For your pleasure I wrote up the news that apparently the University of Austin is not a great place to work: www.chron.com/culture/arti...

History is about interpretation and argumentation using subjective "texts" that require analysis and contextualization and interpretation on their own. And that's true for both primary and secondary texts! And that's before the archives! What it is NOT about is trivia factoids.

Someone ought to write about how AI has replaced the labor academic wives used to do (which was really just all of it) Here’s Milton Friedman thanking his wife for, well, writing Capitalism and Freedom:

Boycott CBS.

sometimes the food you're buying from us is going to contain assorted non food mixed in but that's a risk we all have to live with you guys gotta understand how much money this saves us in order to deliver to you something no one has ever asked for

CBS didn't run the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, but over here at @propublica.org we've been working on the story since March, including finding out who each and every man sent to that maximum security prison was. You can see our reporting here: www.propublica.org/series/depor...

The newest lost text of Galen’s was found in a library in Thessaloniki in 2005 (!!!) while a researcher, Antoine Pietrobelli, was there categorizing. This shit ain't online

In which I am extremely angry:

Menorah, 1296 Unknown illuminator & Elijah ben Meshallum (active 13th century), scribe (The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 116, fol. 226v)

If you are giving away 📚 these days as presents, why not do it like Sigismund Meisterin (left) in 1457? The Augsburg-based monk gave his book - a history of #Augsburg - to Sigismund Gossembrot (right), maybe through a giant golden Initial, surely making an impression. #bookhistory #booksky

#hottake: David Bisbal’s version of “el burrito sabanero” is actually terrible. #tukituki

How is anyone supposed to satirize this

my unpopular opinion is that #adoption is not an alternative to abortion. And it is certainly not a solution to the lack of access to safe and affordable abortions. Compelling vulnerable people to relinquish their own children by ignoring their material needs is just another way to oppress them.

Here's a 🧵 on how I came to write the article I'm working on right now, and you can decide for yourself whether AI was ever going to go in this direction:

The onion skin thing is giving me heart palpitations.

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

“When I got sober, the career I thought I had was pretty much gone… I didn’t know if I was ever going to write music again. And then I was asked to write the songs for The Muppet Christmas Carol. Every now and then, the universe will line up to do something at the right time in your life.”

This and the discussion about how academics can now just read AI summaries of things really drives home how much these guys always confuse the product for the goal. You don't do a coloring sheet because you want to have a colored sheet at the end!!! The coloring is the point!!!

Look, there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for this. The problem is that given who is minding the CBS News store there is every reason to suspect something more nefarious.

People are rightly disgusted by this speech, but it’s a measure of fascism’s normalization that many see this as more of the awful same rather than what I think most of us who’ve been reporting this beat hear it as: a significant calculated escalation. Full alert stuff.

I think everything in this thread is spot on, but the thing that most non-specialists miss is that individual historians are also the ones who decide there's even something to investigate! Based on their deep reading and expertise, they frame new questions to create new knowledge we didn't have!

👇

🧵 Spoiler alert: Ben Shapiro is the Orthodox Jew in question.

None of the things they claim are "AI" are intelligence, artificial or otherwise. They're all programmed actions, algorithms, aggregation of real information, theft, etc. Things like LLM's are not "intelligent". There's no independent thought or thought.

ANYWAY happy Friday! Today is a good day to get THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST and read it safely indoors! :D (Or wrap it up and give it to some unsuspecting person, I don't know your life.) A finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Aurora, Locus, Ignyte, and World Fantasy Award! 🦊🦄🍎

Fixed the hed. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/u...

The pressures of deadlines means there will be things you havent read, or things you have to very quickly gloss over. That is par for the course, I am skeptical that anyone reads *everything* they cite in depth! Sometimes you throw a citation in to please a reviewer! It shouldnt be the norm though!

i’m basically half slavic and half mediterranean and i turn forty on monday so it’s time to open the betting pool on if i turn into Baba Yaga or Strega Nona

Absolutely right. AI might be able to summarize (poorly) what we currently know, but a major goal of historical research is to find the hidden surprises out there. Let me illustrate …

A big part of being a historian is being a detective! Who did this? Why? Where? Why does it matter in the grand scheme of things? You have to learn how to probe, how to uncover, how to read against the grain, how to find unusual sources, how to interpret those sources. How to piece together a puzzle

Last night, San Francisco had a big power outage. And all the Waymo cars stopped in the middle of the street because they don’t know what to do without traffic lights. Don’t you want to be the person who always knows how to drive the car?

The most beautiful part about being an American is that my 9th great grandmother coming over on the fucking mayflower doesn’t make me any more American than anyone else.

Superb use of Alt Text here

See under: leopards, faces, eating www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

a book so phenomenally awful that you want to personally deconstruct the latin alphabet into a bunch of disconnected lines and curves

a book so astoundingly terrible that you low key want to time travel and shank johannes gutenberg

you ever read a book so bad you wanna go back to mesopotamia and uninvent writing

I’m not *that* curious.

“I’ve lived here for a long time, and I’ve never seen so many police cars.” ICE’s occupation in Memphis, the largest Black-majority city in the country, has reshaped daily life, turning grocery shopping into a mission that risks one’s family being torn apart.

Had a bit of a snafu this evening.

"Don't pass off someone else's work as your own." LOL. LMAO.

You know who, as a class, is mostly immune to the lure of nostalgia? Historians.

i dunno, wealthy old white dudes who love devising rationales for even wealthier old white dudes to do whatever they want seems like pretty traditional academic leadership to me

“They’re denying that any of her birth certificates, which are from Laurel, Maryland, her records of immunization, medical records — they’re denying the authenticity of them. It is something I’ve never encountered.” www.huffpost.com/entry/us-cit...

It all started in 1955 with a misprint in a Colorado newspaper and a call to Col. Harry Shoup's secret military hotline. Shoup played along with the tiny voice who called, and a tradition was born. From the NPR archives.

Like Ross Douthat versus Stephen Pinker is the least illuminating, least inspiring lineup you could possibly assemble for a debate about the role of religion in public life. And that's before we even get to "we asked two influencers to figure out whether women are worse off having rights."

The power outage and spotty cell service sending Waymos in San Francisco into a total meltdown is pure comedy.

There’s an essay I filed yesterday that had about 1000 words of scraps and drivel from the drafting process. I highlighted them and hit delete. Then hit undo and made a new “scraps” file in a new sub directory and cut and pasted those extra bits in.

“I can’t get over just how ridiculous it feels that we’re having this conversation in 2025.” slate.com/news-and-pol...