Tim Watson

Trolling works, though. No amount of evidence will count. I look up from scheduling our English courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare, English Literature to 1800, and the Bible as Literature to see that our distinguished colleague from Yale is the Main Character on Bluesky for the second day in a row.

Of course our distinguished colleague Dr. Morris is trolling us. "The data are what the data are...objective reasoning is an important skill," as he says, but he needs no data and no reasoning to assert the "abandonment of the western canon" by humanities faculty.

An excellent article that puts Miccosukee and Seminole sovereignty and environmental protection at the center of the Florida detention center story—with a pretty good history lesson too.

thank you from South Florida for reporting and writing this excellent piece in these grim times

As a fellow dual UK/US citizen, I'm so relieved you finally got the document you need, but I can't believe it took so long. Wishing you smooth travels from now on.

Several archaeologists wearing high-vis vests excavating graves. In the background an excavator stands amongst piles of earth. Excavation at the post-Roman cemetery at Worth Matravers cemetery (credit: Lilian Ladle).

NEW West African ancestry in #medieval England? 🏺 #Archaeology
DNA analysis of two unrelated individuals from two seventh-century-AD cemeteries uncovers the first evidence for genetic connections between Britain and Africa during the Early Middle Ages.

#AntiquityThread 1/10 🧵

📷 Lilian Ladle

I feel like we should be talking more about Katie Wilson winning the Seattle mayoral primary against the incumbent Dem.

She and Mamdani are both transit advocates, both raced buses on foot recently, so it would be great to see them endorse each other on the Link light rail and the NYC subway.

Miller shows that Trump's overwhelming support among Miami Cubans sits alongside his appeal to old school South Florida white supremacy (this is the South after all)

A more genteel version of this bigotry was the joke I was told both before and after moving to Miami in 2005: "a great thing about Miami is how easy it is to get to the United States from there".

Back in the 70s and 80s there were bumper stickers here that read "will the last American to leave Miami please bring the flag".

"Why do we need to have 'Little Havana'?" asks the person who grew up in South Florida.

not the same issue, but my post was prompted by this one resurfaced by @aluckmann.bsky.social today

I wanted to rent a minivan at the huge MIA Avis location, but all minivans were sold out. (Had ICE rented them all?) But when I returned the gross SUV I had to rent instead, I noticed more than a hundred new minivans lined up end-to-end in the garage at the Avis car return lot. Can anyone explain?

A family is interviewed at the Cuban refugee centre circa 1965. Photograph: Cuban Heritage Collection/University of Miami Libraries The photograph appeared in the Guardian on August 10, 2025 as part of an article about the reopening of the Freedom Tower in downtown Miami that served as a refugee center for Cubans in the 1960s

a brutal contrast to the welcome Cuban refugees received in Miami in the 1960s, as documented in the Freedom Tower exhibit in downtown Miami reported in the Guardian today

this was one of the key reasons for us as volume editors to opt out of CUP's LLM training, because even though contributors each had individual contracts for their articles, they were not contacted by the press or included in discussions about the book being used in CUP's AI collaborations.

Same story in Miami. bsky.app/profile/carl...

I'm pretty sure my dad was the person who gave me my copy of it (long ago)!

As someone who grew up in Britain with an edition of Judith Butcher's Copy-Editing on the family bookshelves (my dad was a publisher) and who later moved to the US and worked as a copy editor, this thread makes me happy.

My upcoming term on my university's faculty senate suddenly seems a bit more weighty than it did before.

Hilariously, magically, and appropriately (given that I'm writing about them), a volunteer seedling mango tree has sprung up in the pot in which I planted some of the London Plane seedlings (presumably from a mango seed in the compost I added to the soil).

A global nano-forest on our patio.

Maybe JHU Press feeding its books into AI will create a doom loop when the machines try to parse Of Grammatology

The other major funding for Florida Digital Newspaper Library came from Florida's Library Services and Technology grant program, but this fiscal year 2/3 of funding for that program came from IMLS, so who knows if that will survive next year. Destroying the past in the name of a return to the past.

me, an academic: CAA = College Art Association

it's a kind of invisible shared elite background that doesn't need to be made explicit in the 1990s: "South Beach" is here but not "Berkeley"; Molly Bloom is here but not Harold Bloom.

Would Vogue's assistants in the 1990s have become "cultured" while they were college students, whether in formal courses or otherwise? But the university as a place or an idea or as people doesn't itself feature on the list (I'm guessing Donna Shalala and Angela Davis aren't on here as academics).

I grew up less than 50 miles from Lakenheath, I protested the deployment of US nuclear weapons to Molesworth nearby in the 1980s, but this is the first time I've heard of this accident.

"Maybe it’s time to confront an uncomfortable truth: A lot of us are exactly who Donald Trump believes that we are."—Tressie McMillan Cottom, 2025.

"Make no mistake, a tiny bit of all of us is also somewhere inside the Thatcherite project."—Stuart Hall, 1987.

a screenshot of text excerpted from a bullet pointed list of items that Reuse Planet/Repurpose Project in Gainesville, Florida will not accept as donations. The text of items not accepted includes: "Christmas decor (exceptions for fake trees, lights, animatronic Santa, etc.) Coaxial cables Computer printers Cords/cables Cribs Cubicles Cursed Items Drawer slides (exceptions for big beefy heavy duty ones at Renovator) Hazardous waste*"

shout out to Reuse Planet in Gainesville for being a generally awesome place to buy and to give just about everything, but also for refusing to accept "cursed items" as donations, so important in these cursed times

My current research would literally not be possible without the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, housed and supported by the University of Florida Libraries, with foundational funding from NEH and IMLS, both of which have now been destroyed. newspapers.uflib.ufl.edu/overview