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...

one thing the trump era has made clear, i think, is that the american people themselves are far more committed to the values of our founding documents than our elites

Anyway, should anyone like to hear the long form version I’ll be giving it in Hartford, CT next week. www.hartford.edu/unotes/2026/...

February 4, 134 CE: A collective of nine scribes 🖋️ —named Diogenes, Euporos, Mystes, Marion, Sarapion, Sabinus, Herakleides, Harpokration, and Heliodoros—in Ptolemais Euergetis (Roman Egypt) sign a contract to copy gvmt tax & census lists (P. Mich 11 603): papyri-prod.lib.duke.edu/ddbdp/p.mich...

wow

Highlighting the speaker who stood in front of the Surprise mayor and told him to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf must’ve thought before he died by suicide: “He might have thought ‘how is this my fault I had no jurisdiction over this’ maybe he said ‘this site was not subject to local zoning.’”

Two HRW employees that make up the entirety of the organization's Israel and Palestine program are stepping down after the leadership blocked a report that deems Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees the right of return a "crime against humanity." www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

The Post describes how DHS is now using 'administrative subpoenas' as a form of domestic surveillance, apparently to intimidate those engaged in lawful activity & speech. www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

this part is so true, i mostly travel in women-and-children spaces in far outer SE, so the exact opposite end of town, and since saturday i've overheard and had multiple conversations about how to launder tear gas out of things like diaper bags including one at the methodist church

"The university estimates that the continued bombardment destroyed a total of nearly 1 million books. Their destruction is, by that measure, the single greatest intellectual loss in Gaza’s long and turbulent history." www.thenation.com/article/worl...

If I learned one (1) thing from my university's ride on this particular carousel it's that nobody but nobody leaks details of these things to a national newspaper for a good reason.

These NYT reporters have been wrong from the get go and have now made themselves main characters in this story Begging whichever of my colleagues is speaking to them to please stop

Trump is now demanding One Billion Dollars from Harvard, threatening criminal punishment, and insinuating Harvard’s president was chosen because of his religion (?)

standardized testing should not be part of a "deal" or "compact" and that angle is not getting the attention it deserves

Was that pedantry? Let me show you how: Homer didn't actually write anything about Helen, or at all.

There is a case to be made that any board of a university that signed an agreement that required paying a fee has breached their fiduciary duty and I think somebody should explore it

If you ever see a cat in public it is your civic duty to assist that cat with whatever matters it is currently engaged in, regardless of legality or personal financial cost

This story doesn’t have these specific details, but it has the closure due to a threat:

Sincerely my favorite part of this special is David Macaulay, sitting in a Roman archaeological site, drawing diagrams with a sharpie on a big pad of paper. However, the animated story is its own delight and features some truly classic and far from unproblematic physiognomies

PSA: the 1994 PBS adaptation of David Macaulay's 1974 book "City," about Roman towns, is on YouTube. It alternates between Macaulay walking through Roman ruins and an animated story about the Romanization of Gaul. A formative childhood viewing experience. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K7Y...

“the fox noms many little things, but the hedgehog noms one big thing”

100% Machine Code

I'm used to having to convince coastal types that there are people out there who genuinely believe in libertarian and traditionalist principles (rather than as laundry for regular bigotry). rarely, however, do you see those types publicly confronted with how little company they actually have

Muslim university students were arrested and expelled for protesting genocide. Let's see if college Republicans get even a slap on the wrist for advocating extrajudicial killings.

This is the U Penn donor who helped push the President out, pushed to eliminate arts & science offerings, and drafted Trumps "compact" with universities. People like Rowan repeatedly claimed the moral high ground to impose their agenda on students and faculty.

I’ve been going back and forth on this but this clinches it—I think these guys really want a Persian Gulf labor model in the US. It’s not a coherent philosophy—nothing ever is with these assholes—but I’ve worked on Gulf labor stuff and I’m seeing more and more of it here. Long thread 1/

Where is the Sappho Brothers Poem papyrus? We only know that it is LOST. Again. #Sappho #classics #papyrology facesandvoices.wordpress.com/2026/02/01/t...

Activist OpSec posturing is just Operator culture for lefties send post

We regret to inform you

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

"technologists, reactionaries, and seething upstarts are brought together by decadent parties on a wealthy idiot's pedophile island, laying the groundwork for a digital-first fascism" sounds like a cyberpunk plot but you know it's real life because they did it with the style of people in bumper cars

They used "anti-semitism" as a pretext to deport foreign-born students and chill free speech, and their deportation chief -- the one with the nonstandard Hugo Boss-style greatcoat -- was spouting anti-semitic insults at a US attorney

In 2021 I was telling people in my field of art history to stop legitimizing the use of image recognition, to stop applying for grants to use AI in identifying the subjects of portraiture bc this was what such work was being used to further. All this was obvious. theconversation.com/how-ai-is-hi...

I don't know why they need to make short AI films about the American Revolution when the perfect one was created 18 years ago www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbRo...

the new york city council put the woman who brought a gun to a gaza solidarity rally at brooklyn college to intimidate student protesters in charge of the antisemitism task force