Whole thread:

me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you? students: no AI I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion

Yay! I just noticed that my book is available for preorder. Use the code PUP30 for 30% off. Share with your librarian! Will ship on Jan 20, 2026 just in time for uhhhhh someone's birthday? Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt | Princeton University Press press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

tossing a food bank a couple bucks won’t turn SNAP on. but you personally can’t turn SNAP on, and you maybe can toss a food bank a couple bucks.

the Empress Zoe https://www.wikiart.org/en/byzantine-mosaics/the-empress-zoe-867

Next month, I will be convening a short-course at University of Lille in France, titled the Orient’s East: Iran and Eurasia in the 1st Millennium. I’ll be delivering six talks on the Sasanians, Central Asia, the “Silk Roads”, & the Iranian relations with China. ex-patria.univ-lille.fr/archives/4038

So what?

An international perspective:

I saw a headline that said, "Melissa Expected to Rapidly Intensify," and I thought it could be an @theonion.com "local news" headline about a conversation over coffee which is anticipated to jump past social niceties straight to existential questions, childhood trauma, and personal commitments.

Same reason why everything has to have an app. Sweet sweet consumer data, to be sold to ad brokers.

Gonna start claiming a religious exemption to not use AI. "Ah sorry this is dajjal shit, its against my religion"

The most important thing universities should do in a world with AI is to greatly increase the number of professors, so that classes can be smaller and more class time can be spent directly interacting with students as people.

Don't you think that takes "shitposting" a bit far? I didn't think "regal incontinence" communicated strength, but hey, it's a free country.

Side plot: factory owner (not a hero) inherited the factory from his WW2 vet father (now deceased) and is torn between family legacy and shutting it down to build a data center, but rediscovers his own childhood patriotism and learns that money can't buy freedom.

So with death of academic twitter and academia. edu, I have several things (I hesitate to say "publications") that don't really live anywhere. I'll be sharing them here for now, starting with this old thread about Quran manuscripts found in a synagogue in Cairo: threadreaderapp.com/thread/15519...

A chance to learn about Mandaic from someone who knows 😎

For no discernible reason I'm remembering that the Romans rejected kings and would never again tolerate a king, but still the Roman Senate gave Octavian new titles (Augustus, Princeps) and basically made him the monarch of Rome, yet without ever calling him a Rex (king). Later...

A reminder that the #Medieval #MiddleEast was commonly polyglot, and therefore the academic divisions between (Greek) #Byzantine Studies, #Armenology, #Syriac Studies, and "Christian #Arabic" Studies distort the lived reality of the medieval past.

Mind-numbing how many layers of history there can be to a single manuscript page: Syriac upper text (10th c.), Armenian undertext (pre-10th c.), Arabic material used for binding (11-12th c.?), Coptic foliation in the margin (date?), modern foliation at the bottom. Image: Leiden UL Or. 14236, link ⬇️

Coin of Atiya b. As’ad, the Kharijite leader, minted in Kerman-Narmashir, year 73. The name of the authority, the mint mark, and the date are all written in Pahlavi Middle Persian (and 3 is written as a digit!). Atiya is identified as “Holder of authority” on the obverse margin.

Bloomberg reports this compact is being extended now to all colleges, and the first threat is withholding student loans. Multiple points clearly result in desegregating higher ed. I’ll underscore again that it bans professors from talking about “societal or political events”

12th-century Byzantine Cistern (İpek Bodrum, also known as Çin Ali Köşkü) located in the northwestern corner of Constantinople (Ottoman Kostantiniyye, modern İstanbul) Photos by Nicholas V. Artamonoff (1937)

@rachelschine.bsky.social Sorry, I just realized that my long back-and-forth w/Matthew Kuiper was downthread from your post, rather than downthread from my reply directly to his post. I hope you muted it rather than getting all those notifications! Sorry to spam your notifications.

Beirut folks, come if you can

Fantastic practical joke for medieval scribes. (from §22 of this book payhip.com/b/BoYj4 by @majnouna.com)

Universities are messy, inefficient and have never been a bastion of courage. But let's be honest about what is going on here because it has nothing to do with "fixing" higher-ed. This is about controlling who gets into elite universities and restricting the knowledge we produce. 12/

LLM extruded essays are like being cornered by the most boring person at a party while they monotone monologue small talk at you, convinced that they’re pronouncing something profound.

The palpable relief of reading a syntactically awkward student paper nevertheless brimming with ideas they’re trying on after having to consume the stale cardboard generalities of a Chat GPT essay.

I suppose the Persian Rivayat, the exchanges between Parsis in India and the Zoroastrians of Iran that began in the 15th century, are another example of such notions of belonging, even if gaps exist in between. What started back then still continues today, shaping much of the identity discourse.

What a great message! It might apply in other contexts as well...

📣 María Corina Machado is an inspiration—especially as a 🇺🇸🇩🇴Latino witnessing the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. Her courage and commitment to peaceful resistance remind me of Maya Angelou’s timeless words.

Appendix 1: on gun analogies Nobody ever asked me to teach gun safety in history class. The reasons are so obvious they don't need stating and have nothing to do with whether gun safety matters. But I am being asked (not politely) to spend history class helping people to learn how to use Al.

The basic structure of so much commentary, some in the guise of academic study, reduces to: (1) generative AI products are detrimental to the goals of education (2) therefore, the goals of education must change. Without the tacit axiom that AI has authority behind it, that just doesn’t follow.

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

#NewPublication #JudaicStudies #GenizaStudies Anna Busa, The Art of Compilation: Midrash Pirqa de-Rabbenu ha-Qadosh in Popular Anthologies from the Cairo Genizah, Cambridge Genizah Studies Series, Volume 17 (Leiden: Brill, 2025) brill.com/display/titl...

Sure, I can be as pissy and self-righteous as any author (and I do get spicy when proposed edits introduce factual errors), but honestly it is a privilege to have someone read my prose with the goal of making it communicate better. Many's the time I read an editor's tweaks and thought, "Thank you!"

An interesting read for views beyond the selective news media: www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/...

There is one central, core truth to hold on to: Most Americans don't actually know most of what's happening. But they still don't approve of the slice they do know about.

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

Okay: a question at the edge of my teaching: For a world religions survey, I'm assigning a bunch of Islamic sources spanning the 1447 (lunar) years since the Hijra, but I don't know recent stuff as well as I know medieval stuff. Any good recommendations for Islam today that are 1st-year accessible?

Okay: a question at the edge of my teaching: For a world religions survey, I'm assigning a bunch of Islamic sources spanning the 1447 (lunar) years since the Hijra, but I don't know recent stuff as well as I know medieval stuff. Any good recommendations for Islam today that are 1st-year accessible?

With all the AI spyware built into Windows 11 and AI's inability to prevent spewing protected information if prompted, some university lawyers should really investigate whether teachers using Windows 11 violates FERPA.

Three years and half a trillion dollars later we still have a dumb AI yet some in academia believe it’s a “research” tool. Imagine the millions of ways the money could have been used to actually serve humanity. AI is nothing meaningful but a stage in the adventures of capitalism.

Big news for Persian Studies and Digital Humanities!

This is what freedom of speech sounds like. Also, please consider subscribing to the Philadelphia Inquirer. www.inquirer.com/opinion/trum...

Copy of an Umayyad wall painting (early 8th c.) from Qusayr Amra, depicting six kings with bilingual Greek and Arabic inscriptions. The copy was made by the Austrian painter Leopold Mielich who was also responsible for the massivly damaged state it's now in. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paintin...

Here's an 11th-century Jewish manuscript that refers to God as Allah and wishes for the reader to have "jihad of his soul in love for his Creator"

Building a career on punching down is antithetical to becoming and being an effective educator.

... And then there's the eponym of the Turkish shadow-play form, Karagöz, who is sometimes said to have been a man who worked on the construction site of a 14th-century mosque and was 'kambur,' or hunched, giving rise to a hunchbacked stock figure in those plays as well...