Old man yells at soot. www.politico.com/news/2026/07...

OK so it turns out this Colesworthy is my great great great grandfather. I asked S if I should quit my job to write a bio of him but that seems ill-advised—not least because actual historians already know about him. Let the research begin! (His desk is still in my family!)

I am once again begging Hollywood to stop using the Greek alphabet for an Ancient World movie, if they can't afford to even throw a couple of quid at anyone with an inkling of the language. Unless they really think audiences are dying to see THS THDPSSSSPS

Only one student enrolled in West Virginia University’s new Washington Center after GOP lawmakers mandated the creation of the program Lawmakers allocated around $3 million to the program in the last two years

BREAKING: The Vatican excommunicates bishops from a breakaway group of traditionalist Catholics that consecrated them without Pope Leo's consent.

If you're someone who like a hard copy, but you've been holding off because of the price, I'm happy to say that my book is being paperbacked at the end of the month and it's available to preorder now!

I'm spending this summer drafting my next nonfiction book: TYPO, coming soon from Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series! As part of my research, I'm collecting stories and anecdotes about memorable typos and similar errors from other writers/readers, if you'd like to contribute. More at the link!

This is a dream I didn’t know I could have. To live at the library.

A lot of media coverage of the ‘AI’ reading of the Herculaneum scrolls really fails to understand what’s happened here. There’s no language processing happening, the AI/ML is not trained on a corpus of texts or language. It can detect ink to see shapes. HUMAN EXPERTS are then transcribing the text.

helpful coverage from @elpais.com english.elpais.com/usa/2025-08-...

A thought experiment: Let’s say Shakespeare is a perennially white hot topic on Bluesky. Someone who identifies as a credentialed early modernist posts something about Shakespeare. You arrive in their mentions to tell them about the existence of one Christopher Marlowe. How should they respond?

It's only Algae if it comes from the L'Algae region of France, otherwise it's Sparkling Slime

The Cheese and the Worms definitely in my top-five favorite histories of all time (it’s a crowded field at the top…) www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/b...

Classics and Race [ OPEN ACCESS ] "a series of readings of historical primary sources from the late medieval period until the mid-twentieth century, bringing to light how the classical tradition and post-ancient constructions of race have informed each other." uclpress.co.uk/book/classic...

I suggest you take a look at the writer’s wikipedia page.

Congratulations Kandice Chuh! How lucky we are to have you @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social @cuny.edu www.gc.cuny.edu/news/kandice...

Job: The Huntington Library is hiring a curator of early printed books huntingtonlibrary.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Huntin...

“…anti-diversity…” is doing a lot of work here. k www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/u...

Timnit Gebru is the expert I always want to hear from on all of this! So grateful for this conversation! #WITHpod is on point, as usual. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

Proofs!

Farewell to Academy Award-winning film editor Marcia Lucas (1945-2026). She won an Oscar for STAR WARS, was nominated for AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and shared a BAFTA nom for TAXI DRIVER. She also edited ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE and RETURN OF THE JEDI in a brief but game-changing career. #FilmSky

Subskeeting MIT news but it could be any number of places. 📚

WHAT.

Okay. Some of us did this in school. “Turn the page when you hear the tone.” Books with tape?

Great. Now you’ve got to go out here and try to out-write the Pope.

It's @nicosiamarissa.bsky.social in my newspaper! share.inquirer.com/tayMsR

Ya'll. I am shook. In a good way. Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See's own role in legitimizing Slavery

Baltimore! Artscape is this weekend and I will be there in the Artist Market #sciart

Seems like NPR is making a huge strategic mistake, deploying big new philanthropic donations to carry out a tech and app overhaul, while cutting hundreds of news positions. www.npr.org/2026/05/18/n...

This will change when the “wrong” people earn the best grades.

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.

Giving a lecture on some ideas about provenance and (un)writing names in books at the @obs1922.bsky.social next Thursday. Zoom link also available for anyone keen!

Some good news worth celebrating: my colleagues and I proposed a new major in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (in addition to the minor we've had for many years), and we just received word that it was officially approved at all levels. The work continues!

Stuart Drama Conference! Liverpool, 2027 CFP due in October stuartdrama.com/cfp/stuart-d... I've been dreaming and scheming about this conference with @racheljwillie.bsky.social @cazzert.bsky.social @bkadams.bsky.social for nearly a year now.

A lot of y’all need diaries.

Today marks Nakba Day, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and the year that followed.   Inea is a New Yorker and a Nakba survivor. She shared her story with us.

I would love to see all of you at the Stuart Drama conference in 2027! Yay!

And here it is! Come to Liverpool in July next year. We have a fantastic [insert appropriate collective noun here] of keynotes: @bkadams.bsky.social, @dnmcinnis.bsky.social, @lucycmunro.bsky.social, Perry Mills & Deborah Payne!

👀 over the last few months, I’ve been working on a project with that terrific triumvirate of scholarly erudition @bkadams.bsky.social, @nicosiamarissa.bsky.social & @cazzert.bsky.social, and we’re almost ready to lure y’all to Liverpool in July 2027 to be part of it…

Encouraging NPR segment this morning about school districts moving away from "Whole Language" snake oil and back to phonics to teach reading, which, to the shock of no one, has improved reading scores

📢JOB ALERT 📢 We are looking to appoint a F/T open-ended Lecturer in Late Medieval / Early Modern History (1400-1700) @lancasteruni.bsky.social. This is an amazing opportunity that we are very proud to announce, so please spread the word far and wide! www.hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

A couple of weeks ago, I taught my students about EdTech infrastructure, and I emphasized the problems with centralization (particularly for data storage). Gotta love it when the universe steps in and decides to really drive home those course concepts.

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Printing & Book History folks: I could use some help identifying this press. It seems to be some sort of cylinder press. Under the feed boards on both sides are round ink discs. It looks a little like a grasshopper press. What's odd about it is that it is only about a foot to foot & a half wide...

Palantir is its own agnotology machine. Do not engage with their discourse, which throws spaghetti at the wall of media: every strand introduces a new kind of doubt. You try to consume & debate it but in the end all you are is tangled in spaghetti and covered with marinara.

A high res scan of Shakespeare's property plan is now available to view on @thelondonarchives.bsky.social collections catalogue. Just type in the document reference CLC/522/MS14570/001 search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwim...

Found a Shakespeare thing; wrote about it in @thetls.bsky.social: www.the-tls.com/regular-feat....

Finishing my tenure statement has made me simultaneously feel thrilled, lucky, exhausted, shocked at how much I’ve done but feeling like I haven’t done enough. I suppose that’s normal? Honestly, we need to start funding education so everyone can have this feeling about whatever they study.