a shocking amount of (mostly) medieval art depicting Elisha murdering his way through a group of children who called him bald

As someone who’s probably on Bluesky blocklists for saying something other than "burn it all down" about AI, it also seems clear that asking for more nuance in these discussions in Dec 2025 is like asking for more nuanced discussion of immigration as masked ICE agents toss people in unmarked vans+

In Europe less than 5% of collections have been digitised. There are millions and millions of pages to identify before you even consider the prohibitive costs and pre-digitisation conservation work

Generative AI is also causing me more work as a college professor, in teaching, research, and admin work.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Thread about an almost-literal Cassandra of our present decline, who had already seen it all, 30 years ago…