This program recruiting scholars from outside Canada comes with *incredible* funding. If you're looking to move, check it out! research.ubc.ca/federal-rese...

Delighted the new year brings (at last!) vol. 53 of Shakespeare Studies to the world, in all its purple-edged glory: Marlowe stars in the Forum, & the NGP, Articles & Reviews all full of wit & wisdom. Congratulations to Jim Siemon for 11 years of leadership, w/ huge gratitude for our collaboration!

My mantra today (and for many days after) is that there is no “good” time to do life things but you should do them anyway because that what makes a life that you want to live. Whew.

FYI: In 1916 the U.S. signed an agreement for control of St. Thomas, St. John & St. Croix, known as the “Danish West Indies,” in exchange for $25 million & a declaration that the U.S. would “not object to the Danish Govt extending their political & economic interests to the whole of Greenland.

Ben Jonson. Convivial? Check. Big mouth? Check. Penchant for interpersonal conflict? Check (literally murdered someone). Full of self-righteous, sharp-tongued social commentary that didn't always age well? Checkarooni

Guess what happens when you listen to your mentors? Good things. @oldfortunatus.bsky.social and @profkfh.bsky.social told me to rest. This time I listened. I rested so much that I am actually okay with returning to work! 😭

Did you publish a book about or adjacent to #Shakespeare since the 2024 meeting of @saaupdates.bsky.social? Please fill out this Google form to provide information about your book and join us for a celebration at #Shax2026 in Denver on Friday, 4/3, from 10:30-11am. forms.gle/aTKJdQZniypr...

I'm deeply sorry to the people of Venezuela. There is no opposition party in the United States to counter the fascist regime's actions and the population is easily demagogued.

It is truly wild to see these guys taking SO LONG to realize no one wants this. Like it never occurred to them?

They're going to *throw out* one-of-a-kind NASA archives?! Not even a year since the Inauguration & we're already at the 2nd-time-as-farce version of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

This goes for a lot of academia. It’s in the acknowledgements of early 20th century scholarship.

Is there a word (probably not in English) for “wanting to hear a brand-new cover of an old song”? It’s like nostalgia infused with futurity, maybe.

DEMS WIN BIG IN IOWA: Democrat Renee Hardman wins IA State Senate SD-16 with 71.5%, a 27-point Dem overperformance from 2024. Harris won the district by 16. Hardman's victory blocks a GOP supermajority and makes history as the first Black woman elected to the Iowa Senate.

Someone blocked me because I disagreed with his negative review of Sinners.

Except for when you live in Phoenix. We have to switch summer and winter. And kind of erase spring and fall. 😭

OHHHHHHH! Thanks, @tracelarkhall.bsky.social! I have always been confused by early modern London city boundaries.

Hey so this seems like something more people should be talking about 🤔 🗳️ www.npr.org/2025/10/23/n...

The follow up album to Dummy is Portishead|Portishead (1997). That was also utter perfection. These two albums are a diptych of thought and experimentation.

This is just ragebait at this point.

No student is using an LLM in this way. They talk to each other—more than you might realize. A thinking space? Black box AI invents sources to draw from, so it’s not anything that one can “think with.” Please.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism gets at why it's not something that can be ignored: "the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death". --- THE PREMATURE DEATH part is not something that can be "ignored"

i wrote this for the guardian

I hope that the graduate student is able to transfer to a university that will welcome her and her talents. Sigh.

What historians (and other scholars do) is create knowledge. We should use that phrase more and talk about what it means. I think we don't, and it's part of why AI enthusiasts are confused when we don't readily agree that our work can be replicated/replaced by their products.

And with that, my grades are in, all of my own work due in 2025 has been sent to various and sundry journals. Side question, do y’all think that academics can experience the yips? If so, I feel like I may have just gotten over them after 15 or so months.

If nothing else, this phenomenon is heightening the visibility of those who use citation simply as a signaling apparatus and not for the purposes of leading readers to the source of their claims or the thinking with which they are engaging.

Not just a warning-- a handy visual guide for what to do. This is A+ public health communication!

My friend Matthew gets it. And if we as a country invested more in education and humanities more of would read well and more of us could take his classes.

WHAT “The doors seemed to close everywhere…[t]he Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.”

Brown University says there's an active shooter on campus. Emergency scanner says multiple victims, but unclear how many. Video footage viewed by the Brown Daily Herald "depicted several individuals lying on the ground near the Sciences Library appearing to be assisted by police."

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

What a woodcut!

My favorite Tom Hanks (and Shelly Long!) film will always always be Money Pit. I saw it on VHS when I was a kid and it definitely taught me to laugh and then cry in the face of a minor personal disasters. 😆😭

Here from the same fabulous series by George Spratt is "The Connoisseur." (I like this art-lover's monocle and also the smaller picture that she's carrying as a reticule, the strap around her wrist.)

👀 👀 in response to Trump's DOJ saying the president needs to directly control independent agencies in order to protect the people of the US, KBJ just said something like 'Congress thought replacing all the PhDs with loyalists who don't know anything is not in the interest of the people of the US?'

RIP Frank Gehry.

Sometimes, it is actually painful to read these kinds of conversations. “Accidentally reactionary?” So many people didn’t get the passing narrative and it had to be spoon fed. This whole movie is a passing narrative and so many people just didn’t get it.

A 6-year-old boy is missing after ICE arrested him and his dad in NYC last week and shipped them off to separate facilities. www.thecity.nyc/2025/12/02/i... @thecity.nyc @gwynnefitz.bsky.social

University of Alabama suspended publication of two student-run magazines, claiming they weren’t in compliance with federal guidance on DEI “This is an attack on the student press and nothing less”

Why it matters

While this is so deeply beautiful and moving about the important place of art in society and I'm so glad Dr. Baum shared this with us, I'm sad Stoppard never knew. Please tell people how much their work impacts you. Write to a playwright, academic, artist, etc and let them know how they moved you.

I need to understand why @moderation.bsky.app labeled the quote as “rude.” What is this?

This is a version of Massinger’s The Roman Actor!

Now available online! www.cambridge.org/core/books/h... 🌿📚💚🪲

Indigenous actress Elaine Miles of "Northern Exposure" was detained by ICE at a Redmond bus stop. When she showed them her Tribal ID, they told her it was fake

Pope Leo XIV told students not to use artificial intelligence for homework, saying that AI ‘won’t stand in authentic wonder before the beauty of God’s creation.’