Do you (or does someone in your network) want to tour New York City's book world with me on a "study abroad - at home!" trip next May? We'll be going to the Morgan Library, Grolier Club, Christie's book department, and the NYPL (the one with the lions) and a few other places I'm still looking into!

An important factor here is administrative bloat that creates a whole tranche of staff who need to justify their jobs by creating rafts of busywork for faculty that we (rightly) resent, and exacerbates their sense that we are a bunch of obstreperous heel-draggers

Another thing this reveals is the seemingly universal attitude among Higher Ed admins that faculty are inimical or irrelevant to the achievement of the mission. The bunker mentality that leaves the faculty as the disloyal opposition is beyond me.

Today’s Wheatley Census mystery: are there really no copies of the 1773 first edition in France? Published in London in 1773 and distributed, in part, through Methodist networks of Selina Hastings, there are copies all over the UK. But none in France?

Are there really no 1773 first editions of Poems on Various Subjects in France? And if so, why? ⬇️

1) An administrative burden party is a brilliant idea. 2) This mundane crap is the stuff AI *should* be helping us with for a happier and more productive society, but capital prefers to weaponize it against us, including to make bureaucratic mazes more confusing and impenetrable.

What is the Wheatley Census number and how can you use them? ⬇️

This - the Wheatley Census - has been at the center of my research life for the last year (and a half, honestly)! Proud to finally share the first iteration of it publicly. Take a look. Poke around. And send me your info about copies you work with!

Gonna be a huge day of class solidarity for plutocrats.

WE JUST KEEP WINNING. (UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program RESTORED!!!!)

What is the Wheatley Census number and how can you use them? ⬇️

The vast body of research that Ken Burns relied upon to make his new documentary on the American Revolution would be practically impossible to be produced today, what with the defunding of humanistic scholarship, the collapse of stable academic jobs, the attack on public history & academic freedom.🗃️

i'd say it did. the public put a group of thieves, vandals and extremists in office last november and they promptly went about destroying everything that might work to limit their ability to loot, steal and inflicting pain on the people they hate

In a few months I hope to have things to share about the bibliography of the 1st edition. Stoddard described 2 states of the text and two of the engraving, and some local records indicate what they have. We could re-shape the data structure & get community info to discern what ppl have & show that.

I have LOTS of stories to tell about individual copies that I learned/put together from tracking down copies and figuring out what's up with them. Also things I could only know by structuring data about them. I plan to share those stories on here every now and again!

When Scott Enderle <https://pricelab.sas.upenn.edu/news/jonathan-scott-enderle-1979-2021> and I were building the Shakespeare Census, one of the first things he insisted on was making it open and easily adaptable for others. I'm so pleased to his hard work on that part of the project bearing fruit.

This - the Wheatley Census - has been at the center of my research life for the last year (and a half, honestly)! Proud to finally share the first iteration of it publicly. Take a look. Poke around. And send me your info about copies you work with!

UCLA is *us*: Faculty, students, and staff. Not administrators.

Last one I did as an interviewee was in 2018!

reminded of eric williams's observation about britain's relationship to its history with slavery. "British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it."

<walks into the ocean>

I am SO close to sharing something I’ve been working on for a long time!

Professors at Texas A&M required to obtain prior approval from administration to discuss this half of football in class.

Please let Gideon Ituka be okay.

This piece has started a really great conversation about how we understand and deploy histories around emerging technologies. And I think it’s a great time to revisit Carey’s “Historical Pragmatism and the Internet.”

“The nation’s largest public funder of the humanities appears to be transforming into a vehicle narrowly tailored to the president’s agenda. “ www.nytimes.com/2025/11/15/a...

WE WON. I am *begging* you to take note of who did this. *Not* UCLA admin—they’re still scuttling around behind closed doors, attempting to appease—but FACULTY AND STAFF, led by AAUP.

Far wiser to trash everything we believe in, everything we go to work to do every day, in favor of the possibility of a tenuous and temporary stay of execution.

The irony here is that academics don’t just write the articles for free—we also referee and edit for them for free. Something is deeply broken. “New Zealand's eight universities spent $30-million a year on journal licences and about half of that sum went to Elsevier. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

this is *precisely* the energy our vichy admin has brought to every statement, every meeting, every question they even deign to consider: they view us as children who need to shut up already & let the grownups deal with the big scary world by abjectly surrendering to it

Getting very tired of the tech bros making their inability to grapple with mortality everyone else's problem.

Friends! In May '26 I am leading "A Librarians' Tour of New York" through our Continuing Ed program. Think of it like Study Abroad - At Home! If you're interested in touring NY's amazing book & library world (Grolier, NYPL, Met Museum Lib, Morgan Library & more) w/ me please have a look & sign up!

If you spend any amount of time around elementary or middle school boys you'll know why mine was VERY ENTHUSIASTIC to see this picture of me wearing my football jersey in high school.

In a crushing blow to the Buffalo City Mission Thanksgiving food drive the incentive to donate frozen turkeys is Sabres tickets.

Madison, Wisconsin. Tenney Park Beach looking out over Lake Mendota.

I asked about this, and one of our excellent librarians discovered that in fact AI summaries/"Research Assistant" can be switched off at the level of the library. Something to request. support.proquest.com/s/article/Eb...

A couple years ago I worked on 12 grants in my role as a task force director at the Library of Congress. This year, zero. We are going to lose a lot of our public memory. Which is at the crux of fascistic mobilization.

Teaching today was fun, but chaotic!

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. " www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

best review I've read in ages: "I bought the typewriter to write a book. Copilot kept changing what I wrote without permission. After turning it off and it turning itself back on a few times along with word wanting to save everything to the 'cloud' I went old school." #othernetworks

You know what has brought my kid alive as a reader this year? His teacher introduced POETRY. "Mom! Dad! Have you guys even heard of ROBERT FROST?"

books don’t require subscriptions and licenses

When I first started teaching as a humanist in an information school 14 years ago I often found myself up late the night before class doing the reading and praying I could stay 1 week ahead of the students. Now I’m up the night before praying that circuit diagram theory works in practice.

do the highest reaches of literary studies know about this, for instance www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston...

76 summary executions.