Open your wallets folks. NY Presbyterian nurses need your financial support to keep their strike for safe staffing ratios going. If management has their way. they'll make every ICU nurse have a patient load in numbers that looks more like a kindergarten classroom than an intensive care unit.

Without warning, the University of North Texas abruptly shuttered an exhibition of works by Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez, whose practice centers the lived experience of immigrants in the United States and their inhumane treatment by federal agencies.

Via Rick Prelinger archive.org/details/mari...

This conversation between @arielleangel.bsky.social and @naomiaklein.bsky.social about the Epstein files is the best thing I've listened to or read recently about that topic and also the general state of things

don't care for this!

No joke the first time I saw these in the wild was on a student conspicuously surveilling a campus protest he disapproved of who wanted everyone to know he was recording their faces

I complain a lot about vacuous AI boosterism and reputation laundering from the higher ed sector. But when someone like my colleague, vice dean for A.I. initiatives at a major private research university, says things like this, I hope people pay attention. 1/2 www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/o...

Deadline coming up to apply to take my summer week long intensive seminar “History of Censorship from the Inquisition to the Internet” open to anyone interested, through the Rare Books School.

Is it possible that it's a secret third thing? That studying the human condition, combined with the relative brokeness that resulted from defunding, increasing wealth inequality, and the corporatization of higher ed, inclines one to more progressive views & Mellon's politics are an effect not cause?

It's possible to do a non-reactionary critique of the current landscape of humanities research funding: www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

The Atlantic is part of a smear campaign against humanistic learning and research? The same Atlantic with an annual quota of stories about how college students refuse to read any more?

It would be embarrassing under any circumstances to spend a year on this reactionary horseshit, but to have spent the year in which graduate students were sent to concentration camps for op-eds and the federal govt launched a no hold barred attack on academic freedom is just beyond

Everything about Leqaa Kordia's arrest and incarceration is abhorrent. CAIR has set up an easy form for you to send your representatives a message demanding Leqaa Kordia's release. secure.everyaction.com/6U1ygBt6eUK-...

An amazing review essay of Scheidel’s What is Ancient History and Padilla Peralta’s Classicisms and Other Phobias. planudes.medium.com/the-chains-t...

A point I make in my work on this subject is that we need to reject the insistance that convos abt commercial AI products should be about the tech. Determining whether AI is “conscious” is a Smartwashing exercise in solipcism that distracts from the material conditions of the product’s distribution

sigh

is it time for llm discourse again

I wrote about Trump’s ideological deportation policies and their implications for free speech, including on university campuses. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW: “.. In our in-progress research, we discovered that AI tools didn’t reduce work, they consistently intensified it.” hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

I have to say, I do not love this new trend of large liberal accounts with millions of followers identifying Jews.

This is extremely stupid obviously, but the explicit humanities-laundering these companies are doing is mildly interesting

Did you know CBP holds “virtual job fairs” with colleges and universities around the country?

It really is funny watching AI people talk about AI as intelligence. Like Jim Henson telling everyone on Sesame Street how scared he is of "the thing that lives in the can."

I was lucky enough to review Danielle Hyeonah Lambert’s _Decolonizing Roman imperialism: the study of Rome, romanization, and the postcolonial lens_ for BMCR. I also took a postcolonialist lens to Monty Python & ideas the colonized should be grateful to the Romans. bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2026/2026.02...

Completely agree w/ @bakerdphd.bsky.social. For example, it’s shameful that my alma mater, Vanderbilt, continues its fiction of neutrality as well as using its resources to buy real estate rather than mount a full throated defense of academic freedom www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

"But if the member presidents choose the guise of institutional neutrality as a way to gain political cover, they may now be leading higher ed toward greater authoritarianism." Well the AAU is gonna love this (miniest of threads) www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Columbia will never be free of this stain.

““the major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the victors and rulers or—the more difficult path—to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of complete extinction.”

I don’t disagree with this op-Ed from Arne Duncan & David Pressman, but worth emphasizing that professors have been saying this for the past 385 days. And that at many universities the administration is about as authoritarian as the federal govt.

"Appeasement is being coordinated while resistance is not" is exactly right. (This op-ed from Arne Duncan and David Pressman is excellent; I hope university leaders will read it.) www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

An immigration court dropped its case against Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, a little less than a year after federal agents arrested her on a street near Tufts University

CALL FOR PITCHES @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not. Details below!

Please take the time to read what the children detained in Dilley wrote me in their own words: www.propublica.org/article/ice-... 10/

I say this regularly. People use performative as a substitute for 'inauthentic' and we could all just say the words we mean to say. Erving Goffman helps us to understand that we perform all of the time in real life. Life itself is often a performance of self.

Note: Just like Mohsen Mahdawi, ICE snatched Leqaa at what she thought was a routine immigration check-in, after she protested Israel’s genocide of Gaza. They then took her from New Jersey to Texas—where she’s been detained for nearly a year. Now she’s hospitalized and her whereabouts are unknown.

🚨 NEW MUSIC!! 🚨 RUDE AND CRUDE FROM ME TO YOU #BandcampFriday

This is from a column explaining the concepts of macros and templates that makes an interesting time capsule read about automation in personal computing

I'd like to add that like in all industries, when we stop understanding how our tools work, we become entirely dependent on the corporate entities that own the mold. We are trading the ability to build and repair for the convenience of being permanent tenants in someone else's infrastructure/subs.

If they aren’t using Grok does it count as military grade any more

“Columbia was the test case for this government strategy of kidnapping people first and then asking questions later” www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/n...

Sociologist C. Wright Mills saw this coming—and tried to warn us—60+ years ago. jacobin.com/2026/02/wrig...

why is it called that

Katherine McDonald’s truly marvelous “Four footprints, two languages, one tile”deserves your time: “Two slaves, working in conditions that were no doubt very difficult, taking a little time to mess about as friends and enjoy each other’s company.” katherinemcdonald.net/2016/01/14/f...

Context: this speech is from SIR THOMAS MORE, a history written, as near as scholars can tell, in the early 1600s by 6 or 7 people including Dekker, Heywood, Chettle, Shakespeare, and Munday. It was never performed, because Jacobean England was a police state and it was banned by the censor.

If you missed Ann Blair’s @ransomcenter.bsky.social Pforzheimer Lecture last night, you can check it out on YouTube: www.youtube.com/live/u16QHaI... I think you’ll agree that it’s both sharp and a lot of fun.

The latest Pasts Imperfect is out! Medievalist & historian of race @profcwhit.bsky.social discusses NPS' removal of plaques documenting slavery in Philly 🔔 Then, the ceramics of Roberto Lugo, a new DH project on the artifacts of refugees, ancient world journals by @yaleclassicslib.bsky.social & more

I know this seems like a really trivial detail to get stuck on but this degree of escalation of force combined with zero warning is something I've never seen. For that to get unleashed on normies just moving along in broad daylight? Christ.

“If I am killed doing this, throw my body at the White House, martyr the shit out of me & raise hell. Do not be sad. Do not think I would do anything differently. I would do it over & over again — this is too important to sit down & shut up and not do anything.” www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

For context: newspapers.ushmm.org/historical-a...