Alison Laurence

Mountain lions gain protection under California’s Endangered Species Act State agencies are now mandated to protect the big cats, which have been increasingly vulnerable due to habitat loss

A legal mandate! Was heartened to see this decision come out the same day I was lecturing on the incentivized extirpation of California grizzlies. Past is prologue but not prescription 🐾
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Herd of large, brown woolly mammoths walking out of a forest into a snowy clearing.

So pleased to have an essay in the latest issue of Configurations! It's called, "Stories of Arctic Crisis and Alaskan Mammoths: Neocolonial and Anticolonial Approaches to De-Extinction and Rewilding."

muse.jhu.edu/issue/56326

#mammoth, #Alaska, #neocolonialism, #woodbison, #colossal

Man uses tool on face of 20-foot clay bison sculpture in a dark workshop

Gary Staab is making an alarmingly large bison family that will travel among a number of museums this March. Some stops are only 1 day, so mark your calendars. www.si.edu/newsdesk/rel...

Black and white photograph of a man wearing a checked shirt standing next to a sign saying 'We do not have a dinosaur'.

#WyrdWednesday Sad times.

Snakepit Operator, Highway 66, Sayre, Oklahoma. Photo by Steve Fitch, 1973.

americanart.si.edu/artwork/snak...

Over There, Again The American Legion at home and abroad

"The 1927 expedition to Paris exposed the central contradiction of the early American Legion – an organization that sought to present itself as a benign custodian of memory and shared sacrifice in combat, yet one haunted by its history of vigilantism and exclusionary nationalism."

YouTube video by Chicago Bulls Yuki Kawamura makes his Chicago Bulls season debut | FULL HIGHLIGHTS

Self soothing by watching highlights from Yuki Kawamura's iconic debut on repeat. Shortest* player in franchise history, baby, let's gooo. www.youtube.com/watch?v=52uF...

*Nate Robinson is shorter, I'd wager.

Every child who learned to read English in New England before 1800 would have been familiar with an image of John Rogers being burned at the stake.

It was one of the main images reproduced in the New England Primer, and one of the first longer passages children learned to read independently.

This year, we are adding audio versions of many of your favorite articles, and donors to the magazine get early access through our private podcast feed!

Donate today and you’ll get to hear all of our monster series authors over the next few weeks, beginning with Sam Moore.

Live TV report on cougar capture in San Francisco neighborhood interrupted by coyote ‘Your eyes do not deceive you,’ ABC7 told viewers about unexpected turn during report from Pacific Heights

Lately, re: coyotes, cougars, and other Californians www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Re: archivists 🧡

Welcome To This Class Part 2 Writing & Anger, Spring 2021

“Major historical dread meant something to me then, in that context, lifetimes ago, back in 2014 . . . It was an anticipatory dread of a history we had not yet lived.”

Welcome To This Class Part 1 Writing & Anger, Spring 2021

“[F]ull disclosure: as I write this during the first week of January 2021, in the midst of an insurrection a mile away at the US Capitol, my imagination is taxed, so I’m not 100% sure what we’re going to do. But we’ll figure it out.”

Our latest, from Oline Eaton. Look for Part 2 on Friday.

On the television, the Bears vs. Packers game. On the laptop, the Bulls game. Both Chicago teams won ❤️

Not at #AHA2026 but my heart is always in Chicago.

Seriously, I am shy, please come talk to me and save me from having to approach people cold.

Something new coming your way— audio versions of some of your favorite Contingent pieces read by the authors themselves!

Two cats peer out a window. One is a brown tabby with handsome stripes. The other is an adorable orange creature with a single eye.

A close up of the orange cat with one eye.

My favorite neighbors: two cats with three eyes between them.

A promotional image for an edited collection called "Lands of the Lost: A Field Guide to Dinosaur Parks Physical, Fictional, and for the Future." The collection editors Dr. Victor Monnin & Dr. Alison Laurence are putting out a call for contributions. Abstracts are due January 10, 2026 to dinoparkfieldguide@gmail.com. Find the full call at: https://tinyurl.com/dinoparks The background image is of the outdated-but-adored Iguanodon models at Crystal Palace Park.

A call for 🦕🦖🦣 contributors! With Victor Monnin, I'm editing a collection about extinct animal parks—it's a field guide, of sorts, that turns a critical eye on places real, imagined, and yet to be. Find the full CFP for LANDS OF THE LOST here: tinyurl.com/dinoparks #PaleoSky #HistSci #EnvHist #STS

!!! Amazing news!

Can the Archive Make a Monster of a Historian? A historian who pays full attention to their sources can’t help but be transformed into a monster...

I wrote in @contingent-mag.bsky.social about how a chance encounter with monsters in the archives led to my two books on monsters, science, exploration, maps, and culture.

1/🧵

🧪💙📚 🗃 #ancient #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #18thCentury #politics #HAMH #archives #libraries #arthistory

Oh, 2025. Some notable firsts for me this year: first time applying for food stamps, first creative nonfiction pub... So here's my wish for the new year.

May we, all of us, become fossils 🦖

*Fossil, as a figure of speech, is so often used pejoratively. I fundamentally disagree with that slander!

Can the Archive Make a Monster of a Historian? A historian who pays full attention to their sources can’t help but be transformed into a monster...

"My sources broke categories: they were monstrous. Studying them meant integrating methods from several disciplines — and being marginalized by the more conservative practitioners in all of them."

The final piece in our monsters series, from @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social

Donate Contingent is supported by its readers, not by any university or think tank. We think that makes it possible for us to do this magazine right.

We don't do fundraising pushes very often, but that's because we're fortunate enough to have a loyal group of monthly givers. Almost everything you read this year was paid for by 161 people.

If you like what we do and want to see more, become a supporter today.

Thank you for reading!

Thank you for writing this!

The choice of Khaleesi continues to rankle, too, especially for a white wolf as a namesake of white lady savior trope for animals that, so de-extinctioners say, they foresee on lands stolen from Indigenous peoples, hopping right over them to some undefined Ice Age time.

Oh absolutely! The choice of "Khaleesi" removes these real-live animals from time and geographical context to an even more extreme degree. I can hear detractors say: "They're JUST names. It's not that deep." It is though, isn't it? These legends/fictions are lasting. And myths have persuasive power.

Thank you!!

Cry, Wolf • Germinate Uncover the story behind the dire wolf and Aesop's fable, a classic tale about trust and deception through history.

Colossal named its first "de-extinct" dire wolves for the fratricidal founder of a now fallen empire and the twin he did in. These names... they've been gnawing at me! So, I wrote about lupine Romulus and Remus and snow-white mythmaking for @g-ehr.bsky.social.

g-ehr.com/essay/cry-wo... #Paleosky

Monstrous Rayne On drought years and witch trials

The next piece in our special December series explores "the rise and hunt of monsters in monstrous seasons of prodigious, inescapable heat."

Submit to Germinate • Germinate Germinate invites work that explores, illuminates, investigates, observes, and/or interprets topics connecting the environmental present with its past. We welcome

Howls of thanks to @kerriarsenault.bsky.social. Kerri's questions and suggestions made my 🐺 essay what it is.

#envhist folks: consider Germinate! @g-ehr.bsky.social publishes short peer-reviewed articles and creative work too. The next submission deadline is December 31: g-ehr.com/submit/