If you missed the news about Elsevier and Wiley (and doubtless the rest to follow) remaking themselves as AI companies with plans to profit from selling AI summaries of academic work back to the institutions that produced the original work: bsky.app/profile/benp...

You know who really has a good vantage on what universities can and should be? Faculty. Not always the organizational structure and operation, because that's not the job, But what it takes to educate? Yep. Yet the overwhelming media coverage is by and about ppl w very little to no experience.

Architecture & Reflections, San Francisco #photography #architecture #sanfrancisco #nikon

www.newberry.org/calendar/rec... looks like an incredible program!

Self-Portrait (rotated), potential sketch for The Creation of Adam, by Michelangelo, late 15th//early 16th c

This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence. The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

A dresser inside a museum in New York City has been discovered as a secret stop on the Underground Railroad — the first of its kind discovered in Manhattan in over 100 years

How do you not view this as a gorgeous expression of Hispanic culture in the U.S.? Smooth music, beautiful sets, and great dancing.

I can't believe this is a real NYT headline. In addition to being the tech-bougie capital, SF has to have the most natural beauty of any major American city, right? The giant mountains and the lush forests and the drastic cliffs that overlook the Pacific.

Jeff Bezos’s wealth has increased an average of $70 million every day of 2026, meaning that he could have offset The Post’s losses with what he’s made since Monday.

This is actually very interesting because that’s what people get wrong about the Middle Ages as well. Simply put: you might know how to build aqueducts from self healing concrete but you might lose the need *and* capability to do so. Three separate things. Many misunderstand how societies adapt. 1/

"When in doubt, draw a distinction." Not sure where he got it, but in grad school one of my teachers taught me that. This (long) thread is about the key distinctions I rely on as a critic. There's a Twitter version from 2021. This one builds on that one. I will post them one at a time. Ready?

"Luchs speaks five languages: English, French, Italian, and some German and Russian. She approached grasping Gen Z parlance like she was learning another language. ...An Instagram commenter wrote: 'She’s so natural with it too like it’s not even cringe.'"

TFW you realize in the longue duree historians will view the fall of the Soviet and US empires as basically taking place simultaneously

Weekend timeline cleanse! A #Greek rhyton in the shape of a #dog's head. 🐕🐶 Vessels such as this were used in drinking parties. Since they didn't have a base, their contents had to be consumed before the vessel could be put down Dating ca. 475 BC. 📷 Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia 🏺

Early modern women writing in books! An online resource. #earlymodern #Renaissance 🗃

Love this from Guillermo del Toro

Tom Lehrer remains among the most insightful commentators on contemporary politics, which is saying something since he hasn't engaged in political commentary since 1972. Hope he's enjoying his 97th (!) birthday. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAwh...

Do not fuck with pasta in January

The story was always already about an impoverished unmarried couple facing a pitiless bureaucracy, having a baby in a barn, and then having to hide from a tyrant. The baby grew up to say that the poor were blessed and the neighbor is he who shows mercy. You can’t hide from the politics of all that.

THIS THIS THIS. ALL OF THIS THIS is why faculty resist technological strategies for teaching. There is no engaging with Edtech without this context

DEVIL: You shall stay forever young, but this picture of you will bear the marks of your sin! DORIAN: Can I hide it? DEVIL: Well, yes, but— DORIAN: And there are no other consequences? DEVIL: This… This picture will become so foul! DORIAN: Again, probably I’ll hide the picture.

Good riddance.

What's an insult you'll never forget?

Freaking love this city and all the people in it so much….a bunch of people went and turned the 4 train into the Polar Express giving out toys to kids along the way from the Bronx to Brooklyn….shoutout to the @newyorkers.live account on IG for doing this 🙏 www.instagram.com/reel/DSnsvWS...

The haunting Carol of the Bells song may be best known to Western audiences from the Christmas film Home Alone. But it started as Kyiv's political message to the world a century ago — one that still resonates today.

t’s obvious the artist had never seen a real dragon

Space news is the best. Like, what do you mean there's a runaway supermassive black hole 10 million times bigger than the sun moving through space at 2 million miles per hour www.space.com/astronomy/bl...

Happy 100th birthday Dick Van Dyke!

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

I would like the phrase and concept of "common decency" to make a comeback

What fun. The seven minutes you didn’t know you needed.

Prime Minister of Poland. 🇵🇱

Having imagined what this painting would look like for years (based on the engraving), it is so amazing to see it come to light. Marvelous work, and given crazy art world prices for some works recently (Klimt), what a relative deal. apnews.com/article/fran...

“…students must be comfortable and adept at grasping new concepts. This requires a flexible intelligence, driven by curiosity. Perhaps this is why the unemployment rate for recent art-history graduates is half that of recent computer-science grads.”

This is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Marriage A-la-Mode, Plate V: The Death of the Earl, by Simon François Ravenet, after William Hogarth, 1745, 📸 by @evanvucci

JOB POSTING! Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Rare Books and Prints at the @folger.edu amherst.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/FSL_Em...

Nowhere in the hysterical pile-on against the BBC in the British press has anyone mentioned that BBC News now has 77 million viewers & listeners in the US and has established itself as the second most trusted news source there.

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

He doesn’t miss a beat.

damn that’s french as hell

We rounded up some of our favorite Sandwich Guy puns for you, because it’s Friday and we so seldom get nice things.

I learned a lot about Nancy Pelosi this week — including her very early advocacy for AIDS patients. She visited them in SF General’s AIDS ward and convinced the Reagan administration to allow the AIDS Memorial Quilt to be displayed on the National Mall in 1987. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/u...

The President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, PPFP, has been a jewel in the crown for faculty development and recruitment at the University of California for years and the results have been an expanded faculty with almost 100% tenure rates — unprecedented success.

A really good one from @artbutmakeitsports.bsky.social

Any day looking slowly and closely at a Chardin is a good day. And we all need more of those. Thanks @peterpaulrubens.bsky.social !

A House of Dynamite is the best film in years on nuclear war. You may think the risks are small, but even a small danger, multiplied over a number of years, sums to an unacceptable chance of nuclear annihilation. My thoughts on the film, below, and this short 🧵. newrepublic.com/article/2016...

My new op-ed is out today in TIME: Trump’s Campaign to Defund the Arts—and Rewrite History. It’s about the systematic assault on America’s cultural institutions—and why it matters.