James A. Palmer

‘Nazi heaven’: Inside Miami campus Republicans’ racist group chat The chat is the subject of a Florida International University police investigation.

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s GOP started a group chat for conservative students — and within 3 weeks, it was filled with over 400 instances of the N-word, Nazi rhetoric and writings of "dozens of ways of violently killing Black people"

Thanks!

I don't know if it's a common name. It might be. I was not raised in an Iranian household and all I know about Iranians I learned from books. Perhaps the person I see here and I are not related at all. It doesn't matter. These are all human beings who did nothing to deserve being murdered.

Most people do not know that I am of Iranian descent. I do not carry my bio-dad's last name (and have never met him). But I often wonder about that family, and these days about how many people to whom I am linked in this odd invisible way are now in Iran. The family name is on this list.

"As AI is integrated into scientific practice, the practice of science itself is changing."

On Monday, at 1 PM, we welcome Casey Schmitt to our Ships & Seafaring Talk, where she will present her book "The Predatory Sea", a full-length study of the entangled history of captivity and colonialism using Spanish, French and English archives. Sign up here: www.eventbrite.com/e/ships-seaf...

This is a basic and crucial point for any discussion of LLMs’ use in teaching research or writing. Whether it can ape us, fool us, or get facts right or wrong is, in the end, irrelevant. The LLM is not the thinker we are trying to encourage; the LLM is not the writer that we are trying to improve.

The successful candidate will be a cross-disciplinary historian of infectious disease and historical epidemiologist whose research advances understanding of pandemics and epidemic disease across time, including how environmental and climatic forces shape patterns of transmission, vulnerability, societal response, and resilience. The appointment will foster a long-term program of scholarship and training at the interface of history, epidemiology, environmental science, and clinical infectious diseases.

JOB: Associate Professor/Professor, History of Medicine, McMaster University

Cross-appointed with Division of Infectious Diseases
universityaffairs.ca/search-jobs/...

There is a very real chance that I will never be able to spell the word rhythm.

Entirely possible that ship has already sailed.

Not just lit reviews. I get an email like this every few weeks. They are selling hard to academics to offload the analysis to make space for other work
But analysis & writing IS the work that honors the voices of intellectual ancestors, centers the participants & connects the two to to build theory

The “authorities” part is key.
Who authorizes this “death and destruction” and on what grounds?
Reminded of William Blackstone’s admonition to judges: “To shed the blood of our fellow creature is a matter that requires the greatest deliberation, and the fullest conviction of our own authority. …,”

"It is generally to punish these things, when force is required to inflict the punishment, that, in obedience to God or some lawful authority, good men undertake wars."

Seriously, Christianity furnished us rather early on with an argument for what constitutes a just war and Hegseth violates with almost every word that comes out of his mouth.

"The real evils of war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power." Augustine of Hippo

I get it now.
AI means “artificial information.”

Again: Not hyperbole, misinterpretation, or a joke that Christian Dominionism is a strain of apocalyptic accelerationism which VERY LITERALLY SEEKS to hasten their vision of the Biblical end of the world, & the people who believe this have VERY CAREFULLY worked their way into the halls of U.S. power

Timing! Yesterday, I wrote a thread on working with Claude on writing, and today this came out. It’s a great example of the logical dissociation that Claude produces, and it's worth a closer look.

I really hope that a whole crew of the still living people being faked in this way get together and sue Grammarly into the ground.

A LATE-BREAKING TT JOB.....

Assistant Professor, Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Toronto

Archaeology of the Levant (from south-central Türkiye to northwestern Saudi Arabia) during the Bronze and Iron Ages (3,000 to 500 BCE),

universityaffairs.ca/search-jobs/...

This is not just cursed, its monstrous. The digital resurrection of a historian who died in January of this year, all so Grammarly can get some more clicks and engagement from students and/or scholars and/or others.

It feels so wrong on so many levels, these ghosts enslaved to AI forever

FUCK ALL THIS.

This should be mandatory reading for anyone considering investment in, or even engagement with, AI.

How Florida’s term-limited governor is creating a ‘police state’ as his legacy Slew of bills in veto-proof Republican state legislature harm individual rights and concentrate power, rights groups say

HB945 creates a “counterintelligence and counterterrorism” unit within Florida department of law enforcement that could spy on groups or individuals whose “actions, views, or opinions” are deemed “a threat or are inimical to the interests of this state”.

The normalization of Islamophobia in the US is so pervasive among right wing influencers that it warrants understanding to Germany in the 1930s when explicit antisemitism was spreading like a disease. The consequences are violent for the targeted group.

AHA Endorses Congressional Resolution in Support of Black History Museums and Cultural Institutions - AHA The AHA has endorsed a resolution introduced by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) recognizing and celebrating the significance of Black history museums and cultural institutions. The resolution rec...

The AHA has endorsed a resolution introduced by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley honoring Black history museums and cultural institutions. These institutions are “essential to telling the full story of our nation’s past,” said AHA executive director Sarah Weicksel. 🗃️

Sign the Petition Keep the Classical Languages Major at the University of Iowa

Hi friends. As I previously noted, the U. of Iowa is planning to get rid of African American studies; Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, & the Classical Languages major—along with others. If you wish, please sign the classics petition: www.change.org/p/keep-the-c.... I will add more as I find out.

I have had both veterans and active service members, undergrad and grad. This has been my experience too, especially at the grad level.

This week my students were asking about the distinction between anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. The conversation happened in the context of reading Gandhi’s Satyagraha in South Africa. They were amazed that Gandhi could see the Boer as an iconic figure of colonial suffering and resistance 1/

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.