For the academic study of the history of science: the Scientific Revolution didn't happen, and the scientific method doesn't exist.

Gender is socially constructed.

Yes! Whenever I give feedback without a grade, I find I can dig a lot deeper because it’s the opening of a dialogue rather than the last word on how well they did.

For those that don’t know (welcome!) gloves impede dexterity, which increases the possibility of damaging a book FAR more than handling with clean dry hands. Gloves ARE still used for some materials (photographs, metal objects, items made of hazardous materials, etc.)

Not a single biologist and only one university researcher on PCAST. This leaves the country unbelievably ill prepared for an age of biotechnology, a race we are already beginning to lose.

It’s so hard for me to imagine anybody with expertise in public health, or history, or technology, equating the public health impact of AI with VACCINES and SANITATION.

In all seriousness though, elder millennial jokes aside, I think it’s important to resist the media framing of any mainstream resistance to the status quo as just the shrill nonsense of middle-aged women with nothing better to do. This isn’t the first time they’ve run out this playbook.

That sound you here is from historians of medicine everywhere collectively rolling their eyes.

@profchrisadams.bsky.social and I remember two remarkable scholars, Elborg Forster and Patricia Ranum, "faculty wives" who never held formal positions but their generative scholarship made contributions to the field of French history. www.societyforfrenchhistoricalstudies.net/in-memoriam

Historians: I offered to visit my 10yo’s 5th grade class to talk about history but now I feel utterly stymied. I kind of want to tell them about children in the past but everything that comes to mind is…grim. Anyone have any great ideas on what I can share?

Clearly hitting my stride as chair because I just my department through our course scheduling process, which is governed by elaborate and ironclad college-wide rules, and not only did we get it done, we finished *twenty minutes early*

We all know the worst airport in the US is LaGuardia.

Absolutely thrilled to report that the Board of Governors at @uncpress.bsky.social have approved my book THE RACIALIZATION OF PRINT for publication by @oieahc.bsky.social. Forthcoming, early 2027.

8yo is on day 3 of a fever so I’m working from home. I gave him a bell to summon me as needed. Let’s see how much writing I can get done… 🫠

Writing rubrics is an essential part of the cognitive and relational work of teaching. Farming that out to a shitty program that will be used to penalize students in the grade book is an egregious betrayal of our responsibility to our students. 2/2

Also: I get that higher ed rarely requires people who want to be professors to learn much of anything about teaching, but generating a rubric is figuring out what it is you want students to demonstrate what they learned and how you will fairly and accurately measure it. 1/

Anyway, AI is a managerial technology that came out of fields where researchers act more like managers than researchers and this is not a coincidence. It’s fundamentally related to why certain people jumped at the chance to try to build certain kinds of systems that devalued (other people’s) work.

Not only were race science and race medicine mainstream — they were *prestigious* and buoyed along by scientific academies, colonial administrators, and ordinary readers. I published an article in HWJ about surgeons using race-making to boost their careers. academic.oup.com/hwj/article-...

This is your reminder that if you are a class member and have NOT yet filed a claim in Anthropic v. Bartz, the AI copyright lawsuit, you have 9 days to do so.

... the Arne Jacobsen egg chair teamed with leather couch and a studio backdrop feat. a Lambo inexplicably inside the room. And where Knowles's set is filled with masculine urban cliches, Walsh's set is the rustic counterpart: the fish, stone fireplace, and boat-shaped shelf with tiny old books.

It's interesting how The Daily Wire attacks the idea that gender is a performance when their sets are all about gender performance. Look at the aesthetics here — the cigars and crystal decanter with Japanese whiskey, the black dress shirt, the tight suit with two-toned double monks and tie bar ...

Forthcoming new book by Ann Blair on authorship & collaboration, from @princetonupress.bsky.social: 👀 📗 press.princeton.edu/books/hardco... #EarlyModern #HistBookChat

Nouveauté.😊

Pope Leo is the first Pope to have ever experienced the US healthcare system, so there's that

It is lovely that the Art Gallery of Ontario can now name the Black woman in the gorgeous #18thc portrait they acquired 6 yrs ago & also date the painting. It's from 1775. She is Eleonora Susette, enslaved by the Dutch governor of Guyana, accompanying his widow on her return to the Netherlands.

I got to bike to work again after two days of needing to drive (heavy rains + flood risk on Monday, heavy winds yesterday) and yes it’s still wintry cold but the sun was shining and the birds were singing 🤗

It’s so good I have to post it twice, this time to say hell yes, look at what you can do with an Africana Studies major from Bowdoin College

Very welcome upgrade to the usual trite St. Patrick’s Day greeting

A change in NIH policy change requires poltical review for the announcement of finding notifications, resulting in greater political control over research and reducing the ability for biomedical research to respond to emerging and understudied problems.

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

i’m not a historian but you know, i was married to one for over 20 years, and if there is one thing I have learned from spending time among historians (and reading the books they’ve recommended to me) it’s that historians know how to contextualize basically everything

<bump>

I had never imagined a bat nursing home before but 😭

The Maine Senate race might be the most cursed election of my voting lifetime

This weird rant feels like something that has a lot more to do with him and the women in his family and what's going on between them than anything to do with ballet

The thing about Timothee Chalamet choosing to shit on ballet and opera is that his mom “majored in dance at LaGuardia High School and attended Yale University on a ballet scholarship. As a child, she danced with the New York City Ballet and later went on to perform in several Broadway musicals.”

My book just got passed by the final reviewer!!! Look for ‘Mortality and Measurement’ this year! If anyone would like a sneak peak, let me know. Happy to travel or zoom to hang out and discuss race, statistics, medicine, and empire.

Also: everyone should read this book.

We have the data. My longest columns have more readers, who read longer, and who share them the most.

All the wrong people have imposter syndrome.

Explore our job opportunities focused on the Medieval and Early Modern periods (thread 🧵): 1. Assistant Professor in Early Modern British History, University of Warwick memorients.com/news/assista...

Growing Up in the Early Modern World, a workshop Nov 27 in Sydney exploring childhood in institutional settings, & care, discipline & education across the life course. Please submit a 200 word abstract & 3-sentence bio note by 15 July to [email protected]. Online/hybrid participation possible.

So many people in public health sounded the alarm about RFK Jr. and were ignored or called hysterical. Then everything we warned about and more happened. They have not reformed. They simply want to win an election. But I fear that our warnings will again go unheeded.

The Regime is trying to spackle over their sustained attack on public health and vaccines. Don’t believe that they’ve reformed. They are simply reacting to the unpopularity of their war on vaccines in advance of the election. They will be right back at it after the election.

With all the horrors around us, talking up a book seems...weird. But I have a book coming and it is, I believe, an important one—one hope help persuade the vaccine hesitant (those who've heard the noise but aren't yet consumed by anti-vax BS). Anyway, here's the latest iteration of the US cover:

By this logic, I’ve made my way to 1774 and, yeah, that tracks.

Years ago our admin did a red and black report. It took salaries & how much $ each instructor made in tuition $ for classes we taught-you were in the red or black. They released numbers once & shut it down bc humanities were producing huge $ for uni & engineers, business and scientists were losing $

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Anyone who knows me knows I gesticulate like a muppet when I talk. I also literally can't spell a word without also fingerspelling it in ASL. Why? Rubella vaccines didn't exist in Kansas in the 1950s, so although my Uncle Marvin survived, it left him Deaf. My (hearing) Dad learned ASL, too. 1/2

I’m assuming this is good faith so I’ll bite. The University of Iowa just opened a right wing “intellectual freedom” center with state funding. The center can’t make classes and has hired a marketing firm to assess (and try to drum up demand). Students don’t want this.