In Las Vegas for NBA Summer League. AJ Dybantsa looking like the real deal for the Wizards.

Questions about how to reinstate your terminated NEH grant? Join us for a free MLA strategy session tomorrow (Thursday, 9 July) at 2pm ET where we'll review the process & answer questions. Register at the link below, and please share with others who are trying to get their grant reinstated.

Just two days to finish carving all those statues for Trump's garden. How's that going?

!!! So excited to see all of this coming up! 👀

New @schmidtsciences.bsky.social Newsletter is out with a focus on our Climate Science team. Check it out here: mailchi.mp/78157c4fa237...

Wow, already so much basil. I just pruned my plants and, well, I had to make pesto. (If you need pesto, hit me up.)

New update includes the Kelvin scale, for truly "slow and low" cooking.

Currently doing something I never thought I'd need to do: applying a software update to my oven.

1/ LLMs learn narrative from their pretraining data but what narrative content is actually in there? It turns out narrative is wildly unevenly distributed across sources and topics. New preprint with @andrewpiper.bsky.social @elliottash.bsky.social @mariaa.bsky.social:

Important thread from Jason.

If not now, when? This is an emergency.

Knicks - Spurs. Wednesday.

I'm in NYC tonight so I just walked over to MSG to see this huge Knicks celebration on 7th avenue.

It has been TEN years since the premiere of Andy Van Dam's "Hypertext" movie, the product of a 1974 NEH grant to test using computers to teach the humanities. @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social & MITH hosted the screening. Here's @doctorow.pluralistic.net's take: boingboing.net/2016/05/03/a...

@nycsanitation.bsky.social I’d like to report a sweep

Game after game and I can't believe how great the Knicks are playing. Just incredible.

OMG NY KNICKS

A reminder that two-thirds of National Endowment for the Humanities staff were laid off last year from their *career* positions, and most divisions and programs were eliminated. None of which had to happen except by the inconceivable choices of a few in control. #NEH

Nice coverage in The Atlantic “The country’s commitment to the humanities has been affirmed in court, and I love that.” (Me)

Members made this possible. Collective action requires the collective. Whether MLA, AHA, or another society, please join, engage, and participate. Together, we can accomplish some pretty amazing things.

You do not hate the DOGE people enough. Boys with toys breaking things they were too arrogant and lazy to understand.

🗃️

I love some good news!! Our scholarly societies went to bat for us and won this important suit against DOGE and the Trump administration officials running the NEH. 🙏

An important step in restoring the integrity of the NEH and affirming the value of the humanities in our society. I am very grateful for the efforts of my colleagues, our members, our collaborators, and our legal team.

We have a small computer museum at the Schmidt Sciences office in NYC. Our latest addition is pretty cool: an IBM 360.

Somebody should write an Object Lessons-style piece about the millions of non-functioning hand sanitizer stations rotting away in every office, hotel, airport. cc: @ibogost.com

Tomorrow (May 1): Join @browncds.bsky.social for "Forging the Future of Digital Scholarship: People, Projects, Priorities"—a free symposium (in-person & virtual) exploring community-engaged research, multimodal publishing, & more. Keynote by @brettbobley.bsky.social of @schmidtsciences.bsky.social.

On Friday, I'm doing a keynote talk at this awesome conference at Brown University, "Forging the Future of Digital Scholarship." Details below. Come say "hi" ! events.brown.edu/event/328468...

This has been on my mind for *weeks*. I've been saying it's possible to have an AI that only uses consensually-gathered content, is open source + open weights, runs on your own machine, and is designed to empower creators instead of exploit them. Well, we've got one. www.anildash.com/2026/04/28/o...

At DCA flying to ORD. Looking forward to meetings with funding colleagues from @macfound.org, @acls1919.bsky.social, @wtgrantfdn.bsky.social rantfdn.bsky.social, @mellon.org, Getty Foundation, and many others.

Here is an AI trained just using text from 1931 or earlier, which leads to a lot of interesting experiments: can the model independently develop later inventions? Can it learn to code from examples alone? You can talk to the model here: talkie-lm.com/chat Details here: talkie-lm.com/introducing-...

Last year the NEH canceled my $75k fellowship. This year it’s channeling $15m into what I call the “Trump-al Arch" That’s 200 fellowships! In this week’s newsletter, I talk about how "American" these gilded monuments actually are itallhappenedbefore.substack.com/p/before-the... @ekoshy.bsky.social

Yes to all of this below: it is indeed such an important topic.

"Many of the former federal employees who spoke to @nbcnews.com said working in public service felt like a calling. Months of unsuccessful job applications have chipped away at their mental health." Many terminated staff at the National Endowment for the Humanities can confirm. #NEH

Hey friends - Who's been doing non-traditional humanities dissertations in the past ~5 years? Tons of fabulous resources from ~2021 and before, but wondering what cool people have been doing lately. References? Links? Exploring new options for our department.

Announcing—LatinCy Lexicon v0.1, a refactored version of Whitaker's Words that uses LatinCy annotations to disambiguate words/meanings. Can be added as a custom component to any LatinCy pipeline. github.com/latincy/lati... #digiclass #nlproc

Cool job alert

Asheesh is exactly right. There's not enough funding for the humanities. We can argue the details, but that's the fundamental problem.

Photo taken in Hoboken, NJ yesterday.

Exciting lecture series in Paris from @schmidtsciences.bsky.social HAVI grantee David Smith, @northeasternu.bsky.social.

Come to the first lecture at 4pm this afternoon on "Textual Criticism as Language Modeling" as we lay the groundwork for philology as LM inference. 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, Salle 26.

We have a new article with Digital Classicist Online: Towards a smart edition of Apollodorus

This spreadsheet is insane. Search for your cancelled NEH grant here! 👇

Sometimes I wonder what my motivation is at this stage in my career. And it's this. Making sure small-minded men die mad about my inclusion. And propping the door open for as many smart and kind people as I can.

On Tuesday, Feb. 24 at 1PM eastern, we're hosting a second webinar for the @schmidtsciences.bsky.social HAVI program. Feel free to jump on if you'd like to learn more about the program. Register here: schmidtentities.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

As someone who has spent 20 years funding incremental advances in digital tools for humanities research, the leaps we've seen in just the last year are incredible. (One example from Alex below, but many others in really hard areas like handwriting recognition.)

Great piece by Ian Bogost about liberal arts colleges (gift link down thread).

Quick reminder: This Tuesday, the HAVI team @schmidtsciences.bsky.social will be doing a webinar about our current digital humanities/AI RFP. It is January 20, 2026, 1PM EST. Register here: www.schmidtsciences.org/opportunity/...

Very thoughtful piece from @alondra.bsky.social about US AI policy and why "deregulatory" is a misleading description of its aims.