time to repost this banger — the Chicago Inter-Ocean newspaper, 1899

Man I'm so goddamn sick of ai. "Wahhh you can't have a reasonable conversation about ai on here," yeah maybe be mad about the two year parade of scam artists and financial charlatans and environmental ruiners who have radicalized everyone against the spell check that agrees with you

Andras Riedlmayer, art historian at Harvard's Aga Khan program, has passed away. A great loss for Ottoman Balkan history. 🖤 Among many feats, Andras testified about the deliberate destruction of religious and cultural sites in the 1990s wars in Bosnia and Kosovo humanrights.uconn.edu/icty-digital...

"We're in the process of inventing a general equivalent ... of everything, not just the economic... a total encoding in which everything can be measured by the same extremely reductive yardstick, that of the binary, 0-1. Everything enters into an equation" —Baudrillard (1999) on "AI" & LLMs?

hot tip for saving area studies centers at US universities — rename: Melania Center for East European Film and Payola Studies Kushner Center for Peace in the Middle East Authentic Panama Hat® Center for Latin American Cooperation

lmao if you step back from inhabiting this horror for a sec, it's genuinely hilarious that he tried to step into an ongoing battle about fascism with the words "Here's a podcast" bruh

Cannot repeat the Obama-era dodge of saying "we tortured some folks" and not holding accountable the torturers and especially the chain of command. You want to stop state-sanctioned crimes? Trials not words are the only way.

i long for the day when this @theonion.com headline won't be evergreen

You cannot overstate how startling it is to see a politician just say the thing with clarity and poise. No fearful hemming. No overwrought qualifying down til it’s meaningless. No lingering sense that there is a loyalty to a donor class or an ideology of stasis that they’d never admit to.

what makes these NYT journalist and US pundit types so insufferable is their fanatical conviction in themselves (and by extension the US itself) as "the good guys", sure "we" might've tortured some folks or created a few disaster-oopsies, but we're golden anyway. the delusion is deep

Please share widely on all platforms and consider donating. A single mother who is part of a local cleaning business I occasionally hire has been kidnapped by ICE, and taken from her three children (all under 10). Proceeds will go towards food, childcare, lawyer fees, and other needs. Thank you ❤️❤️❤️

every time i get a fundraising text from anyone in chuckie's gang of useless Dems, i just donate and donate and donate again to Minneapolis mutual aids, diaper funds, food support, independent news etc — because they're the ones actually representing us www.standwithminnesota.com

"May your house be on CNN" —Bosnian proverb from 1990s

"write, journalist, write!" is the refrain of this 1970s (and still popular) hit, though really feels like nobody is writing hopeful songs about journalism today... youtu.be/HaqegOt41Ro?...

ppl used to joke that over-generalized 101 history classes were "Plato to NATO"... well the joke's on us, since there will be no more Plato or NATO pretty soon

Nothing will come in the way of tetka theory. After all, tenacity is part of tetka style. The book is now drafted. It contains lots of tetka wisdoms others want to suppress. It endured much and so it will also endure the long way to publication. Biće, biće!

We are delighted to announce the 6th Mid-Atlantic Ottomanist Workshop, hosted by Rutgers University, Newark on April 10–11, 2026. Call for Papers Please submit an abstract (max. 300 words) by January 21, 2026 to: [email protected] #menasky #skystorians🗃️ #ottoman

Historians will have to seriously contend with the extent to which Bush's inadvertently comical demeanor gave what was indisputably a horrific and harrowing regime the reputation of being not that bad, you know. Like, he utterly ruined the lives of millions but he'd be like:

"A king dreamt of a long-dead sultan, whose corpse had entirely disintegrated except for his eyes, which kept looking around in their sockets. None could interpret the dream, but a dervish said: He's still amazed his kingdom is in the hands of others." ~a little story from Gulistan~

brilliant, succinct, imaginative. read it. by @harikunzru.bsky.social www.artforum.com/features/yea...

Branko Milanovic in @equatormag.bsky.social sums up the parochialism often hiding behind non-aligned & non-critical Yugosplaining — his growing up in Yugoslavia meant Nasser and Ben Bella were "formative influences", but his analysis says Christian Greco-Romans were the first global civilization 🙈

this is the hidden potential of every AI. as a social practice in 2025, AI is a new media engagement machine designed to disseminate countless iterations of the same underlying fascist propaganda

Lea Ypi’s “Indignity” tries to be at once a memoir, a philosophy tract, a historical novel, and “Candide” for the twenty-first century—but it doesn’t do any of them successfully.

fascinating how when the same underlying technology produces this, it's called "deepfake" — but when it's generating college essays, it's called "AI" www.nola.com/news/educati...

“Housing shortage – Jews to blame," letter sticker, German Reich, 1938 zwangsraeume.berlin/en/context

around the time i saw paco de lucia in sarajevo in 2006, i remember listening to this kind of stuff and then finding this track oh man youtu.be/2oyhlad64-s?...

around the time i saw paco de lucia in sarajevo in 2006, i remember listening to this kind of stuff and then finding this track oh man youtu.be/2oyhlad64-s?...

as a bosnian, i cannot accept this depoliticization of the mass murder that was directed against us. to brazenly claim that the violence has "no political or religious motivation" is beneath common sense. it harms any understanding of what happened in sarajevo and bosnia

sending thoughts and prayers to the many academics who supported the Biden-led crackdown of Gaza student protests in spring 2024

The lesson here is have good principles and stand on them. Stand for something that isn't power!

your day needs romica of course, but the accordionist (guessnig victor gore?) is 🔥🔥🔥 youtu.be/9CvrVDByzdc?...

how i learned to stop yugosplaining and love the bomb (2025)

"Rudyard" is a name that's about to come roaring back isnt it

3 min selfcare tip: youtu.be/xozc7KJdJVw?...

hej ljudi šta je s vama asks a timeless question that still resonates today youtu.be/s1ZJ3CsU3sc?...

odnio vrag šalu was the zeitgeist of the early 21st century

*Chicago ppl* — come see Damir Imamović talk about music, research, incredible old records, fantastic new songs and more, this Wednesday (October 8) at Northwestern! Please share widely ✨👇

Colleagues in Eurasian and Slavic studies (broadly defined) — Hokkaido University's Slavic-Eurasian Research Center is accepting applications for its Foreign Visitors Fellowship for 2026—27. Highly recommend this excellent program! Please circulate: src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/fvfp/index1....

PSA—Do not review books for the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. They asked me to review a book, I spent quite a bit of my time reading and writing it up, only for IJCS book review editor Lucas Lopez Arrastia to tell me that editors couldn't contact me, so they pulled my review. AVOID