What do you call a political system where those in power refuse to seat a duly elected member of the opposition party? Not a democracy that’s for certain.

Spoke with cnn while sitting on the floor of my hotel room hallway bc my family were asleep in the other room.

Put another way: with Trump's approval solidly around -9-10, it's a safe bet he is probably underwater *with Texans* and he may not be much above water with Texas National Guard. 'Murder your fellow citizens so a guy you don't really like can be a God-King' is probably not a strong offer.

If you're interested in the long life of Paul's Epistle to the Laodiceans, I'm presenting some of my research at UMass Amherst. Open to the public!

More than a century after the massacre at Čaŋkpé Opí (Wounded Knee), the U.S. still honors the soldiers who carried it out. In a new piece, guest writer Amelia Mavis-Christnot examines Trump’s decision to preserve those medals—and the deeper history of erasure it reflects.

Thank you @iannelsonmills.bsky.social for agreeing to present on your research for my early Christianity class. We got a big lecture hall and made the lecture open to the public. Haec Epistula Non est Pauli 10/28/2025, 11:30 AM, 65 Bartlett Hall 130 Hicks Way, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003

Put less intelligently, the objection to the so-called AI boom is not about the technology being shitty (although it is). It’s about the shitty people who are using their shit technology to treat other people like shit.

I couldn't contain myself when I got this email, and I shouted in joy! My neigbors in offices down the hall (different department) jogged over and asked if I had just got a grant or application accepted, or if my team won a championship. It was indeed the former!😆

this reminds me that i think people would be less interested in “raw milk” if we called it “poop milk” or “shit milk”

Graham Hancock has recently repeated his lie that @flintdibble.bsky.social is responsible for the 2024 retraction of Hilman's 2023 Gunung Padang article in Archaeological Prospection. I "prebunked" this claim on MythVison podcast last year. Here is the relevant clip. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnAl...

This video by AMOPankration is fantastic. It documents his own journey, as an amateur, making a mark in the field of archaeology and publishing peer reviewed papers It also calls out hypocrisy of those who label scholars as "gatekeepers" youtu.be/4oqeNliw-YQ?...

@boslough.bsky.social posted this on another social media platform.

This is one of the best articles I've read about AI in a while. It points out the many disturbing, if not outright dystopian, ways in which AI has already reshaped our society and culture, which so many people have complacently accepted because it's "the future." www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

One of my teenagers shared this amazing video with me, and I am proud. The kid understands my interests. Did you hear the story of the Victorian hoax about a fake Welsh Kingdom in NW England, which fooled Wikipedia editors for most of the 2010s>> youtube.com/watch?v=bxKi...

For colleagues who may be going to SBL/AAR in Boston this year: I am a late addition to the Monday Rhetoric and Early Christianity program. @zafulotus.bsky.social; @candidamoss.bsky.social @iannelsonmills.bsky.social; ‪@smehorn.bsky.social‬.

My latest for National Geographic about Byzantine female asceticism featuring the work of @ctschroeder.bsky.social, Christine Luckritz Marquis, and Caroline Walker Bynum. www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...

Excited to announce that after a lot of editorial work our volume "Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE - 300 CE" is out now. @jeremiahcoogan.bsky.social @illdottore.bsky.social academic.oup.com/book/60683

Laodicians - the one pseudo-Pauline epistle that is both orthodox and universally recognized as a fake. It may originally have referred to an alternate title for Ephesians. Thank you @iannelsonmills.bsky.social

The stories we tell matter. I know this not from watching but from memory. I was just a child, held behind barbed wire in a U.S. internment camp, when an atomic bomb obliterated Hiroshima—killing members of my family.

Visiting my favourite empress at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. The small arch of Galerius features portrait busts of the emperor and what probably used to be a portrait of his wife, Valeria Augusta. After Licinius executed her for treason in this very city it was recarved as a Tyche.

The Burrows Cave Scam EXPOSED with Dr Joe Wilson @josephapwilson.bsky.social Clip below about gravestones desecrated to make fake artifacts Full video on YouTube: youtube.com/live/pcBt8qr... or Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0okZ...

Thursday at 6pm UK/1pm Eastern, I'll go live with Dr Joe Wilson to discuss Burrows Cave Did the Phoenicians make it all the way to Illinois? This tale is a wild one www.youtube.com/live/pcBt8qr...

@flintdibble.bsky.social Thank you Flint Dibble, for hosting me tomorrow to talk about the Burrows Cave scandal. www.youtube.com/live/pcBt8qr...

Reviewer accused of stealing manuscript and publishing it as his own denies he refereed it retractionwatch.com/2025/07/25/r...

This "golly, let's not let politics get in the way of friendship" pap that we hear from a lot of Trumpistas is basically a kind of gaslighting, as though burning down the constitutional order & kidnapping people to ship to gulags were just another ordinary policy disagreement.

Springer Nature to retract machine learning book following Retraction Watch coverage The move comes two weeks after we reported on the book’s fake references.

As I always say: there are plenty of people who want to study history, but from high school forward, they are told not to. And the same as true with the other liberal arts. We’re lucky that any students refuse to listen.

Yes, my spouse wanted to get a PhD in history. He decided to be responsible and went for computer science. He nearly wrecked his health. Yes, he made a good living & he liked programming & design. But his health from stress…some things you cannot completely recover from when you ‘have time.’

This is literally what we reported would happen. www.status.news/p/skydance-c...

I don’t see how saying “Around the World” a thousand times is going to help anything.

it's here! it's here! @vox-magica.bsky.social's amazing new Element in Religion in Late Antiquity is live and ⚡free⚡ to download for the next two weeks! get it! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

We could also express this in terms of time: it takes one week to write a blog post, I produce roughly one journal-article-length piece of scholarship a year and it's taken around five years for a book manuscript. There's an irony that I am a hare-writer on the blog, but a turtle-writer otherwise.

The staff at Iran's National Museum in Tehran have sandbagged the exhibitions they cannot move. I just...

Welcome to the USA of 2025, where condemning genocide is deemed antisemitism and can get you deported, but building concentration camps and calling bankers ‘Shylocks’ doesn’t get condemned by the news media at all.

“I am a student from Gaza. I am trying to learn amidst the ashes. And I dream of becoming a voice for history - not a forgotten victim of it,” Leena Majed Yassin Final year Archaeology student at the University of Gaza.

Geology Murder xkcd.com/3112/

wrote a little thing on mine & @lollardfish.bsky.social's newsletter (always free! subscribe!) on King Arthur and how he can't say in the Middle Ages. we "need" the Middle Ages because we need the boundaries of modern/ medieval to be "porous." this helps us understand our own world. #medievalsky

Read more about Nasca ceramics on this link: smarthistory.org/nasca-cerami...

I have consumed every version of the Heracles/Hercules story I could find. But somehow, I've never seen Disney's Hercules. Friends have threatened to kidnap my rubber duck, Gawain, if I don't change that. So on Monday, at 8 PM Eastern, I will! You can join me with #DisneyHerc.

My recent UMASS honors thesis advisee shared with me a cool graphic they found on a linguistics chat on Reddit. This image is based largely on data I published in my 2023 article in Humans (and is correctly cited). Can anyone help me identify the image author so I can thank them?

I went on a palaeontology tour last week focusing upon the lore of fossils, & the Dunstable Downs burial came up - an early Bronze Age burial of an young woman holding a child, surrounded by fossilised sea-urchins. Even in my ignorance of the period this is unbearably special & touching

Really thrilled that my second book is now published! It explores the life of Tacfarinas, a C1st AD auxiliary soldier-deserter-bandit-rebel who came to lead a revolt against #Rome in NW Africa during the early reign of Tiberius. He is a truly fascinating figure in #Roman history! 🏺AncientBlueSky

Fashionable some 6,000 years ago: a stunning Neolithic three-row necklace from Sachsenheim, dating to around 4,000 BC. This remarkable piece, which comprises more than 500 limestone and jet beads, is a witness to both craftsmanship and style. 📷 Landesmuseum Württemberg #Archaeology 🏺

The Attic Greek terracotta pyxis is ca. 550 BCE, and the greave is Greek, 5th c. BCE. Greaves could be lined with leather or fabric. Achilles' greaves would probably have been fancier, like these, from the tomb of the Thracian king, Seuthes III, depicting helmeted Athena. 🏺 #ancientbluesky 2/

A Late Roman Beaker. Probably 7th century.

This article suggests that a Yeniseian status for Hunnish is plausible not only via the Chinese sources, but also for the European sources. This matters for Dene-Yeniseian studies, and I will explain why. a 🧵 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

(4) From Troy to Tomb Raiders: The Extraordinary Life of the Euphronios Krater understandingrome.substack.com/p/from-troy-...