The tour around the Vatican archives was pretty great, honestly

Happy holidays to readers of global history and of the history of decolonization. States-in-Waiting is now out in paperback at an affordable price, especially with a 20% discount using code GHIS26. Many thanks to the team at @universitypress.cambridge.org cup.org/48wR0Mk

I'm watching The Wrong Trousers and it's bonkers to watch it now, since a provincial museum in the north of England in an animation from 1993 has better security than the Louvre.

One of my jobs at the Environment Agency was to get the Treasury to pay to fix the navigations we ran. I think it’s fair to say that England’s waterways are not in a great state of repair, and that this could be quite a big headache…

Happy Erev Festivus to all who celebrate. I got a lot of problems with you people and now you're gonna hear about it.

Looking at a well-known travel agency’s hotel listings for a grant application and it’s pretty easy to see how people who don’t know where they’re going end up having alarming experiences

This is the kind of thing that makes you realise how easy it must be to sell half-baked trainings to businesses

I think I jumped on the slow productivity bandwagon avant le lettre

The last point about the light switches. This is now every hotel room everywhere. Also you will get insane static from the thick carpeting.

Waiting for someone in government to clock that this might be an issue

Every single delivery driver now either doesn’t even bother ringing our front-door bell or does and dumps the parcel by the door. It has got noticeably worse in the last year.

Also, setting way too many readings in graduate-level classes leads to this: no one can read all those books in the time available

When you see someone publish what is essentially an ad hominem attack and wonder who peer-reviewed it…

The thing that is stupid about this AI argument is that it’s absolutely true that people can’t read everything in detail, but the way things work they’re pressured to pretend that they do. The exponential amount of literature was a problem pre-AI.

A mistake a lot of people who take up teaching at universities make is to start with the assumption that their students should be just like they were as students but without the defects. Better concentration, better at deadlines at deadlines. But to get a teaching job you were 1 in a 100 or 1000.

Marvelling at the ability of our children to make a mess literally a minute after we’ve cleaned it up

It’s not really enough just to say that most universities are done for, is it?

I think one of the best things my university could do for my mental health is allow me to unsubscribe from end of year emails that tell what a great and wonderful 12 months that was and how jolly things are looking for the future. It's like getting newsletters from a parallel universe.

‘Prompt engineers’

Came across Clarissa Dickson-Wright’s autobiography in a charity shop. It is everything a devotee of weird history could hope for

Plea to stop using prehistoric monuments & peoples as a sub for present-day national identities. Past peoples are not ‘ancestors’, they had no idea of the concept of a nation-state & this archipelago has seen a lot of traffic since the last ice age

A strong contender for one of the worst recent policy decisions

Can't believe I'm asking this, but has anyone ever successfully dealt with a neighbour who doesn't maintain their garden when it starts damaging your own garden? Next door has been terrible for years, and has finally started to cause real problems for our fence...

Look at this one

It is so lovely to see how much effort the Crystal Palace Park Trust are putting in to restoring the park giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

HS1 Ltd is expanding the capacity at St Pancras... 🤔 I have known for AGES this is in planning (and was leaked some documents about it, also ages ago). I can't tell if this story is some new plan, or re-hashing the old ones. In any case it's welcome! #CrossChannelRail www.ft.com/content/ff71...

Different times

Labour has to do two things. Get better at policy to improve people’s lives and get better at communicating success. At the moment it’s looking distinctly underpowered on both and has let Reform set too much of the agenda.

Amazon has one hardcover of my book left with a 35% discount. Someone must need a Christmas present still… www.amazon.com/Flooded-Past...

due to a new federal initiative Carleton is hiring 5 to 10 "Canada Impact+ Research Chairs" at the rank of Associate or Full Professor if you work in any of the strategic priority areas listed, and long for Canada, consider applying (&feel free to reach out) carleton.ca/deputyprovos...

And handily here's the most accurate pollster from the last GE2024 doing one of its rare (in part because more expensive) polls.

I genuinely think this is one of the most interesting things about politics in England. The polls and actual elections all tell us 'Labour are super-unpopular and shedding votes to another challenger in their bloc' but they tell us different things about which challenger that actually *is*.

Anyway, there are no jobs even for many, many highly qualified, often overqualified, candidates, people who "know all sorts of details" and also manage to read current research. If you're a journalist writing on this, try finding jobs on H-Net. That's the kind of detail that's actually relevant here

People lying through their teeth about the nature of academia don’t deserve your rebuttals, go write a footnote or something.

Further down thread it says 170 fac have been given offers (buyouts, retirements). If not enough take them there will be “involuntary separations.” 170! Think of the collective yrs of training, specialization, teaching, the number of students taught, advised, mentored, the wealth of KNOWLEDGE.

Not for the first time reminded of the extent to which all university travel policies everywhere seem written solely for work in Europe and North America

This

Here is the percentage of white males age 30-39 working in professional, technical, and managerial jobs between 1850 and 2024. The current generation has not been squeezed out of such jobs. If there is any lost generation here, I would say it is boomers who were 30-39 in 1990. (@ipums.bsky.social)

finally, a solution for the sophisticated warhammer player who wants to spotlight the crown jewel of his fine wine collection

Liz Truss finally has a route back into No.10

But McSweeney’s analysis of Labour’s wrong turn goes back further, to the summoning of the Long Parliament in November 1640

Even by my low expectations for Kemi Badenoch ‘violence against women and girls is something done by immigrants and nobody else’ has shocked me.

How long is it going to take me to tell the people who've just sat down next to me in the library and started a conversation to be quiet?

Important point: university isn't just for posh kids; Erasmus+ gives non-posh kids same chance as posh kids to study abroad, which they otherwise wdn't have; & covers vocational & other non-university training & education exchanges. And if more students come to the UK, that increases UK soft power.

i'm fascinated by how much people love and are amazed by chat gpt saying "nice catch!" and "great observation!" because i personally find the condescension and obsequiousness the most skin-crawling thing about how LLMs "talk"

Booking for the first @royalhistsoc.org Lectures of 2026 is now available: bit.ly/48N0CCY > Charles West on 'Queens & the Making of Medieval Europe’ > Vinita Damodaran on 'Decolonising the Natural History Collections of Empire' > David Stack on 'Well-being: a Historian's Perspective' #Skystorians

"All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Google Gemini wants to "help you" read and reply to your emails."

I’d like to see a ‘European students react as Britain rejoins Erasmus’ story

Or Islamic Studies in the early 2000s (post 9/11). IS job openings (& anecdotally, enrollments in courses on Islam in the west) are way down. While I’m mostly glad about a main reason - less obsessive focus on Islamisms, the fact remains that Islam is the 2nd largest & fastest growing religion…