Joe Borges

Daguerreotype image of the hand of fishing boat captain and slavery abolitionist Jonathan Walker showing the “SS” (for “Slave Stealer”) that the US Govt branded on his palm after he tried in 1844 to help runaway slaves in Florida find freedom in the West Indies (Massachusetts Historical Society) 🗃

WTK is the protagonist of sumo, but Ura is the yokozuna of our hearts.

YouTube video by 木瀬部屋TV SUMO 🐱宇良関が保護猫と遊ぶ【相撲/Sumo】 Ura playing with rescue cats

MUST POST THE URA PLAYS WITH RESCUE KITTIES VIDEO

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikeS...

The Sumo wrestler Ura Kazuki, famed for his acrobatic moves, pink mawashi and signature leg bands.

I love Ura Kazuki so much. It is beautiful when a competitor's buoyant personality manifests in their Sumo.

A reminder that humans love an embellishment even if it rarely shows up in the archaeological record with organic materials. This pattern requires nothing but making small changes to the twined elements.

Francis Fukuyama:

A book titled "Outdoor Pigs: How to Make them Pay."

those damned outdoor pigs can't keep getting away with this

Arguably the greatest thing ever committed to print

I have not seen this film. But I have seen this story repeated over and over. Local people recognize heritage in their landscape. National policy makes control of things a prerogative of distant authorities. The museum and archaeology staff are powerless as well; the direction comes from the top. 2/

Who Are Museums Really For? And Can We Change Our Minds? The film “Binnigula’sa’ (Ancient Zapotec People)” asks the questions: Who are the rightful custodians of artifacts, and what is the responsibility of museums to local communities?

Current international frameworks for heritage are products of nationalist logic— archaeology is absorbed by nations as part of their validation among their peers. In colonized countries, this perpetuates the violence of dispossession of colonial “conquest”. 1/

This looks like an amazing cultural policy experiment (by an institution of this scale), and it will be fascinating to see the results and the implementation too!

Museums take note – you are part of the problem. Next time you advertise a freelance role, do some research on what their fees need to cover and ask yourself if what you’re expecting to pay is reasonable.

If you put the DOGE guys on a desert island where the only way out was to say the magic words “I’m not sure what the answer is, let me consult someone who has worked on this problem for a long time” they would all starve to death

I think everyone interested in AI should read the model cards for the frontier models, especially the safety sections, which give you a sense of known risks:
Gemini Deep Think: storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-med...
Claude 4: www-cdn.anthropic.com/07b2a3f9902e...
o3: cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875...

Hand carved #lettering, completed, with five stars. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.

Carving complete. I'll gild the stars tomorrow for a forthcoming video and paint in the letters, oil the surface and fit a hanging plate on the back. Then I can get back to my true vocation of carving arses.

A wooden Windsor style chair with a dried thistle on top. A warning sign ‘Everyone who ever sat on this chair is now dead. Play it safe and remain standing.’

Leicester Guildhall Museum does not mess about.

“One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this” Omar El Akkad The book. I’m holding it.

Book store bargain

Basically, I set up a mental health plan with the wellbeing team at my uni and I now encourage other HDR students in my faculty to do the same even if they don't expect something difficult could come up. And this doesn't just apply to history research! It applies to other disciplines too.

53. In your first draft, over-reference rather than under-reference. Always err on the side of caution, and you can edit the references if they seem excessive in later drafts.

24. Historians should read more Stuart Hall

a photo of the oil painting "Freedom of Speech" by Norman Rockwell. The painting depicts a scene of a 1942 Arlington town meeting in which Jim Edgerton, the lone dissenter to the town selectmen's announced plans to build a new school, as the old one had burned down, was accorded the floor as a matter of protocol. (source: wikipedia)

*stands up* the meme museum is Good, actually

Also that he conspicuously omitted to screenshot the likes and RTs of each critical post

I like that the techbro guy’s screenshots are basically the great and the good of the Online museum world

“I was completely oblivious to some of the purported issues… but I felt that something else must be at play” - this fucking guy

Curating your own set of news sources through an RSS reader is the best way to do it. Highly recommend checking out Molly’s guide and making your own. I use Inoreader for mine.

Our *new paper* explores how flexibility in social categories like gender and race can undermine unfair norms. If we can't read an identity, we can't use it to underpin discrimination. We show even a little confusion can be powerful, and advocate identity play
philsci-archive.pitt.edu/26062/

Janet and Allan Ahlberg, The Ha Ha Bonk Book, with 'Catherine' name sticker

Goodbye, dear Allan Ahlberg, and thank you for everything.

Picture of a book, says ‘then they got mixed up. “Is that a toe bone?” The little skeleton said. “Where does this one go?” Said the big skeleton.’ There are four illustrations of the little skeleton dog who has been put back together wrong , in one of them he is saying “wofo”, in another “oofw!” And in another “owof!”

allan ahlberg died 😢.
once at the library I had to cut up a (giant) copy of Funnybones that someone had taped together wrong and then i had to reassemble the pages in the right order. felt so right.

original artwork for The Essential Calvin & Hobbes (and maybe other, similar books? i'm not an expert)

the cover of the published version of The Essential Calvin & Hobbes

a few years ago i got to see a bunch of original comic art from the curators at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library at ohio state where a bunch of my work is archived. the cover for this calvin & hobbes book was done in watercolor with all the linework done on a cel

A living mask taken from a human, displayed next to a colour chart of human skin colours, from the 1930s

A collection of instruments used to take head and facial measurements in the 1930s

A display of the craniometric equipment & anthropological masks at the Museum of Anthropology in Florence. Some 350 out of over 600+ in the collection were taken from living humans in Africa & India during the fascist regime of the 1930s & were displayed in what was formerly known as ‘The Race Room’