Wonderful audio microhistory of an interracial, gender-nonconforming couple in post-Reconstruction Arkansas by Rachel Trusty: "Chesser & Holly: A Collision of Love, Race, and Law in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas" soundcloud.com/c19podcast/s...

sorry team, he didn't "doubt climate change" or "have skepticism" about it, he orchestrated a campaign of disinformation that strategically obfuscated his own scientists' findings to maximize profit—which you can see him doing in documents like this (1996) climateintegrity.org/uploads/dece...

an editing service I offer on a “pay what you can” basis, by the way, is that if you are writing a novel (esp romance but any genre) set in the USA or U.K., particularly Oxbridge, and you are not from there, I will read it and check this stuff for you

Bots are ruining the internet. And our libraries. www.library.yorku.ca/web/blog/202...

It's increasingly difficult to find out who teaches on a course on a university website

Academic staff in chemistry, materials science and East Asian studies are currently in a consultation period over 22 job cuts.' UCU 'said the university was looking to move to a compulsory redundancy selection process, if necessary, in September with staff leaving by 31 December.' 1/2

We are closing @goldperc.bsky.social after 12 years. Here I reflect on the times and what we made of them www.goldperc.uk/project_post...

The first sentence of this review is, "Kylie Smith wrote an angry book." 1. The construction of that opening line is sexist AF. 2. It's sexist AF, but in an academic book review, it's unacceptable. 3. Everyone should be angry about racism in psychiatry. If you're not, that's a you problem.

We love to see it! 👏👏 www.insidehighered.com/news/student...

In the final moment of Jameson‘s *Years of Theory* lectures, he admits that some of the questions he’s just spent weeks lovingly summarizing don’t interest him at all —but that this is a reflection of his own limitations. And that to think the new you need to know what came before 😭💙

I get the impression that some people aren't clear what this means. This is the UK state deciding to intervene directly in the healthcare of individual children, depriving them of medicine that their doctors have prescribed for their personal health & wellbeing, in defiance of global best practice.

It’s official: there is one way to get to the future, and the people selling this product have found it. Coincidentally yes, it’s this product

The past is CRAZY. Absolutely BANANAS. Learn more about this insane family in Chloe Northrop, FASHIONING SOCIETY IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY JAMAICA (2024, pp 94-128)

I wrote a thing about Backrooms, Us, the underground labyrinths of the Bay Area where I grew up, AI slopplegangers, and what's really lurking underneath Silicon Valley. It's my first for @oaklandreviewofbooks.org, and I think you'll really enjoy it.

I went to college *many* years ago, and I can state unequivocally that Dr Toombs was the single most important educational influence I ever had. He lit the spark that transformed me from a bookish hayseed to an adult with an actual political consciousness, simply by speaking the truth, then as now.

TransActual, Trans+ Solidarity Alliance, and Scottish Trans have helpfully created an email template here:

We often desire the symbol more than what it represents: people go into debt because a new car makes them feel like they’ve “made it.” Generated text is a symbol of text in this sense, a cognitive debt that allows people to “think they have thought” about it when they have moved away from thinking.

"Decisions arrive without clear rationale. Restructures are announced before the evidence that triggered them has been shared. Policies are reversed before they have been embedded. Courses are closed or launched with speed."

This could be a good sign - that #NEH needs more staff (no kidding) as they prepare to reinstate grants - but also note that these positions are being advertised as GS-7-9 - paying $30k+ less than in the past. To do the same work as those of us who were fired. Think that through for a moment.

The interesting question is not who uses Zotero or does not use Zotero. The interesting question is which academics enjoy working conditions that allow them to make scholarship central to their professional lives, and which academics have to do scholarship <in spite> of their working conditions.

So, I'm up at this Havahd bah with my buddies one night, and frankly, I'm bit surprised because it didn't look like a bah you might find up at Havahd. I thought there'd be equations on the wall and shit, but we're havin' a good time after our guy Case got us through the line. (thread)

I’m heartbroken by what’s happening at Muhlenberg & grateful to the students reporting on it. I was thrilled when my amazing new public health colleague joined in fall 2025. I am shocked the college decided to lay him off months later w/no explanation of the criteria they used to make this decision

Also true for academics happy to just tell anti-intellectual ghouls what they want to hear, as we have nauseatingly seen once again this week

100%. i've shared this before, but this NYT pitch rejection (from bari, lmao) really spells it out.

It's okay to use citation software. It's okay not to. Using citation software isn't even a little bit like using Gen AI to write, read, or summarize (citation software is deterministic: same inputs, same outputs). These are actually easy things to know and understand and avoid Discourse about.

John Wilson says about everything that needs saying about the Boghossian report.

The state of higher education in the UK, in a photo

Trump may already be deporting newborn Americans while the Supreme Court dawdles on birthright citizenship: pregnant teenagers in immigration detention having been giving birth to U.S. citizens but those girls and their babies are now missing ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/birth...

what is your go-to literary text for a first-year close-reading which blows their minds and changes their lives forever and has them all falling in love with literary scholarship etc

I think that if you understand what’s happening here as “none of us have a clue what we’re doing but we’ve bought these magic beans off a wizard and we’re quite optimistic” then that will cover you for most of the ensuing outcomes.

Totally appalling. University "leadership" is utterly lacking at the moment - and has been for as long as I can remember. Sick.

£20m more staff cuts being put to the University’s Court today. Around 250 people will be made redundant if the plan goes through and remove all of that £20m every year from the local economy and high street. Over 1000 staff gone. @dundee.ac.uk @thecourier.co.uk @eveningtelegraph.bsky.social

Saidiya Hartman said “critical fabulation” requires “Narrative restraint.” It’s not just “make stuff up.” Right there in “Venus in two acts” — restraint is “a requirement of this method” (p.12). Before you go all fabulating pls re-read the part about it being “critical.” Thx!!!

I really enjoy EB White's take on New York and New Yorkers.

Sun Ra and John Cage performed together at Coney Island NY on this day June 8 1986

My day job is at a rural branch of a public library, and we have a Pride display. Yesterday I was at the desk when a man came in. Fifties, maybe, or sixties. Plaid shirt, mesh trucker cap, suspenders. He went up to the display and just stood there for a long moment. Then he came up to the desk. 🧵 1/

Edinburgh has a budget surplus

Once a decade somehow the entire country becomes very invested in this question that should be up to individual professors

let me add too that we were ostensibly closed because our major was "unsustainable," but the state's - and university's - own metrics showed that our enrollment has been growing consistently since 2012 this wasn't about money and it wasn't about metrics. it was about something else.

What's that? A new @sunypress.bsky.social volume devoted to the metapsychology of Haitian-Canadian psychoanalyst Willy Apollon coedited by Lucie Cantin, Tracy McNulty, and Jeffrey Librett? Yes, please! As the kids say, we are so back. sunypress.edu/Books/A/A-Ps...

Every good teacher I ever had was someone who 1) confidently loved sharing knowledge and 2) had the academic freedom to go off-menu and not just teach for some test scores

It's the privatization of intellectual freedom. In private prep schools, educators will be free to teach the very same texts, ideas, and histories to a select elite; in public schools at all levels, educators will be denied the ability to do this for the benefit of everyone else.

In Auburn's case, this gives away the whole game: the board knows full well that they have utterly departed from how they are meant to function as a governance and financial oversight body. And so they are inserting nonsense language into their charter equating their personal opinions with the law.

Important thread on boards of trustees and universities.

I do believe that the ppl inside academia generating new culture war discourse that’s prêt à porter for this kind of media treatment— however recycled, derivative, & divorced from reality it may be—essentially know they’re participating in this informational circuitry + should be judged accordingly

When a politician stays on the case like this, especially when the political press keeps trying to “move on” to new sensations, I’ll boost them.

The problem for Boghossian is that *he's* the one living in a debate that's over. The debate *happened* in the late '90s. He should know that. He was there. His 1997 article on Sokal is directly about this issue, and I've read and taught it in courses on the so-called "science wars."

"why is it that occasionally scholars make overblown claims about their work?" "I don't know, maybe we should ask that in the job interview for the last position in our field."

Just a reminder: the Carroll Report is the most important humanities report of our time

there's no problem in scholarship that wouldn't be solved by hiring way more tenure-track faculty and giving them more time to research.