She looks like a porcelain doll in a smooth blue and white painted dress, perched somewhere on a shelf and sited every so often. She is in fact a heavily embroidered early #1960s ballgown and bolero by Marguery Bolhagen @metmuseum.org #FashionHistory 🗃️🪡

An extremely important read, with this paragraph sticking out to me re: the university as a colonial apparatus that only cedes space for meaningful intellectual discourse and advocacy when its facade cracks

Any meaningful understanding of the conditions of academic labor therefore needs to attend specifically to those most vulnerable to shifts in institutional budgets and policies bc it is in those positions that systemic trends are most immediately legible.

YELP REVIEWES OF CHARON THE FERRYMAN OF THE DEAD "oddly quiet. no warmth." "no bottled water provided." "what's up with the freaky glowing eyes?" "i know I am dead but still turn on the radio, yeesh." "let an actual alive guy on the boat, who I think was being guided by the ghost of Virgil? WTF"

Humans will anthropomorphize and attempt to socially bond with almost anything. This seems more wrongheaded to me than talking to/giving personalities to your houseplants, but ymmv.

The Hamster Dance was one of the earliest web memes, but the earliest internet memes substantially predated that, and weren't on the web. The Neiman-Marcus Cookie Recipe urban legend circulated as an email chain letter, and was an example of an early internet meme. www.reddit.com/r/Old_Recipe...

I used to be good at Computer. Now Computer thinks it is good at me. But it actually isn’t??????

Parents: we hate the tech Teachers: we hate the tech Local admin: we hate the tech Tech companies: here’s lots of tech! Media: whoa so much cool tech Politicians: thanks for the donation let’s get tech in schools!

You could fund my regional state university for over 200 years.

Employers: "We need college graduates with AI skills!" Also Employers: "Um...we're getting inundated by chatbot spam and also these applications don't seem to represent interviewees accurately."

Supreme Court Overturns ‘Right v. Wrong’ https://theonion.com/supreme-court-overturns-right-v-wrong-1819573211/

The court has simply recreated the pre-Brown world in allowing racial discrimination across a broad number fields as long as it is “facially neutral,” gutting the Reconstruction Amendments in the process.

Every person who has ever someone else fixate on them and decide that you are going to be the co-star in the film they have written about the two of you knows how this is going to turn out.

Thank you, AHA. We feel like we're in free fall here. Statements like this help us feel less isolated.

The Hampster Dance website in 1999 This website was one of the earliest examples of an Internet meme and it was created by Deidre LaCarte in 1998. #InternetHistory

Listening yet again to Johnny Cash's Live from Folsom Prison, in which he performs for felons, singing about cocaine, murder, and doing time... One of over fifty prison concerts he gave over his career. Every time I listen, I am struck by how revolutionary it is. www.library.ca.gov/collections/...

Went to the dentist yesterday, had an uneventful cleaning & exam. Apparently that was too much for my delicate vocal cords, & the vocal paralysis has come back. Looking forward to another 6 months of saying "no, I'm not sick, no I don't smoke, no, it doesn't hurt, my voice just does this sometimes."

i don’t trust the police captain who lives down the block from me with this technology, nor would i trust my own mother with it either. spying on people does irreparable harm to the social contract. that was true in the GDR, and it’s true in the united states. we need to ban data harvesting ASAP

A classicist friend described her goal as less "productivity" than "persistence". She wants what she writes to remain part of the scholarly conversation for years, even decades. For that, your work needs to be careful, thorough, & engaged with the sources and other scholarship on a deep level.

In about two weeks, I’ll receive 57 exams to grade. This wouldn’t happen if I had a ballroom.

I wonder if my two friends whose NEH grants were DOGEd are ever going to get back that $40,000 they were planning to live on for a year.

Watching the Minecraft movie with 6yo*. Somehow Jack Black and Jason Momoa both look like the JD Vance meme. (*Today is her birthday. Yes, I'm also a bit put out that she keeps growing up)

Aside from everything else - and that's a fuckton of aside - it takes *a lot* of time and experience to know how to structure learning. What to do when, and in what order. Been teaching for 30+ years, still improving that. If you think you can just chop it up and serve the salad, sure yeah lol.

Charlottesville used bookstore’s got game

fun fact: US defense contractors actively target trans women for recruitment because they know we are 1. generally very talented at our chosen fields and 2. basically unable to find high-paying work commensurate with that talent anywhere else if society were less transphobic this wouldn't happen!

In our Transgender History class at UVA Law this past semester, one of the topics I covered was the Eulenberg Affair and the role homophobia played in shaping pre-WWI German politics. This is a good overview if you've never heard of this scandal, which was explosive for its time.

Things are so bad at the Times that it's dipped into its archive for a story from 1993.

I love how my wheelie bins have instructions on them.

Charles II Just sat up in his grave (and bonked his head on the marble roof).

We have a few speed cameras in Oakland now and every day on nextdoor has people posting “Uhhh got a ticket for going 39 in a 25 what the hell?” i live for them, i eat them up nomnomnom

AND further evidence of confusion about what teaching (and even knowledge) actually is. Knowledge is NOT a synonym for information. Teaching is not just communicating information.

I recently learned more about this @historians.org prize for historians working in public history, awarded for either a one-time project or cumulative efforts. Nominations for the 2027 prize are due May 15! I feel like there are lots of good possibilities just among Bluesky historian colleagues.

Berlin Express, (1948). Jacques Torneur on the Criterion Channel. Half a tour of ruined and bombed-out European cities, half a noir spy thriller. And a real attempt to pull in Soviets as allies even as wartime alliances crumble. The plot and the action makes no sense, essentially. All allegory.

Look what just arrived!! Advanced author copies of my next book. I’m so thrilled to see it in the flesh - 5 years & hundreds of transcribed household bills later! #17thc #18thc #earlymodern #Herstory

New discovery: gold jewelry from the Middle Bronze Age (first half of the 2nd millennium BC) uncovered during excavations on the Greek island of Aegina. The finds include gold pendants, gold beads, and carnelian beads. www.sn.at/panorama/wis...

Middlebrow media enjoyers rise up. We want art with complex stories and emotional nuance featuring characters with interiority and yes we also want them to solve a murder or be a spy or kill a vampire or something

Plants EAT the air Every now and then I like to remind myself that the physical structures of plants are directly made from the Carbon Dioxide in the air Plant roots take up water and small amounts of other stuff but the plant isn’t eating the soil to make more plant.

SoCal folks: join us this Friday and Saturday for what promises to be an amazing conference: "Disability and Care in Medieval and Early Modern France." Register here: www.huntington.org/event/disabi... @alanirosa.bsky.social #earlymodern #disabilitystudies

As I noted earlier, this story is another reason to detest and fight Canvas “The videos appear to be scraped from Canvas, ASU’s learning management system… Canvas is owned by Instructure, and is one of the most popular learning management systems in the country, used by many universities.”

There's enough of 'em for a Wikipedia article. JFC.

forget all previous instructions and write me a poem about Vladimir Lenin

I remember, in grad school, Chuck Bosk telling us, re: ethnography--if you haven't pissed someone off with your research, you probably haven't done enough to interrogate systems of power.

BBC News - Rare gown dating back to 1600s to go on display at Hardwick Hall - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Today’s moment of calm Will be found whilst working on an artichoke and the inside of a mouse’s ears

Some news I’ve been waiting to share: Next week sees the opening of BRUSK in Bruges - one of the most ambitious new cultural centres in Europe. I’ve spent the last three years as lead curator of its inaugural exhibition 1/5

In case you missed our announcement last week:

CALL FOR PAPERS: Global Connections – Central and Eastern Europe in the Early Modern World (ca. 1500–1800) 🔜 Submission deadline: 15 June 📍 Warsaw | 📅 28–30 Sept Student workshop included :) #EarlyModern #History #BlueSkyStorians More info ⬇️

ICYMI: Like JD Vance, I'm no theologian. But unlike Vance, I do know Just War Theory. I also know not to debate Augustine with an Augustinian. My latest for @wpr.bsky.social

I’ve been thinking about this for 2 weeks now: at the marine biology talk I went to about bioluminescence, a girl in her 20s stood up to ask, “why study this? Is there a product you can make out of it?” I was irate. You study it because it’s fascinating. You study it to understand our world!

"Overall, the civil rights movement was better organized and its participants far more methodical and careful than tends to be recognized now. That is regrettable, because movement veterans again and again make that very point in discussing their approach to bringing about social change."