Orel Beilinson

I love this article from 🇮🇸 (1945): it celebrates the technology that finally allows them the "delight" of "getting new flowers to decorate one's home during deep winter" & "sending a bouquet as a token of friendship"—but at a cost: 5.5 kr. for a tulip that lasts 4 days [=a worker's day's wage!]

This school in Berlin held a drawing contest. The theme seems to be "my favorite place," and I absolutely love the Multikulti ones:

PSA: Historians of Habsburg Central Europe/adjacent spaces, if you write about modern nationalism, and haven't included Jeremy King's (2002) monograph or his pathbreaking chap., "The Nationalization of East Central Europe: Ethnicism, Ethnicity, and Beyond" (2001), perhaps, work on your geneology!

Yay: posted the syllabus for my first-ever grad seminar, "Global History: Approaches and Recent Studies."

A friend challenged me to clear as many Duolingo courses as I can (by skipping to the highest level) - Duolingo must be trolling me on purpose then:

(It's also funny that reaching the highest level in Italian and Polish requires talking about religion, but in Spanish: football.)

I wondered why the Berlin State Library only has seemingly random volumes of this Soviet journal on higher education: 1950 part 1, 1954, and 1957 part 2. Inside, I found an order slip from the Central Polytechnical University, I suppose in Russia: how did the volumes get to Berlin?

Grandpa's new job advice: "No one wants to learn about Marx. Some people want to learn about Lenin. Everyone wants to learn about Stalin! Teach Stalin! Do not teach uninteresting things!"

His sensibility clearly reflect his positionality -- born in Moscow in 1941 and studied medicine -- and yet...

She explains why Russians buy fewer luxury goods: "People are no longer so eager to seem rich and successful[...]. We became focused on real values: family, warm relationships with our loved ones. This is what is becoming fashionable. So why overpay for ostentatious luxury?"

So funny

One person I particularly enjoy reading (with the necessary irony) in the Russian public sphere these days is "family psychologist Anna Devyatka," who has one of the most difficult jobs one can have: coming up with an explanation for every social change that will be flattering to Putin. Here /1

Nachtmahr used to be the German word for nightmare: an evil spirit (mare) plaguing your nights. Now it is Albtraum ("elf dream"), lest you forget the elf squatting on your chest to spoil your dreams. A pan-Eurasian experience: from karabasan in Turkish to painajainen in Finnish, 'evil squeezing'!

Reading now. So far, it is pretty amazing.

I cannot think of a single paper topic that would be enhanced by an AI-generated photo

I would have *loved* to see a 1930s exhibition about the "contribution to knowledge made by women." I don't think it came to fruition though.

فرانسة I think

In the 1930s, there was work toward a Hague Convention on Nationality to codify and regulate the right to citizenship. The International Federation of University Women petitioned the League of Nations to ensure that women wouldn't be compromised, not least by marital status:

I am slowly making my way through a 1907 Japanese report about the Habsburg colonization of Bosnia. That's how I learned the term 山林, often 'forestland' but literally 'forests and mountaints.' Reminded me of montes in Spanish: mountain, but also forest (and, in Mexico, desert!)

I know of two explanations: One is that عاهن here should mean 'present, immediate,' so على عواهنه would mean something like 'he said whatever came to his mind, whatever was presently on his mind.' The other interprets عاهن as "lazy," "weak," or "broken," and thus "unbridled" or "unrestrained" speech

I guess I am too much of a Europeanist after all. Listening to David Shulman on a Tamil version of the famous Arabian Nights story, it took me way too long to realize he's been talking about the City of Copper (usually translated Brass) and not Koper, in Slovenia.

Very excited about next year's classes!

Israel now has a nationwide ranking of journals, local and international, for university budgeting purposes. It is ridiculously clear what fields the committee comprised: some of the best European history journals are ranked B, the lowest-tier, but a French-lang journal of Jewish Studies is A+. LOL!

Holly Case, _The Age of Questions_!

Now that everything is signed, I am very happy to share that starting in October, I will be a tenure-track lecturer of modern European and Global History at Bar-Ilan University. Looking forward to teaching broadly: thematically and geographically.

It's so difficult finding out what a novel is about from book reviews in 19th-century newspapers, as they are invariably either "he understands the immutable Serbian soul completely and renders it beautifully" or "boring, false, at times disgusting; the author is likely in fact crypto-Austrian."

Science laboratory at a secondary school in Damascus, circa 1929:

The proto-lesson-plan: this pedagogical journal from interwar Syria printed a script of a (fake) classroom conversation for teachers to emulate, in this case, for teaching the properties of sugar in elementary school. Pretty cool.

YouTube video by SUPRAPHON Leona Machálková - Zatmění (Total Eclipse Of The Heart)

There's a party right below my hotel, part of Berlin Pride, and they are singing "A Total Eclipse of the Heart" as an English-French duet. Do you think they'll be willing to make it a trio if I offer them the Czech version?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=28Cy...

Loved visiting Alte Welt Sıraltı in Berlin -- formerly an Eckkneipe, a round-the-clock working-class pub; today a Biergarten + Turkish restaurant. Being able to speak Turkish afforded me not stories of long years in Germany but jury duty in the couple's argument, but great fish!

In 1970, the Slovene director Matjaž Klopčič released a film called Oxygen that takes place in an independent state ruled by hippies and '68ers. Are there any equivalent attempts to describe such "utopias" or, in this case, utopias sliding into dystopias, especially so early after 1968?

I won't be using it, I think! But it's much better decoration that the cheap "old maps" they sell near the universities...

Today, I received a German textbook for North(!) Korean from a librarian whose acquaintance I made in Berlin, who thought I "was weird enough to actually find that appealing." True and thanks.