Hear me out: the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, but just five hours of Shire music with the occasional elven hymn thrown in.

The greatest con the Right ever pulled off is convincing America that mainstream media leans left.

1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️

A high-resolution digital map allows people to plan their routes along the ancient roads of the Roman Empire go.nature.com/4nHZmoM

and her and my joint article which introduces the concept of the prodrome of the pandemic www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 3/4

Ugh. Daylight savings ending combined with other stressors seems to be giving me insomnia. An unfortunate week to have to make my 105 mile round trip commute all five days.

Wow. Watching R1s finally realize that academia is dying because it's starting to impact them is... well, it turns out, just as annoying as when they were oblivious. It's still all about them. They still have no idea what higher ed looks like beyond their quads. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

🚨 COMING TOMORROW🚨 🎙️ Dive into the untold history of Eastern Europe with @drfrancisyoung.bsky.social ! Explore the significance of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and the rich tapestry of cultures that exist beyond the 20th century narrative.

I'm rewatching Picard after a complete rewatch of TNG (post season 1), DS9, & VOY, and at first I was surprised, it seemed much better than I remembered, but about seven episodes into season one the writing takes a real downturn in quality.

Signum amoris in operibus

My (delightful) partner, assessing our visit to Segovia: "It's only a real castle if it's in Castile, otherwise it's just sparkling battlements."

If the purpose of your economy is not to benefit all the people who participate in it, then your economy needs work.

Today, the White House Press Secretary told the country that this ridiculous damn ballroom is “the president’s main priority”…not reopening the government, not lowering the cost of groceries, not lowering the cost of housing, not lowering the cost of healthcare….building a ballroom

So I've been chair for a few months, and there are two parts of the job I actively resent: 1) Not the initial email, but the follow-up "did you actually do the thing (spoiler: you didn't)?" email. 2) Being unsubtly deputized to harass my colleagues on behalf of higher-ups. I see a theme here.

I dream of handwriting a manuscript of the Silmarillion, but with a bunch of stuff from The History of Middle Earth (like the Statute of Finwe and Miriel and the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth) added, with some great fragments written in the margins (like Luthien's lengthening spell).

This is not what ceasefire means. Trump's "peace" is a lie.

So for-profit AI companies have trained on the world's largest collaborative volunteer project and a precious free resource, to make money for their for-profit enterprises. They have crushed traffic to the volunteer project, starving it of donors and volunteers www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

Looking forward to the inevitable bombshell report exposing exactly how many university administrators took bribes from edtech AI companies

These are all sourced from “A People’s History of the United States,” and I struggle to think of a more prescient page from a history book that I have read than this one:

I stood in front of this Monet at the DIA yesterday, & had a profound sense that my departed mother, who adored Impressionists, was standing beside me. I felt almost as if I could see her there & reach out to her. I had to move on before I completely broke down. Art has such power to move the soul.

The Long Neolithic lives as a sense of wonder. It sits in distant fields and summons us to not only witness its stone persistence, but to engage with its slow release of mystery. Its power bends not only the landscape, but our sense of story. – Dr. K. Brophy #StandingStoneSunday

Why did I think in-text citations went after the period all this time? Did that used to be a thing?

CONFERENCE: Always Here (SUNY Binghamton): memorients.com/events/cfp-a...

I decided to add a peer-editing assignment to my first year seminar, but I've never done such an assignment before. Anyone here have experience and advice or tips to offer?

She's a sweetie

"We're going to create superintelligence" How about making outlook search work first. How about that

I have something good to share: my article "Æthelwold's Reform and Bede's History" will be published in the June 2027 issue of La Revue Bénédictine. That's the last thing I needed for tenure I delayed to this coming Spring, so it's a huge weight off my mind.

In some ways the thing I've most learned to appreciate from a decade of Trumpism is that a hypocrite failing to live up to their good ideals is a vastly superior option to someone completely lacking in good ideals at all. Hyopcrites can potentially be shamed into doing better.

So my understanding is that most medieval scholars no longer believe in the historicity of the berserker myth, but I'm having trouble finding focused scholarship on the issue in English. Does anyone here have a good reference article to hand on the question?

Socialism can be abused, just like anything else. But at its best, ideal form it's everything we say we need more of: communities coming together. We need to stop assuming that human beings are incapable of this & try to live together better. The alternative we're living in now is destroying us.

The white supremacist conceit that everyone in antiquity was living under some kind of global jim crow segregation is just complete bullshit news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

It is an important issue, and I am glad to see a collection of peer-reviewed work we can now share with our students to demonstrate the complexities and relevancies of the questions involved. trivent-publishing.eu/home/217-ang...

Came up in my memories, don't have the citations unfortunately. Christ as geometer between the angels and the hellmouth.

I have taken the Tylenol that was in the medicine cabinet and which they think probably is the reason you like trains forgive me but that’s bullshit you got autism from your dad

I feel like ever since I got covid I get sick more often (2-4 times a year instead of once) and much worse (almost a week instead of 48 hours, same crushing headaches covid gave me even when I test negative). Is that a recognized form of long covid? Or am I just getting old?

Looking at Eco's definition of Ur-Fascism, Sparta would fit. I've not read the essay, does anyone know if he mentions Sparta?

#medieval #tombsonTuesday in Châlons-en-Champagne. 📷 my own. Tomb marker dated to second half of 13th century

Increasingly I'm liking my 603 date as the end of Ancient Rome - the last official act of the Roman Senate. It was, after all, not the emperors who conquered the Roman Empire, but the magistrates who comprised the senate, & they who still gave the veneer of Republican legitimacy for centuries after.

Not seeing a lot of love thy enemy or turn the other cheek from the Biblical literalist crowd this week.

I cited actual Kirk quotes where he calls Black women less intelligent, demonizes me for being Muslim, & dehumanizes LGBTQ people—& his supporters are upset at me for “speaking evil of the dead.” If quoting him is “speaking evil” maybe ask yourself why you followed someone who believed evil things.

A reminder on the anniversary tragedy, that in its aftermath we failed. We gave in to fear, and hatred, and vengeance. We squandered all their deaths and made the world a worse place. We let ourselves become worse. And in so doing, the terrorists won.

I'm seeing a lot of people saying violence is never acceptable, and that's just not true, and they know it. Without violence, we would never have defeated Nazism, or ended slavery. It is a sad truth that violence is sometimes necessary to prevent an even worse outcome.

"I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights" - Charlie Kirk, 2023 www.snopes.com/fact-check/c...

This so perfectly encapsulates MAGA thinking. They talk about unproven pedo conspiracies all day, but never the scout leaders, ministers and priests, much less the institutions that abetted them. It was never about protecting children. It was always about destroying their enemies.

I need to remember to stop pointing out when people are using poor argumentation outside of grading my students. Because it just ends up in an impossible argument. And now that I type that the logic is pretty simple 🤦‍♂️

The US Administration, and I’m quoting verbatim here, “doesn’t give a shit” about whether its execution of 11 people had a legal basis. It just claims absolute power to kill any person, at will, that it decides to kill. The same people now illegally deploying active military across our homeland.

Does anyone else have a coded hierarchy of email sign-offs that roughly correlate to a scale from "I am attempting to convey my rage at you with professionalism" to "you are basically my ride or die"? No one I am emailing is even slightly aware of this system, and that's probably for the best.

On Labor Day remember to ignore people who claim to believe in moderation in everything except capitalism.

Paul Kershaw, UVa. I had never heard of the Anglo-Saxons or Carolingians before, and it is no small part thanks to him that I quit my theater major to pursue a PhD in the history of the early Middle Ages. He also demonstrated that lecturing is a performance art, so I wasn't giving up much 😂

My students, who attend a working-class rust-belt college, openly talk abt how much they hate AI & are afraid of its consequences. I wonder how much of the oft-reported student enthusiasm for the tech is the merely result of the NYT’s Ivy League bias