Day 2 of page proofs for Beer Ghosts. So far I have caught two missing words that the copy editor and I both missed in multiple readings, and a stray comma or two. ✍️

Deputy Head of Research Funding at the British Academy (FT, permanent, £50,108, deadline 2 March). The postholder will help deliver a range of funding in Humanities & Social Sciences and manage the BA's relationship with 9 British International Research Institutes (BIRIs).

Hahahaahhaa hell yeah. The future rules! THE FUTURE RULES!

The Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a disturbing amicus brief Tuesday urging a federal court to force the Wisconsin Elections Commission to hand over the state’s unredacted voter rolls to Trump’s Justice Department www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Amidst the chaos, pageproofs for Beer Ghosts have arrived! Experimenting with having Word read the manuscript to me while I check the typeset version. Long ago I was Anna Tsing’s research assistant & helped her with pageproofs for her first book, one of my early glimpses of publishing life.

Congrats to BART rider and Oakland legend Alysa Liu on winning a gold medal at the Olympics and making the Bay Area proud!

🚨HUGE NEWS: Assembly Speaker Robin Vos just now in a speech at the beginning of the Assembly floor session: “I will not be running for re-election in November.”

Workers have begun restoring the slavery exhibit in Philadelphia that was removed by the Trump administration

See @jmelendezbadillo.bsky.social at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture tomorrow (Feb 20) at 6:00pm CST! He'll discuss his book, Puerto Rico, and how his scholarship is shaping how Puerto Rican history is being understood, even influencing Bad Bunny. Register here: buff.ly/nDY7pBA

This book is so incredibly moving. What a remarkable human being. #BlackHistoryMonth

"Refreshingly free of academic jargon & analytically rich, Migration & the Origins of American Citizenship exposes the long history of contested politics over migration & the crucial precursors for today's debates about immigration policy." -Lucy E. Salyer, University of New Hampshire Pre-order:

Ever wondered how Spanish privateers shaped global warfare & trade? Join Dr Vera Moya Sordo on Mon 23 Feb (1–2 pm CET) for “Kings of Privateering: A History of the Spanish Enterprise”, part of our Ships & Seafaring series #earlymodern #maritimehistory 🗃️ Register: www.eventbrite.com/e/ships-seaf...

some of you are looksmaxxing when you need to be booksmaxxing

We were told to scrub "biodiversity" from our websites because of this shit.

JUST IN: Judge Provinzino in Minnesota has held a Justice Department attorney in civil contempt for violations of her order requiring the return of a released ICE detainee’s ID documents. He must pay $500 a day until the documents are returned.

Along with blocking health coverage for new moms, Robin Vos is also blocking this breast cancer screening bill from a vote. Republicans are trying to finish their session this week and take their customary nine-month break from legislating in election years. fox11online.com/news/local/n...

Any librarian mutuals available to give me a hand finding something?

Carter G. Woodson, a graduate of Berea College, established the original week-long celebration of Black history that became Black History Month.

Hey, it looks like my chapter on the history of school food programs in Canada is included as part of the sample package for the new edited collection, School Food Programs in Canada: Models for Success www.ubcpress.ca/asset/108593...

Here ya go!

No cover yet, but my new book, Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grew Them, has appeared on the @uchicagopress.bsky.social website! Out in October…👻 press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Epic has a new AI summary generating tool, and I noticed that it completely hallucinated a GI bleed for one of my patients last night.

Would you like to pre-order our terribly useful forthcoming book about digital asset management? Want to use your library degrees for fun and profit? If you order today, it will be a lovely birthday present for me, though I won't see any proceeds for ages... www.bloomsbury.com/uk/practical...

No cover yet, but my new book, Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grew Them, has appeared on the @uchicagopress.bsky.social website! Out in October…👻 press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

20 February, 5.30pm - 7pm Join editor Meiqin Wang and contributors Midori Yamamura, Vicki Kwon, and Stephanie Benzaquen‑Gautier for an online discussion of 'Contemporary Art and Ecological Transformation in East and Southeast Asia'. Register for the Zoom webinar here: aaari.info/26-02-20wang/

Against Archival Erasure: a conversation on Caribbean women and the archive. 2/27 at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Did y'all know that NYC was such a slave city that Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that NYC secede from the Union? www.untappedcities.com/on-this-day-... How many New Yorkers do we think know this today?

My book comes out in about a month! I've got a mini-tour lined up this spring to promote it: March 11, New York, NY March 19, Berkeley, CA March 27, Tuscaloosa AL April 23, Davis, CA May 27-28, London UK Stay tuned for details! Now booking for fall too, if you're interested.

As an administrative burden scholar, heads up that this deliberately dysfunctional policy design a) also adds burdens to election officials, who now have to manage one more complex administrative process, and b) those burdens will consume administrative resources, making it harder for others to vote

Cautionary tale: I asked Gemini to transcribe a 1-page PDF from The Morning Post from the early 1800s. I was interested in testing its accuracy. It hallucinated a full transcription of book review that doesn't exist and then invented false citations when I asked where the review was from. #AI

The "AI revolution" in science is going so smoothly that my instititutional library is having to deploy multiple technical protection measures against "poorly behaved Gen AI crawling" just to maintain its timely service library.ed.ac.uk/research-sup...

The Department of Homeland Security has had to correct information provided to at least five states after its SAVE voter tool misidentified some voters as noncitizens, according to correspondence between state and federal officials. With @texastribune.org

Did they just have ChatGPT generate this weird list…

I was so impressed with this story about measles in the Atlantic -- the depth of reporting it would take to weave in all these details so fluidly. Turns out, it was a work of fiction. She researched the effects of measles, but lots of fiction writers do research. www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/the-...

WTAF

Me, teaching the 19th century

Quite a juxtaposition on Times home page between the article below and this one. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/o...

I am hiring a postdoc @ Univ of Iowa. Potential project focuses include flood-risk infrastructure planning, disaster recovery processes and outcomes, insurance program externalities, or uncertainty in climate damage attribution. Please consider applying/sharing! jobs.uiowa.edu/postdoc/view...

NEW: Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found. The government keeps doing it nonetheless. www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Justin Fox, of DOGE, was "an ultimate decisionmaker for which grants to terminate or keep." When he used ChatGPT, he didn't instruct it to categorize by race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so on. He asked if a grant related to DEI. That did the trick – race, ethnicity, and gender were flagged.

Sharing some exciting news- some brightness- my book Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II published by @uwapress.uw.edu has received the Caroline Bancroft History Prize from the Denver Public Library Special Collections and Archives! Arigaa! Thank you for engaging in AK Native history!

👀 A federal judge has ordered the disclosure of a roster of DOGE employees and affiliates, as well as a text message revealing a top NEH official’s views on “woke” and “progressive” grants. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

It's the Leeds Symposium of Food History & Traditions' big 4-0. It's on Friday 24 April & the topic is 'Food and War'. There are some great speakers inc BFHP podcast alumni @alessandrapino.bsky.social & Marc Meltonville. REMEMBER, IT'S IN YORK! Book here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/food-and-w...

I've been told a book cover needs to be seen five times before it registers on a viewer's eyes. I dunno. But: I'm willing to give it a shot. Available wherever you buy your books, from hard cover to audio. INTERESTED IN REVIEWING THE BOOK?

I love the thought of a Jacquard loom (mentioned in the article) rising up to thwart its punch card progeny like this.

Late to my own party, but it is wonderful to see my edition of Hortense Mancini’s letters in print, which arrived at the start of the year. If you think your library would benefit from the words of one of the seventeenth-century’s most libertine women, here is the link: iterpress.org/978164959131...

There's a lot of chat in this episode between @katiematherkm.bsky.social and @rickhough.bsky.social about how we commission stories, what we love about beer, wine and pub culture writing, and more about what we're planning in the future. Check it out! www.italianwinepodcast.com/Episodes/ep-...

Detainees at the Whipple Federal Building must be allowed access to an attorney and private phone calls and be informed of their rights within an hour of arriving, a federal judge ordered.

Another story from @theguardian.com on how Wisconsin-based Uline, run by some of the biggest Republican political donors in the nation, is exploiting migrant labor. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

“Young people are quickly becoming so dependent on A.I. that they are losing the ability to think for themselves. And rather than rallying resistance, academic administrators are aiding and abetting a hostile takeover of higher education.”