"It comes after a Waymo was seen fleeing police and speeding through a San Francisco construction zone and after striking a child near a Santa Monica elementary school earlier this year." patch.com/california/a...

Taking the month of June off from as much as possible (aside from my own writing and research and weaving and chores and gardening), so if you need me, send me an email! This month of JJ will end abruptly when I report to jury duty on July 1…

I've started adding bonus content to the Pellicle Patreon as a sort-of extra treat each week, and this week it was a little gallery of photos by @totalcurtis.bsky.social that didn't make it into the published story on Leeds' beer scene by Jon Clark. www.patreon.com/posts/159356...

The Wisconsin Elections Commission is sounding the alarm about the “unusually long time” it took for absentee ballots to reach their assigned voters by mail in the state’s April primaries. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

I have roughly a billion pages of articles from 1870s-90s Russian journals to read, the only typed primary source I have. My PDF reader now offers OCR transcription, so I decided to test if it could at least do that 1 thing that could be useful. Guess what? Omg, it's so laughably bad. Details below

Turn your fitness tracker into an ankle monitor with this one weird trick.

From yesterday’s print version of The Guardian - my obituary for my beloved Des.

After a record wet April, things have been dry this month. Abnormally dry conditions are expanding across western and southeastern Wisconsin in the latest Drought Monitor. With below normal precipitation more likely than not over the next week and a half, expect this to continue.

ICYMI: the full interview with Tom and Lydia of @artistrawcider.bsky.social dropped on the @aisforapplepod.bsky.social feed. We talked about their beautiful natural cider, folklore and much, much more. Available on all podcast apps. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/b...

This is an extraordinary story, and like a lot of extraordinary stories about wrongdoing and corruption, will become much harder to report if the Trump administration succeeds in requiring NDAs of all federal employees. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/trump-want...

"Trying to force communities to 'obey' hasn’t been working, which makes cooperation with local volunteers ever more critical, especially as fire seasons get longer and more extreme." Today @cangeo.bsky.social, an excerpt from Jesse Winter's new book WILD FIRE, about fire pros and locals cooperating:

I wouldn’t generally enjoy a work trip on my birthday but I’ll make an exception for glades in late May.

🎙️ Just published a new episode of All About Beer: Brewer to Brewer: Marni Wahlquist and Alyssa Hoberer. Have a listen:

I'm doing an AMA on r/AskHistorians today. Anything and everything you've ever wanted to know about labor history, urbanization, deindustrialization, and the economy! www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...

“The decline actually ended years ago, and the latest numbers from the American Booksellers Association show independent stores expanding at a pace not seen this century.” abcnews.com/Business/wir...

🧊🦦Pass the otter pops—it’s #WorldOtterDay! We’re showing up to the party with lots of love for our resident otters and the team that makes sure our girls are happy, healthy, and ready for their close up.

Very few sign-ups for the in-person document sessions on 16 and 17 June. Please circulate with PhD students etc who use legal records in their research (or I won't be able to run the sessions this year). I can promise witchcraft, treason, and all that good stuff (if it runs). Details via the thread.

for your consideration go.bsky.app/8XX2Ekk

#Skystorians Who has written the definitive window screen history? In places with rabies, it’s also a bat issue—one small screen slid out of place for ONE day, and we immediately had a bat in the house (only realizing it the next day), and a combined 13 rabies shots between the two of us.

Sentimental Chicagoans raised their final glasses of Schlitz this week as they toasted a beer that’s run through the city’s veins for well over a century. blockclubchi.co/4wHnCNo

stop writing articles about extreme heat using fun summer imagery challenge: impossible (apparently) apnews.com/article/euro...

U Pitt Press book sale on the Intersections Series ends May 31! My book is 40% off as are others in the series. upittpress.org/intersection...

Floppy disks are aging out and so are the people who understand them. Here’s how one Cambridge project is rescuing that data before the hardware and know‑how disappear.

I'm so glad this came through, because I spoke to a bunch of sources (colleagues, opera scholars, etc), even if they aren't named or quoted in the piece! Plus I got to dig into these:

This week!

Come on down!

What a joy this conversation with @taramulder.bsky.social was! She manages to bring the experience of pregnancy and childbirth in ancient Rome vividly to life, and I wanted to know HOW. She told me that and more--including the "anti-acknowledgements" she wrote... draftingthepast.com/podcast-epis...

Again, please share. In every aspect of American history you will run smack dab into the critical contributions of Black people. It’s not Black history. It’s American history. Trying to erase it is a fool’s errand. We live it every day. time.com/5836444/blac...

Get on this, everyone, because the sale ends on the 15th... and, according to the website, you can get some of the many non-fiction titles for about $5 USD. #booksky

Philadelphia is poised to launch the nation’s first city-sponsored retirement plan for workers whose employers don’t offer them.

On Reddit, Orange County residents are very justifiably angry that local authorities are posting vital evacuation information on X and Instagram…which both require accounts if you want to be able to view videos easily and completely. How many people use neither? This has got to stop.

Also please do not stop and take pictures on this bridge! Signed, a part-time local.

There’s so many people who deserve a spotlight who aren’t white supremacist rioters. It’s really not hard to find them, either.

I'm excited to soft launch my next digital history project, Governing Ground: A kind of companion website to my in-progress book on the politics of the grasslands and public lands in the twentieth century American West. 🗃️

Looks so interesting. Here's a link to @uchicagopress.bsky.social page for the book.

It is publication day for my book, White Power: Policing American Slavery. Here’s the unboxing, with a trip down memory lane. Thanks so much to those who helped make this a reality, esp. my amazing agent Dani Segelbaum, @dgershenowitz.bsky.social @uncpress.bsky.social @sonyabonczek.bsky.social

"ChatGPT, the most heavily used AI service, gave wrong information in 46% of its answers, including making up an expenses scandal, giving inaccurate replies on voter eligibility rules and getting the date of the election wrong by two months." www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

For International Tea Day, my Green Tea Chemistry print. 🧪🐡 This linocut illustrates green tea and its chemistry. There’s a tea pot, 2 cups of tea & a tea plant (Camellia sinensis) on a tray, & in the steam, you can see some of the organic chemicals found in green tea. Up to 27% of the composition 🧵

So to recap, students weren’t enrolling in the “center for intellectual freedom” classes (they were free to do so) so now the legislature wants to force students to take them. Irony is dead, bludgeoned d to death by the worst ignoramuses. Too bad students won’t learn about it in those “classes”.

Happy International Bee Day! In the Rethinking Lawns lab @negauneeinstitute.bsky.social Chicago Botanic Garden, we're working to help turn our lawns into better spaces for native pollinators. To celebrate, have some id keys for Midwestern/NE American bumblebees! drive.google.com/drive/folder...

For real. "Are too many Harvard students getting A's?" is not a question worth thinking about, by anyone, anywhere

WTAF

NEW: The Agriculture Department doesn't have the guardrails in place to make sure its AI doesn't go haywire. That's because the department is prioritizing rolling out the technology over implementing controls, a new watchdog report found. www.nextgov.com/artificial-i...

In case you missed it earlier... I might have gushed a bit in this one. But hey! It's episode 100! It's Jessica Riskin!

This is incredibly cool research on the information channels that led Black southerners to decide to go north in the first Great Migration.

“the water always wins, in the end”

“We define ecocultural legacies as manifestations of traditional Indigenous stewardship practices [like trails & large, nut-producing trees] that are embedded in the structure and composition of ecosystems in complex ways…They are gifts left by the ancestors that help us understand how to live well”

Thrilled to be one of the four authors of “Eighteenth-Century Embroidery”, module 4 of the Royal School of Needlework’s online course on the history of embroidery. My focus is on domestic women makers and the everyday labour and creativity of needlework in the home.