my first book is officially published. a decade of work is over. on to the next one.

Someone should write a book about how to do this and maybe it should come out today.

Over on Whatever, I use my recent visits to film/TV companies as a framing to note how my not "cognitively offloading" any part of my creative process to "AI" is making my career more secure, not less: whatever.scalzi.com/2026/04/24/a...

This is an incredible tweet.

This but also the option to wear a backpack for the rest of your life.

The Public Scholar publishes one week from today. Please consider pre-ordering and/or asking your library to order. Authors really need your pre-orders to make a book go. I think it's a useful book! More importantly, so do real scholars and writers! www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

There was a time when if I turned off a feature in MS Outlook, it stayed turned off!

The circle of death is: Cut faculty (or non-replace) so you offer fewer classes so fewer people enroll so you cut faculty so you offer fewer classes so fewer people enroll so then the market has spoken.

The longer I spend in digital humanities, the more I am obsessively drawn to analog technologies and convinced we must actively and intently teach them or the digital world loses its color, texture, and depth.

But literally none of this is true? Carney is openly lying about "AI's" capacity and where it's being developed, and people are actually cheering him for it.

It is genuinely surreal to watch both the U.S. and Britain decide to destroy their own world-renowned and extremely profitable university systems at the same time.

I don't know how to explain to the people who pop up when creatives complain about "AI" to say there are legit uses for it just how much they sound like someone saying "Well actually fire is used to make bread" when people are talking about an organized arson ring burning down their fucking houses

1,360 households in the 'Cittie of Chester' in 1664 now transcribed on the Hearth Tax Digital site. Read the intro here: gams.uni-graz.at/o:htx.chstr/... And read the returns for all the households here, fully #OpenAccess: gams.uni-graz.at/o:htx.chstr #EarlyModern 🗃️

What a time to be alive.

Applications are open for the 2026 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History, the signal prize in the field. Due May 15. www.historians.org/award-grant/...

I love this place

Can’t wait!

If you're one of the few, brave, dedicated souls staying all the way to the end of #RSA2026, Patrizia Cavazzini, John Hunt, and I have what should be a great panel Saturday afternoon, "The Failed Artist in Early Modern Rome," chaired by Elizabeth Cohen #renaissance #earlymodern

Lu Ann Homza and collaborators have put out the Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Inquisition! emspanishhistorynotes.wordpress.com/2026/02/13/t...

My department has recently migrated from Twitter to Bluesky. If you are interested in religious studies, please give our account a follow! #mcmaster #religiousstudies @mcmasterreligion.bsky.social @mcmasteruniversity.bsky.social

Alt text was on maybe 75% of Bsky images when I first joined. Accessibility is still the right thing to do. You can hit the gear on the left of yr screen, click accessibility, and get Bsky to remind u to use alt text. It's pretty easy ❤️

Blueskeets of the @rsaorg.bsky.social persuasion, I hope you'll save the date for 3 excellent book history-digital humanities panels at the conf Thurs 9-10:30 Collections as Data Thurs 11-12:30 Network, Media, Method Fri 2:30-4 Preserving Greek Texts Details: rsa.confex.com/rsa/2026/mee...

Doug Ford is destroying Ontario's social safety net, and has been for years

"It is unusual for a country to contract out its airport security fast-pass system to a different sovereign nation. We've just sort of been piggybacking on the Nexus process using it as a proxy," @senatorpaulasimons.bsky.social told CBC News in an interview.

For years, Canadians stood sentinel on overpasses as their children’s bodies were driven along Hwy 401 from Base Trenton to their final resting places. Those children died because our ally called on them for aid, and they didn’t hesitate. This man knows no morals, no honour, no loyalty.

If it ever seems like GenX and elder Millennials are obnoxiously loud about queerphobia and, specifically, trans rights, you have to remember we grew up in a society saturated by homophobia and decided "never again". This shame and hatred must not simply be redirected. It must end with us.

The cognitive dissonance of constantly reading that I need to spend some time mastering generative AI while not knowing a single person in my industry who uses it to do good work 🤙

On behalf of historians, please don't wait.

it is an incredible coincidence that the tech sector going all-in on AI is also owned by people that want to destroy the institutions of democratic life

🎯 I still have my "I like it long!" protest sticker from when Harper tried to eliminate the long form census. People galvanized very quickly, and the government did not anticipate the level of pushback they got. Governments who want less data want to make policy based on vibes and not facts.

You guys get that this whole ‘post yourself in 2016’ thing is just an opportunity to train AI to recognize aging…. Right?

we're perhaps not talking enough about the implications of Canadian troops being part of the tripwire force in Greenland what would a US invasion imply for the border? energy? water? trade? movement of people and goods back and forth? NORAD? Five Eyes? US CBP agents posted to Canadian airports?

Gotta say: it takes a white guy emeritus prof from Yale to proclaim that faculty life hasn't changed in 40 years — amidst adjunctification, platformization, public funding cuts, the substitution of tech for competent support staff, the disappearance of those jobs *my* senior advisors enjoyed...

Hot dang I had never heard this before and it absolutely rocks, thanks Ian for both the tidbit and the ear worm.

from the perspective of Venezuelans, I suppose last night's military operation doesn't really look very different from Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, or countless other US military actions what makes this feel different from vantage points outside of Latin America is that the US is no longer 1/

Make a Bond movie academic: TwitchingEye

My PC beans were $17 when I started buying them 8 years ago. $25 now.

So the new SpongeBob movie is awful, surprise, but there was a pre-show TMNT short that ended with Leonardo telling the audience ‘delete ChatGPT off your phone. AI sucks!’ And that was nice.

When I was 16 I learned to drive in a minivan and spent the last two years of high school driving all my friends around having fun. I couldn’t goddamn wait until we were having kid #3 and I could excusably get my Sedona. Fuckin’ love minivans.

Have definitely been feeling the same way about this program.

To be perfectly honest I absolutely hate the CERCs (Canada Excellence Research Chairs) program. You would need to be awake 24/7 to spend that much money over the 8 years, seriously. You wouldn’t even have enough time in your days to be able to spend that much money (wisely, anyways).

I got the insider’s tour of the archivio di stato di Bologna in 2012, which culminated in the top floor of a tall tower and ‘this is the expensive fire suppression system . We have no idea if it works but we can’t test it because we can’t afford to recharge its nitrogen system.’

An archivist once handed me a pen and told me to correct the date on a 17thC manuscript.

I think we need a mega thread of everyone's craziest archive stories.

I was doing some genealogy work for a family from my city in southern Italy, helping them understand how and when they had emigrated, when I found the double homicide trial that started their transatlantic.

Look up the startups that authors who are pro AI are affiliated with. Tell the journals you consider this a CoI (because it is), do it often, during review and retrospectively — keep pushing them to get serious.

Canadians, please sign this and share it around: www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en...

So when the AHA says it's OK to use AI to summarize scholarship, the greatest risk this guideline poses isn't simply to the quality or accuracy of research; the hazard it poses is to the communal nature of the knowledge production. A pursuit that puts people across time & space into conversation 4/n

What this province did to Kathleen Wynne broke my heart. She was a great premier, and a very good person. We let her down. And now our province is dying. #onpoli