The CIA shut down its World Factbook. Graham: "This is different from the [Trump] administration’s assault on truth... It’s a series of steps that by design or in effect block access to data, and in doing so erode the concept of a shared frame for all Americans." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

As someone who has co-written two National Historic Landmarks, I know just how much work goes into getting these important sites designated (even more so for monuments). I keep thinking about the group of scholars who must have dedicated so much time to this, only to have it made meaningless.

Bad Bunny has a consulting historian. news.wisc.edu/pop-star-bad...

"Appeasement is being coordinated while resistance is not" is exactly right. (This op-ed from Arne Duncan and David Pressman is excellent; I hope university leaders will read it.) www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

On Thursday for my Botanical Bodies course I'm lecturing on the history of enslavement and botany in the Caribbean and it literally could not be set up more perfectly for me.

#jobfairy this is an intriguing one - 18 month research fellowship for an object-focused historian, museums studies person or similar at Chatsworth House! £48k + £11k travel, outreach etc #skystorians www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQK358/d...

Abstract submissions for our 2026 meeting in Montpellier are now OPEN! ethnobotany.org/home/meeting...

Exciting new undergraduate research opportunities here at Carnegie Museum in Botany! Applications due March 1. drive.google.com/file/d/1jNNy...

Call for submissions from @edgeeffectsmag.bsky.social - plants! edgeeffects.net/botanical-im...

"this sublime marriage of the two ecological time-tracks is being destabilized by climate change...Deep biological clocks are no longer in sync with modern realities." emergencemagazine.org/essay/memory...

“Certainly at a minimum...people should know that the government is using its funding as a way of essentially coercing a different presentation of American history.” www.propublica.org/article/inst...

I'M NOT SAYING THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENING but I am begging you not to use AI / apps to identify mushrooms or plants. www.latimes.com/california/s...

I am truly in awe.

For all of the right's outcries over "erasing history," the Smithsonian audits, absurd plaques at the White House (which is a museum), threats to important works of art & architectural history + wildly inaccurate historical storytelling is shameful and dangerous. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/a...

Finally watching that movie Eden, pray for me.

Imagine---imagine!---getting through an education or a career without anyone, ever, describing your fuckability

I've created an Arena channel of artists engaging in or inspired by foraging and gleaning — Yuji Agematsu, Mary Mattingly, Sarah Nicholls, Candace Thompson, Agnès Varda, Rachel Wolf — and I'd appreciate other recommendations! www.are.na/shannon-matt...

quick, someone help, we've got a vegetable situation

I want to say a bit more about our initiative to hire scholars to 3yr Research Associate positions. None of us know what the twinning of humanities research support and employment will look like in another 5(?) years. But we do know that we need it. As a matter of social and cultural health. 1/

"The solution to technology is not more technology. The solution to loneliness is each other, a wealth that should be available to most of us most of the time." @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social in @theguardian.com with a must read www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

VAP in Art History at NYU - "Late Antique and Medieval periods," $70,000, apps reviewed starting March 1. apply.interfolio.com/180364

Paid research fellowships: The Image Center in Toronto. theimagecentre.ca/fellowship/

Department “Artifacts, Action, Knowledge” seeks to appoint a #PublicationsManager with work experience in: ✍️ Editorial leadership 📚 Publication management 🌐 Multilingual experience 🗓️ Deadline: Feb 28, 2026 🔗 bit.ly/4k5DWSs #HistSci #STS #SocSci #Humanities

Meantime, there was a terrible tumult.

The college at which I'm employed, which has signed a contract with the AI firm that stole books from 131 colleagues & me, paid a student to write an op-ed for the student paper promoting AI, guided the writing of it, and did not disclose this to the paper. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...

You can’t actually be serious.

Stop what you’re doing and read this piece, which is as powerful as you’d expect from @adamserwer.bsky.social witnessing the events of last week on the ground in Minnesota. “The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone.”

“In Ron DeSantis’s Florida…parents at one Miami school received a notice that their first graders would need a signed permission slip to “participate and listen to a book written by an African American.” www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/b...

If this is professional grade logistics Gunther should've seen the 7 year old's party set up in 10 minutes by a couple of wasted middle aged Connecticut mothers at brewery last Sunday. All of this shock around organizing, care work, and showing up for neighbors is so wildly alarmist + confused.

Jesus fucking christ.

Can everybody please chill about the GD storm

After the Trump administration removed signs and information about George Washington's slaves at the President's House in Philly, someone put up a sign that reads: "Slavery is part of U.S. history. Learn from the past or repeat it!" 📸 - Tom Gralish, @inquirer.com

The Bark I took my dog to the lake, he stood at the water's edge and barked, the echo of his bark came back and he barked at it, again and again he barked at his own echo thinking there was another dog on the other side of the lake. Welcome to poetry, I said. Mary Ruefle

The Louvre thieves didn't even bring a bag for their loot! They stuffed it into their pockets and it fell out! hyperallergic.com/shocking-new...

Look for the helpers

"Curated by writer and editor Dessane Lopez Cassell and produced by Farrah Rahaman, the series reflected on the intertwined legacies of freedom, extraction, and ecology in North America's oldest surviving botanical garden [Bartram's Garden]." hyperallergic.com/joiri-minaya...

"Western insistence on making inert matter from an animated world, a world built on process rather than progress, is a blip in history... At the same time, deciding that an organism only has value because it has “human” traits ain’t it either." lareviewofbooks.org/article/mush...

Really interested in the idea of cemeteries as contested spaces where what's "natural" is carefully managed + deeply felt. Thought about this a bit re: Green-Wood, but I also love New Haven's 1797 Grove St Cemetery and would like to know more. www.noemamag.com/where-the-pr...

"The mother-fetus system, it would appear, was highly adaptable—capable of adjusting to an environment unlike any previously encountered on Earth." A good day to write about acclimatization. pioneerworks.org/broadcast/ba...

It feels so wild just working as normal right now (+ I feel like I've said this a million times?). Prepping lectures on early modern herbals, grading assignments, writing about plants, sending emails while the world burns. 🙃

goode folke... [subdued gesture of yntroductioun] the weeke ende

"Texts from nature, from the universe, and they remind us that symmetry co-exists with chaos, that ingenuities outflank fatalities, that what is desired is more reassuring than what is promised." -John Berger, "How to Resist A State of Forgetting" [Robert Smithson, designs for Spiral Jetty, 1970]

A collaboration with time: beautifully decayed and damaged daguerreotypes from the studio of one of the most celebrated 19th-century photographers Mathew Brady, who died #onthisday in 1896: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/decayed-daguerreotypes

Job at my beloved undergrad alma mater: VAP in #histsci #histmed at UW-Madison, due Jan 28. jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/visitin...

The White House says the Smithsonian Institution must submit materials about current and upcoming exhibitions and events for a review that will determine whether they express "improper ideology." n.pr/4583d8f

Officers who shatter car windows aren’t being disciplined — they’re being promoted. One officer who smashed a window in front of a local TV reporter got a senior ICE position overseeing operations on the East Coast. (Published July 2025)

I curate the history series at public media's trade journal Current. We're looking for pieces on the history of NPR, PBS and its affiliates, with some space to imagine public media's future. We accept academic articles repurposed for wide readership. Plus, we pay. Please circulate!

he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings