Erica Buchberger

On Caribbean boat strikes, and many other things with Trump Term 2, “this didn’t come totally out of nowhere, it built on some things from the past” and “this is new, different, and worse” not only can exist simultaneously, they should.

Both true at once. It’s a mistake to treat them as either/or.

One of the major fruits of research is delight. Think of how often you’ve read about a discovery and really enjoyed it. Often the most pleasurable kind of news. Public delight isn’t discussed enough as one of the major outputs of funding research.

YouTube video by Reagan Library President Reagan's Radio Address on Free and Fair Trade on April 25, 1987

So they didn’t like the ad. Let’s just post Reagan’s 5 min speech against tariffs as it appears on YouTube.

Over and over. On all platforms (some of y’all are still on X).

*1981 Sherrilyn horrified by 2025 Sherrilyn saying “let’s post Reagan’s speech.”

youtu.be/5t5QK03KXPc

Last chance to turn it off.

On Monday, November 3rd, Microsoft will start using your LinkedIn data for AI training. And remember, you're opted in by default.

To toggle it off 👉 Account - Settings & Privacy > Data privacy > Data for Generative AI Improvement.

1. Congress has allocated money to do this work; if you fire the people doing the work it is a de facto impoundment.
2. Many people in govt do weird jobs that require specific expertise and are hard to understand. Trump admin just assumes they have no value. But closing wells in National Parks?

There's nothing new here that I haven't written about in 16 years of research on Santa Muerte. In fact, calling Santa Muerte a "bad ass" was lifted from my book without acknowledgment. #AcademicSky #SantaMuerte #Mexico

🚨🚨🚨 Major announcement!!!
I am extremely pleased to announce that HAA is searching for a senior, endowed position in premodern art or architecture. The subfield is wide open. Please spread the word and encourage curious scholars to write to me with questions! 🚨🚨🚨

cfopitt.taleo.net/careersectio...

going to be hard for trump to claim the Ds are responsible for stopping SNAP when he's literally got a court order saying he's responsible and needs to give people food.

That a federal judge had to block the Trump administration from pushing millions of Americans into hunger says everything about this President and the party he leads.

Grateful to our Attorney General for being on the frontlines of this fight.

Fantastic piece about how the rapid decline of literacy is bringing about a new Dark Ages of superstition and magical thinking.

But as Noah McCormack argues, this is a societal choice and not an inevitability.

Alabama officials want to ban naturalized citizens from holding elected office “We want to make sure that no potential foreign influence or foreign meddling could impact our state’s highest elected leaders.”

Nativist Nationalist racism (and completely against the US Constitution) in full display here. This is so dangerous. www.al.com/politics/202...

Hi, It’s Me, Wikipedia, and I Am Ready for Your Apology “Wikipedia, the constantly changing knowledge base created by a global free-for-all of anonymous users, now stands as the leading force for the dum...

Once again, @mcsweeneys.net does not miss.

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"In 2004, you saw some college guy using me and thought, 'What a lazy cheater.'

Now you’d think, 'At least he’s not asking Gemini.'

In a few years, you’ll say, 'Wow, look, a human being who can read.'"

I don’t think I have ever been this burnt out and demoralized and part of this is because institutions are not taking our concerns about the pedagogical harms of widespread and uncritical adoption of LLMs in higher education seriously.
It’s exhausting to do this without any support.

Whenever people complain about the number of folks relying on food stamps, it is worth reminding them that SNAP is, by too large of a degree, a subsidy for corporations that refuse to pay a living wage and their political allies who reject public policy prescriptions to reduce income inequality.

At what point can Johnson be fired by the people of Louisiana for failing to do his job?

See also: universities. It's coming from the institutions.

As the minority in both houses of Congress, Democrats have little institutional power. But one thing they can do is work to refuse to validate the lies, forcing Trump and the GOP to be more open about their lawbreaking, and push them to go faster instead of a slow burn that’d leave more complacent.

“If you live in a 15 minute city but your barista can’t afford to live there too, you don’t live in a 15 minute city, you live in a theme park.“

If you are voting by mail this off-year election season, then put your ballot in a box early this week.

Postal Service practices have changed to delay both the postmark and delivery date. Assume that a late ballot will not count.

@democrats.org Are you paying attention?

The New York Times’ “Moderation Advantage” Is a Statistical Illusion After accounting for money and incumbency the supposed electoral bonus for moderate candidates vanishes entirely.

NYT pushed its “Dems must go moderate” take again yesterday. In a new piece out today, @adambonica.bsky.social shows even more clearly why the data don’t support it. It also shows what a skilled empiricist and teacher Adam is.

Very proud of my pal’s public work.

open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

RFK jr urges Americans to start their car engines, wrap their mouths around their exhaust pipes, and take several deep lung refreshing inhales twice a day.

#GlobalMiddleAges #MedievalSky

dear US friends, when a sitting president (re)builds the seat of government, it almost always means the president has no intention of leaving at the end of term. your African friends with decades of experience

English Manorial Rolls In Chicago A massive, almost unstudied source at the University of Chicago

Gossip, paleography, and "a massive, almost unstudied source" in @rayclemens.bsky.social's latest post: open.substack.com/pub/raymondc... #medievalsky

Thanks! I'd love to hear what you think of it.

Thanks, Lucy! I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it.

Republicans on the Supreme Court are poised to gut the law that finally ended Jim Crow, and Southern Republicans are eager to gerrymander Black voters out of representation like it’s 1925 again

Local identity in the Lives of the Fathers of Mérida: when ethnicity and religion aren’t the point While scholarship on early medieval Europe often centers ethnicity or religion over other forms of identity, they were not always the most relevant form of identification for contemporaries. In the...

My article is in the new issue of the Jrnl of Medieval Iberian Studies. Its aims are two-fold: 1) show how this text leveraged ethnic and religious IDs to construct a local, city ID, and 2) challenge historians to *show* local ID mattered, not just assume it did. tinyurl.com/5e5arv2e #medievalsky