We've invented a dangerous game of chicken in my house in which we keep deferring when we open Christmas presents. "After lunch? Oh, how about after dinner? After this movie?" Current record is Dec. 29.

Happy Christmas! 🎄🎅 'Christmas day is one of great importance to the men: the whole of it has been given up to revelry, at present there is not a sober man in the ship' - Charles Darwin, 25 December 1831. 🍾 thedispersalofdarwin.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/c... #Christmas #histsci #histbio 🗃️

Christmas Eve, Philly.

Christmas Eve, Philly.

Exactly and more. When I was a student blue book exams were the dullest; they felt actively anti-intellectual. Research papers were the deep pleasure and substance of learning; I wouldn’t be a writer or a professor now without them. But they’re most vulnerable to the LLM plague,

How do you pronounce this word - ACADEME - bc either it's not pronounced like it's spelled or it is literally never pronounced

This is the real War on Christmas.

Facebook, Instagram, X are simply banned in Russia. No US outrage about free speech there—yet the EU is the target. That contrast says a lot.

I like being an uncle for the holidays because: Mom and dad are responsible, and will discipline you. Grandpa and Grandma are indulgent, and will coddle you. But the uncle... the uncle is unpredictable. The niece and nephew cannot know what the uncle will do, because the soul of the uncle is CHAOS

Not crazy, exactly, but I did stumble onto a letter from Confederate president Jefferson Davis' wife in the Valentine Museum archives in Richmond once in which she explained that her husband kept his famous neckbeard ("the little fringe") as a kind of natural muffler to keep his throat warm.

Just going to leave this here.

Central Eastside, Buckman, Portland, OR #pdx #murals #streetart

Of all the birds who've had to sit through Epsom salt foot soaks for bumblefoot infections, Xander is just the best. He doesn't try to jump out. He doesn't poop in the bath - having to end it early. 😂 And we play peek-a-boo while he soaks. #chicken #kaporossurvivors #starlandsanctuary

Thriftstore find of the year.

The fact that overt (as opposed to dog whistle) antisemitism was at least partially taboo on the US right post-WWII, compared to, say, racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia, which were always entirely acceptable, is precisely why antisemitism is how the young right is proving how transgressive it is.

Trump did lots of weird stuff in 2025. But if you ask me the biggest thing is killing around a million people. Several hundred thousand kids. Nobody really knows how many, and I doubt he even knows he did it at all www.cgdev.org/blog/update-...

Religious studies folks, a request: I'm writing some text for a public-facing description of our department. (Literally public-facing--on the wall outside our office.) How would you explain what religious studies is about to passing students in a way that would make their ears perk up?

whew

Who among us hasn't been tempted to grow a little neckbeard to stave off laryngitis?

Scratch a Campus Free Speecher, find a state censor

Not crazy, exactly, but I did stumble onto a letter from Confederate president Jefferson Davis' wife in the Valentine Museum archives in Richmond once in which she explained that her husband kept his famous neckbeard ("the little fringe") as a kind of natural muffler to keep his throat warm.

UPDATE: This matter has been resolved thanks to some inspo from @adjb.co

If you voted for Trump, for a third party candidate, or didn’t vote, this is what you voted for. Watch it:

If there’s one part of the Constitution and its Amendments that everyone in the US understands and holds sacred, it’s the First Amendment. Free speech may be the only value we all agree on. If you tell us something was censored, no matter what it is, we will trip over our feet running to see it.

Hello Bruno!

New Forbidden Course at Bari Weiss’s University of Austin: watching bootleg copies of 60 Minutes smuggled in from Canada

Filling out some grad student worksheets today, learned that Jawaharlal Nehru University has two academic terms: Winter (W) and Monsoon (M).

UPDATE: This matter has been resolved thanks to some inspo from @adjb.co

AI is often sold as 'do something you already know how to do more efficiently' but is often bought as 'do something you don't know how to do with no idea if you are doing it efficiently at all'

for my PhD exams I spent months reading 300+ books in European intellectual history, modern European history, modern Jewish history, medieval Jewish history, and critical theory. There is a huge difference between the style of reading that accommodates this, and having a computer "summarize" books.

"Get the principals on camera" is such a telling phrase here, because it tells us that for Weiss there's no world in which the victims of these horrific actions can actually be seen as the subjects of the story: They're background noise, and the people who matter are the ones sending them.

Funny, that's my response to anyone who says the US is a "Christian country"

Religious studies folks, a request: I'm writing some text for a public-facing description of our department. (Literally public-facing--on the wall outside our office.) How would you explain what religious studies is about to passing students in a way that would make their ears perk up?

"We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera." Indeed: That's not how it works! You can't make a political figure comment! And an office *not* commenting can send a message unto itself. Also, you don't just ignore a *major*, ongoing story because others have covered it.

Welcome to 60 Minutes. Our top story tonight is Snakes: Nature’s Spaghetti

CBS News chief Bari Weiss pulls 60 Minutes story Weiss said investigation had to include comments from Trump administration 60M's ⁦‪Sharyn Alfonsi‬⁩ said multiple US agencies refused to comment - and this lets WH veto coverage My NPR story www.npr.org/2025/12/22/g...

He's making a list He's making a spreadsheet He's making a database He's trying to find the best CRM software for his use case Santa Claus would like to add you to his professional network on LinkedIn

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Nah, I think he took sides pretty clearly.

After New York public schools began locking up students' smartphones, kids rediscovered hobbies and human interaction

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

Convalescent weekend after having all his teeth extracted this week.

truly amazing how many different professions there are where everyone’s newest persistent headache is “AI zealots high on their own supply”

I don’t know how anyone can still talk about “the AI revolution” with a straight face. Reuters story about a railroad company that has sunk $300,000 into “developing AI products” and appears to have made…a chatbot that doesn’t work? archive.is/2025.12.17-0...

Convalescent weekend after having all his teeth extracted this week.

man, the director's cut of Until the End of the World is like 5 hours, you really feel like the director shouldn't have been able to indulge his every Wim

The Gen Z "Richard Spencer gets punched in the face" meme is born

The Shining is a New Year's movie

Yeah I have FOMO F.un O.n M.y O.wn

"New York Governor Kathy Hochul signs RAISE Act to regulate AI safety." techcrunch.com/2025/12/20/n...