In the late 1970s, Carolyn Lougee of Stanford was doing early digital history work, creating a database of her research. In 1980, Stanford's IT dept *erased* her database. #Oops. And they couldn't restore it. (how do I know this? from a paper archive at Stanford. don't just worship the digital!) 🗃️

i am now entering the holiday charcuterie zone. time for five days of little meat bites.

I will never get tired of photos of octopuses looking at you suspiciously. 🐙📷Lawrence Hylton (inaturalist.ca/observations...)

I basically arrived at my dissertation topic while chasing a citation chain where no one seemed to know the OG primary source for.

It’s also a basic skill in the humanities, at least! Surely, we can all agree that it’s not okay for a professional history association to tell us it’s fine if we offload/bypass this fundamental step/basic skill by using LLM generated summaries of books and articles to begin ‘critical engagement’

I just spent six years writing a book. I learned how to use archives, how to handle secondary sources, how to structure a 140k-word argument. I fell so hard in love I went back to school for a PhD. Now people ask how I use LLMs to write or summarize and I can only think “You don’t value what I do.”

Anyway, I read all of these anti-AI posts in academia as love letters to our disciplines. And that, at least, gives me joy in a weary world. So thank you.

Academia needs to fall back in love with manually writing out footnotes. And if you never fell out of love with that practice, that’s just super.

if you don't have time to read the things you cite, then you don't have time to do scholarship. quit flooding the zone with garbage.

I know this isn't what it is doing. I know. But I'm just so tired of having conversations with people who think what it is doing is anything remotely like what we do with our own minds when we think and create. That's what scares me. Not what it can do, but how little people think of what WE can do.

Many people in tech participate in a long history of denying embodiment, which is why I so frequently post Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBWx...

i love my little Pluribus program

Wow so we actually know the name of the guy who is ACTIVELY destroying the functionality of Microsoft office. It's a damn christmas miracle.

I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.

a profound ethical and intellectual failure on the part of the AHA @historians.org an absolute betrayal of everything that historians value and the value they bring to society.

getting ready to dive in. thanks @lollardfish.bsky.social and @profgabriele.com for keeping me intellectual company

You know this is spam because it’s not asking you to do 10 different tasks to become a “vendor” of the university to get paid. Also, ugh.

I just saw someone yell “they’re just using it to generate ideas!” And I hate to say it But if you work in the ART DEPARTMENT and you need a death machine stuffed with your colleagues’ work to give you ideas Quit.

ugh this Jake Paul fight is pissing me off.

If you need to use pre-minced garlic or pre-cut fruits and veggies, or literally anything else that makes cooking more accessible to you, you are no less of a person and your food still tastes good. Don’t let ableist people make you question your worth.

glad I could “game the system” at DFW last month while awaiting total hip replacemnt surgery. F these Fing ableist Fs

Wake Up Dead Man was absolutely delightful.

i was especially struck by these paragraphs, which rang very true to me. libs who grew up around conservatives aren't embarrassed to be liberals--or confused about what conservatives want. there's a certain kind of elite media man, on the other hand--

I know some people may have thought the purpose of scholarship was to create and refine better understandings of the world while winnowing and weeding out incorrect and obsolete ideas, but what if we just gave all the ideas equal time all the time instead of discarding the dumb and immoral ones?

the Eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the Everlasting Arms

The truth gleams like the bones of angel

this film was an absolute triumph and the fact that it didn’t walk out of there with every Oscar is an utter travesty

any chance they can actually make the software work? i mean, i am not thrilled for China to have the floorplan of my house, but I will overlook it if they can make this damn thing consistently find the living room every time

Oh.

cc @dennowayne.bsky.social I remember this one from senior year

Please read our text

loooooook at these gorgeous whole peaches from Spain that Mr. B picked up at Costco.

frickin helter skelter ass year

boy it didn't seem like it could get worse and then it did

O, horrible, O, horrible, most horrible!

“The LA Fire Department said a man and a woman were found deceased inside, approximately 78 and 68 years old.” Rob Reiner is 78. His wife, Michele Singer, is in her 60s. www.nbclosangeles.com/investigatio...

whatever the details turn out to be, this is absolutely horrible

Man, it feels like there haven't been holy days this rough since the Bible.

I believe these spots ran on Captain Kangaroo. They scared my little sister.

Reading Railroad

I want to go to this and write about it for someone who would like to read that

This is the entire thing

true, but one must be specific here: this is a FRENCH academic writing the review. American academics are just petty; by comparison, European academics are just plain ferocious

this time of year I miss my uncle so much. he was in his glory at Christmastime.

Okay, this is the third sturgeon-related post I have seen on my feed this morning. One about California sturgeon, one about Great Lakes sturgeon, and one about European sturgeon. Big Sturgeon is having a moment

look at this smol living fossil!

I want to add to Daniel's excellent points here bc I've been arguing against these uses of "AI" by historians for years. What's important is this, as ever: the tech isn't the central issue; the surrounding political & economic project of its deployment is. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Thinking about one of my all-time favorite historians, CUNY grad Nick Salvatore, & what he did for cultural/political biography, radical history, Af-Am history. I am always telling folks about We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber. www.ithacavoice.org/2025/12/obituary-nick-salvatore/

What a terrible time to be a good person