Look at this noble, furry creature sitting on an issue of The New Yorker

From a letter of recommendation I've just sent off: "______ is that rarity of rarities: a born researcher, a subtle thinker, a curious mind, a scholar of the highest ethics, and—perhaps rarest of all—a pre-modernist." 😀 #premodern

Please enjoy this moment of quacky levity, brief respite for trying times

Just inhaled The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, on the heels of reading There Are Rivers in the Sky. Both dark _and_ life-affirming, the ideal antidotes/escapes for the current moment :-/ More of this, so please share recs

"We envision a resistance that is...a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction." "How to Resist AI in Education" by me & @cnygren.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...

Compare the statement about the antisemitic terror attack in Australia by the Israeli Prime Minister with the one by Zohran Mamdani, and ask yourself who more truly cares about condemning antisemitism, as opposed to using it to promote unrelated politics.

No one warned me that embroidering was addictive. I’ve quit my academic gig — this is my full time job now

UMass-Amherst is hiring “a specialist in the visual arts, architecture, and/or material culture of the Islamic world” ! careers.umass.edu/amherst/en-u...

Bummed that I’m gonna have to report this student for submitting work that is not their own

Does it make sense for a Mamluk-era manuscript of juz' 16 to open with Q18:57 rather than Q18:75? Sharing the opening pages here.

Does anyone I know have an image of documenta XV (2022)? Ideally one showing after artworks were taken down??

The job market for human-type ministers will now tank

Here's an 11th-century Jewish manuscript that refers to God as Allah and wishes for the reader to have "jihad of his soul in love for his Creator"

As a visibly Jewish person, I always know that going to a synagogue means assuming a certain degree of risk. But now I know that if something were to happen to me, it wouldn't just be sad for my family, but people would try to exploit my death to push policies I deplore.

When I’m accused of “technopessimism“ I counter that I’m not “pessimistic about technology“; I am opposed to the economic, political, and social project of upward wealth transfer that “AI” is being leveraged to bring about. If that phrasing is useful to others, then go ahead and use it.

Lol, I was going to joke that they probably conducted the AI analysis using a photograph only (which would be absurd given that paintings demand first-hand study, examination of materials, support, etc), and then I visited the AI co.’s website & saw this on the front page:

I grew up in Florida, still have lots of family down there, but Bugs was right

Excited to share my friend/colleague Melissa Kerin’s hot off the press @hyperallergic.com piece on Tibetan Buddhist museum shrine rooms. It’s likely to ruffle some feathers of our curator colleagues, but it needed to be said hyperallergic.com/1038180/the-...

Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.

My first concert was the Violent Femmes. I was 13.

good morning happy back to school to all who celebrate, happy one week of summer left to all the syllabus scramblers, happy grr to the quarter system people, here's some help for all of us in the college classroom against-a-i.com

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

Considering getting this passage from the NYT article printed on totes for our art history majors. Too much?

Amherst College is hiring a full-time lecturer of architectural design, candidates should have an M.Arch or equivalent and ideally bring experience teaching arch design studios in a small liberal arts college setting apply.interfolio.com/171730

Please vote for @stephenniem.bsky.social’s Gaming Islamic History panel to be featured at the next SXSW! While gaming is well represented among the slate of panel options, Islamic gaming (indeed ANYTHING having to do with Islam) is not.

If you're in the vicinity of Middletown CT on September 16, come on out to this public lecture I'll be giving at Wesleyan (and if you're not there but ARE in Boston, I'll be giving it again at Tufts the following week). I'd love to see folks there! www.wesleyan.edu/cfa/events/2...

Amherst College is hiring a full-time lecturer of architectural design, candidates should have an M.Arch or equivalent and ideally bring experience teaching arch design studios in a small liberal arts college setting apply.interfolio.com/171730

Peth Hegseth has announced that the Arlington Confederate Monument - or, as I call it, the Monument to the Myth of the Loyal Slave - will be reinstalled after its 2023 removal. Here's why that's a huge insult to Black Americans, past and present.

Many congrats to the award recipients, but worth also underscoring the fact that the awardee projects are largely limited to to U.S., Greco-Roman antiquity, Shakespeare, and AI.

📣 College professors -- We can choose to not comply with authoritarianism. We should reject state infringement on our classrooms. It must articulate, precisely, what we value. For me, I introduced offense statements on syllabi a few years back. I'll keep them this academic year. #humanities

Zuckerberg farted out some nonsense today, and since most media outlets refuse to report critically any time a tech CEO offers them some a pseudoserious press release, I've decided to do it for them. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/7/30/how-to-read-an-ai-press-release

NYPL fellowship to use their Islamic Studies/Middle East/N. Africa-related collections: networks.h-net.org/jobs/68904/n...

Awesome new tenure-track position posted at Middlebury: early modern Mediterranean art history plus digital art history/digital humanities/data #dh #dah #earlymodern apply.interfolio.com/170982

This is so brilliant and intersectional, and I love that they’re utilizing title vi for this purpose!

This week my university announced its proud partnership with the ADL. I feel safe already.

Anyone have a contact with COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories) in Israel? Trying to help someone who's been admitted to a U.S. uni but has been unable to get COGAT approval to leave. (Please feel free to contact me privately.)

Food people: is Scottish tablet basically the same thing as barfi? Is there any historical connection between the two?

Universities should be the places rapidly raising the alarm about AI, not adopting it

This is absolutely amazing, not least the way that the amicus brief turns Title VI on its head. The authors are 100% correct: universities and colleges have no business adjudicating who or what is authentically Jewish.

This accords with my sense that SLACs like Williams will be among the few higher ed. institutions in the U.S. that will be able to reject these strings-attached federal grants & still get by. Now is the time for well-resourced SLACs to step up and be among the vanguard.

Western writers have long hesitated to call Byzantium what it was: the Roman Empire. Historian Anthony Kaldellis calls this “Roman denialism” & has spent years critiquing it. Now he takes the fight to a popular audience. By Luka Ivan Jukić in @newlinesmag.bsky.social newlinesmag.com/essays/overc...

That time I presented a paper at a Rubens conference at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp and didn’t get booed off the stage 😀 Was so lovely to be there in springtime with old friends and new colleagues!

It's nice to see elected representatives visiting their constituents who have been detained by ICE but may I respectfully suggest university presidents consider doing the same

As dictated by custom, Pope Francis lies in state on…an Iranian carpet.

It’s gotten so bad in the US that I, a Jew, have taken to masking the word “antisemitism” in emails and texts with colleagues. I do this to protect others from a federal administration bent on destroying higher ed on “behalf of Jews,” and also to protect myself. Are we safer yet?

Persian #etymology of the day: عید پاک ʿeyd-e pāk "Easter", from Arabic ʿīd "feast, holiday" (from Aramaic or Syriac ʿīḏā) + French Pâques "Easter", from Latin pascha < Greek πάσχα páskha < Aramaic פסחא pasḥā < Hebrew פסח pesaḥ "Passover". Happy Easter!

Copyright protection under 17 U.S. Code § 105 is not available for any work of the United States Government. The White House is the People’s House. Content for every @WhiteHouse is in the public domain, never copyrighted with “All Rights Reserved.” Small stuff vs human rights violations, but BS.

Hey look it's a postdoctoral position to study the codicology of middle-eastern manuscripts in Leiden: www.universiteitleiden.nl/vacatures/20...