A fine report in many respects, though one that conveniently elides the Chronicle's own complicity in promoting and normalizing many of the fringe, anti-democratic views of the Manhattan Institute, especially when it comes to attacking the academic study of culture.

hey is the word “eliminate” good when they’re talking about You. just wondering

I wrote about the psychological impact of having one's village erased by Israel. www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/...

Google shutdown Reader 13 years ago today and I’m still mad.

i did a triple take at this line. the university of michigan apparently jeopardized a grad student's status and got him detained by ICE for almost a month on this basis, which i can only convey to non-academic folks as "absolute horse shit"

TIL the world's new favorite himbo once bought a 13th century copy of one of the Norse Sagas for $150,000, then donated it to the library because "I'm not much of a reader."

Tried to write something today for book history students in which I referred to phone books and then caught myself, was unsure, ended up staring at the wall for quite a while.

Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in the trans sports ban case in West Virginia contains some of the ugliest transphobic stuff I have ever seen in a legal opinion. Straight-up gleeful. Vile man. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

It feels like this is the inevitable culmination of "hidden histories" and "untold stories" combined with "we can't footnote your work, that would be awkward for the reader." But at its core, it's just the result of an utter lack of respect for the labor and expertise of an entire field.

The sub-head is seriously questionable: “how changing student preferences are fundamentally reshaping universities” buys into the university’s narrative that this is driven by falling recruitment leading to deficits. How can that be, when Exeter has been eating other people’s lunch for years?

A lot of media coverage of the ‘AI’ reading of the Herculaneum scrolls really fails to understand what’s happened here. There’s no language processing happening, the AI/ML is not trained on a corpus of texts or language. It can detect ink to see shapes. HUMAN EXPERTS are then transcribing the text.

Do read Mohammad Mhawish’s unforgettable account of life under surveillance during the genocide in @nymag.com. As one of his interviewees says: “It is not death that we fear. It is the terror that comes before it.” nymag.com/intelligence...

'What is perhaps remarkable about the Exeter cuts is that they are targeted at some of the university’s most successful departments, many of which turn over a profit even after they have made enormous and increasing contributions to the central university budget.' Read, rage and weep.

BIG update + good news following email ending volunteers to Jail & Prison Services: NYPL affirms JPS will continue with *same* number of volunteers, just from central NYPL, not branches. Per source, internal email which provoked the uproar among librarians should have never gone out.

The cooling system was installed by the village AC technician, Thermodynamix 😊

🚨AFTER 33 MONTHS, I BRING YOU THE SINGLE LARGEST CREATIVE PROJECT OF MY LIFE 🚨: THE NAMCO MUSEUM MUSEUM: EVERY GAME, EVERY COLLECTION, EVERY PORT! EVERY RELEASE, EVERY REGION, NO EXCEPTIONS! I've meticulously studied & presented EVERY single instance of Namco's historic game collections, for you!

When I was recording with the CBC yesterday, a Canadian pollster said that the only people who had a majority positive view of "AI" were people who earned more than $200k. I scrawled "class war" in my notes.

I’m as excited to get more Philodemus as the next classicist but the funding behind this project, in addition to having its own politics, has always made me wonder what other applications for the imaging technology the funders imagine.

bring back english departments

sometimes you just have to do a quick late-night draft (from 續墨客揮犀)

These are the actions of an authoritarian regime, where their agents come to intimidate you if you share public information about how they have killed American citizens

Incredible example of how nonsense Hindutva history is established and even monumentalized in the west, depending on ignorance, indifference and vague protestations of anti-colonialism to do so. Read the whole thread and weep @rcsed.bsky.social

A really good piece from @emilyctamkin.bsky.social which makes the point I also have been making: the *pro-Israel political coalition* was the driver of making Israel so salient in the June 2025 and June 2026 primaries, which in turn helped catapult Mamdani et al because *voters agree with Mamdani*.

For local context as people get upset about this, in my experience the youth palestine solidarity movement in NYC often values the interconnectedness and analogousness of struggles across distance and scales.

Media outlets are running with the Kingmaker Mamdani narrative, but progressives also won last night bc hundreds of people organized for months to knock doors and get out the vote. I spoke with @jfrejnyc.bsky.social about why that's important for durable power on the left!

No matter how many people are talking about this, it is not enough people talking about this.

In early 2024 I saw a student post something like “when he’s only a 6 but he’s on canary mission… 😍🥵” and then I understood the depths of the vibe shift that was underway

This is Palmer Raids type stuff here smh

It's easier for media to portray the election as an attack on American Jews than to delve into what NY-10 really was: The second most Jewish Congressional district in the US having a referendum between two Jewish candidates on what it means to do Jewish politics in the age of Trump and Netanyahu.

When a Jew wins a landslide election in the most Jewish city in the United States, where massive numbers of Jews turned out to reject a terrorist org that lobbies for genocide:

A morning essay/prayer film about what it means that Darializa Avila Chevalier—who will soon represent Columbia University in Congress—was a part of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia in 2024.

A cartoonist named Daniel "Des" Rolando Sanchez Estrada was tried as a terrorist and sentenced to 30 years in prison for having anti-Trump comics in his car. Prosecutors connected him to a 2025 anti-ICE protest he didn't even attend because he was in the same book club as others who were.

you people need to show more respect for the political machinery that lost to donald trump twice

I’m excited to shared draft AI Guidelines for the CUNY Graduate Center community @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social Importantly, they embed a right of refusal for faculty, staff, and students where reasonable alternatives exist.

An absolutely stunning photo! The 35m-long #Roman shipwreck, along with its cargo of 6,000 (!) amphorae was discovered in 2019 off the coast of the Greek Island of Kefalonia. It’s one of the largest Roman shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean. 📷 Ionian Aquarium

A university that called the cops on its own peaceful students is now set to be represented by one of them in Congress

Two years after Darializa Avila Chevalier took part in the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University, she is now set to represent the district in which the university is located in Congress.

Has Bret Stephens weighed in yet

when being anti-israel is considered the only genuine antisemitism, jews who are anti-israel cannot be victims of antisemitism because they are themselves antisemites — this is the present formulation under which “judeo-christian” society acts toward jews critical of israel and zionism

Hartman offers countless examples in her work beyond "Venus in Two Acts" (2008), and so do scholars Marisa Fuentes, Jules Gill-Peterson, Jessica Marie Johnson, and a few others. Not everyone can pursue critical fabulation, nor should they.

One additional comment: critical fabulation is about the Black feminist praxis of an ethics of care.

It is 2026, and people still think Saidiya Hartman and Natalie Zemon Davis invented historical information in their works. I am by no means an expert on critical fabulation, but it is not a practice about making up historical information.

What an exquisite 'LI'(BER) at the beginning of Matthew's Gospel BnF MS Latin 9385; Evangelia (the so-called Gospels of Du Fay); 9th century (843-851); Abbey Saint-Martin de Tours; f.19r @gallicabnf.bsky.social

Micah Lasher's campaign treasurer called Lindsey Boylan a "psycho bitch" in a recording I obtained. Full story in the Judge Street Journal: judgestreetjournal.substack.com/p/exclusive-...

Official release day of print: July 10, 2026 Why Odysseus?: Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero a.co/d/0ewA5pSV

Given the growing evidence on cognitive offloading and skills erosion, this may be very prudent policy. And it will make for an informative social experiment, with much of the US serving as an counterexample

@ztul.bsky.social Sorry this is a little late but I'm in the back catalog enjoying the Sprawl unit now