Merry Christmas! My state of the field essay on the history of sexuality in Modern France was published in open access yesterday by @frenchhistory.bsky.social. Check it out at academic.oup.com/fh/advance-a...

Symeon Stylites would like a word. Probably several words actually.

I heard about this book on @lollardfish.bsky.social ‘s This Guy Sucked episode, and I’m very excited to dive in once my grades are in

The problems are all the basic functions of everyday life that, we will be told, can be done by Good Responsible Not-Gen AI. And that’s just (say it with me again!) a permission structure for eviscerating public services & core forms of human negotiation that are necessary to a functioning society.

Something to keep your eye on. Popular discourse is starting to turn against AI, so new frameworks are being built to continue selling it. We are about to see a flood of media that qualifies AI: “Gen AI” is bad and overhyped but “predictive” or “analytic AI” is responsible and good. +

“Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.”

I wrote a bit for McSweeney's about Isaac Chotiner interviewing Santa Claus. Just a little something for the holiday season. Enjoy!

Recently, Blake Gutt and I had the great fortune to sit down with @eocieslik.bsky.social & record a converation for the Whiplash pod with @maxwellkuzma.bsky.social on medieval trans & genderqueer saints--and why they matter today, more than ever #MedievalSky 🗃️

It was as if a million right-wing and centrist pundits suddenly cried out and were suddenly silenced.

The Punctuation Collection™️

Marsilius of Padua has entered the chat

I’m leading a discussion on Wollstonecraft tomorrow in one of my classes, and that Douthat interview … is something.

Thanks to Kerra for this write up on the Plague maqama article. @uniofexeternews.bsky.social news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-h...

Maybe it’s the medievalist in me, but the pope’s next move is exceedingly obvious: place the US under interdict. Nobody gets the sacraments until everybody gets the sacraments.

Whenever people complain about the number of folks relying on food stamps, it is worth reminding them that SNAP is, by too large of a degree, a subsidy for corporations that refuse to pay a living wage and their political allies who reject public policy prescriptions to reduce income inequality.

This is one of the best analyses of the total grift and scammery of AI in education I’ve seen, and it is a MUST Read: “Higher Ed’s Rush To Adopt AI Is About So Much More Than AI - defector.com/higher-eds-r...

It has the energy of:

EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification. I glanced down at the message. “Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began. So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

Hello friend!!

This is the moment the “30-50 feral hogs” guy has been waiting for.

So I'm prepping a slide for a class wherein we're using an excerpt from Einhard's Life of Charlemagne to talk about primary source analysis. I was looking for some estimates on Charlemagne's height when I came across this gem from Google AI.

I respect Anil so I want to talk seriously about harm reduction and public health messaging. First let me acknowledge that yes, many regular, not-super-online people are trying out AI tools. Of course they are! It's been aggressively pushed into everything and given heavy institutional support.

Oh 😮 ! In Our Time is a programme solely committed to intellectual broadcasting, and it’s enormously popular. Melvyn Bragg is a titan, and his stepping down is the end of an era

Aside from the fundamental misunderstanding of fascism, can we fucking stop labeling modern anti-science as medieval? This isn’t a pedantic point. At the basic level, RFK Jr’s brand of anti-vax bs doesn’t exist without social media. But more importantly…

“Instead, Robertson said, voters are distracted by the political noise of President Donald Trump’s policies, while the real drivers of grocery sticker shock—labor shortages and tariffs—continue to tighten their grip.” Those “real drivers” are the results of his policies.

I, for one, welcome our robotic failsons.

I’m saving this for my “why study the humanities” talk for the incoming first-years. If you’re wielding your humanities education as a cudgel against others, you’ve failed your humanities education. Unless it’s against fascists. Then, swing away.

Premium Newsletter: The enshittification of AI has begun. With GPT-5, OpenAI has cut access to all other models, reducing the value of even their $200-a-month subscriptions. They join Anthropic in screwing their customers over by making their products worse. www.wheresyoured.at/the-enshitti...

I think a lot of sound, reasoned critiques of this document will be forthcoming in the next few days. I’ll just add this: in the most charitable reading I can muster, the doc seems to endorse use of ai because it is inevitable and here to stay. I’m not so sure. 1/2

...and it's out! "‘People and Things Have Always Been Mixed Up’: Notes on the So-Called Global Middle Ages", my very short essay for the Journal of Medieval History's 50th-anniversary special issue, is now published; limited free access at the link below! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RAEXD...

They can’t just bring themselves to say “too much capitalism is not good,” so they call it something medieval.

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

very offended that none of my friends have texted to ask me what it means that the new Pope is an Augustinian

GASP IS HE MEETING WITH THE SYNODAL WAY BISHOPS IN GERMANY?????? GUYS GUYS THAT’S THE WHOLE BALLGAME

"Oh yeah; all right; Take it easy baby; say the Mass all night; He was an American pope"

Genuine question: does this mean that some of the investment capital they raised now converts to debt? @edzitron.com

It’s not a misunderstanding; it’s a willful perversion. If one thinks they can sit Miller down, explain his error, and expect him correct himself, then they profoundly misunderstand the moment and the Republican party’s enthusiastic embrace of fascism.

Where’s Sciarra Colonna when you need him?

If you need any sources on AI being shitty, I've been collecting and compiling them: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

A zombie survival game set in 14th-century England is extremely my shit. The only way it could be more my shit is if they set it in 14th-century Venice.

This is how every interview with a public official should be done. I fear that damage that people like Lipstadt and Jonathan Greenblatt are doing, by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and by allying with fascists, will be incalculable.

A great piece of public-facing history! I plan on using it with my intro students next fall. It’s such a rich encapsulation of the critical toolkit needed to engage with history, from skepticism for AI summaries to the contexts of historical narratives. Thanks for writing and sharing!

CEOs upset about Trump’s tariffs sound like mob bosses shouting “I thought we had a deal!” at the Joker.

Grandpa, tell me the story again about the day the historians all became the Joker.

Chocolate chip cookies without chocolate chips are my favorite cookie.

This piece from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social starts with a bang and just gets better and better. Gift link.

Yes, snatching students off the street for protected political speech, and demanding that students not use slurs are the same fucking thing.