Americans: we live in a fallen state—embroiled by sin, cheating, lying, and evil. You cannot trust anyone, not even those who claim to know you best
Canadians: I love my neighbors and my friends!
Academics work years on something and when it finally comes out say "With apologies for cross-posting" while announcing it to their colleagues. Don't apologize! I have never once thought "I already saw that announcement on the other email list. I think an apology is due here."
Muslim-Christian entanglements in Umayyad Syria: a Muslim man threatens a priest because the priest refused to give his Christian wife communion. Incredible detail.
- John Tolan, Islam: A New History, 40, citing Lev Weitz, Between Christ and Caliph, 201-2
Academic publishing can be absurdly slow. Two pieces I wrote in 2021 (a chapter in an edited volume and an encyclopedia article) have yet to come out.
Gestapo behavior, yes, but honestly any goon right now can cover their face, claim they’re ICE, and rob a family blind with impunity, especially if the victims are brown
When I discovered this podcast I literally thought “I wonder when they’re going to do Schmitt”
Immensely proud of my wife and the whole PM team! So excited for the world to see this film. Coming to a theater near you in June. Special preview screenings with live Q-and-A on June 8! deadline.com/2025/05/jaci...
The president of my university is headed to DC to beg the former head of World Wrestling Entertainment, now Secretary of Education, to prioritize cancer and Parkinson’s research over the administration’s vendetta against pro Palestine students and critical race theory. Totally normal.
American conservatives would be more welcome on university campuses if they stopped being proudly ignorant know-nothings and reconnected with their intellectual roots
Insisting college courses give a 50-50 perspective on every issue is the conservative version of equality of outcomes
Today I got a books-only review request. Hard pass. Sorry. Wish I could.
Academic presses, please stop offering to pay reviewers in books. People need money, not books.
😂
I am once again calling for a federal ban on academic e-books without page numbers
This op-ed suggests to me that administrators have a strong basis for resisting the *insane* demands that universities eliminate *any* programs or campus institutions that value racial diversity-and to do so by Feb 28. Posting screenshots below of some of the harrowing implications of this mandate.
Everyone in academia, especially administrators, should read this piece. The DOE’s recent interpretation of SCOTUS’s 2023 decision misinterprets race-neutrality as devaluing racial diversity itself, even though that 2023 ruling explicitly values racial diversity.
My article "The Queen's Urdu: Translating Colonial Secularity in Victoria's 1858 Proclamation" is now open-access from Cambridge. This is a preview of a major argument I am making in my upcoming book. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
A tenure track opening at the American University in Cairo for historians of Asia and the modern world: www.h-net.org/jobs/job_dis...
It’s cute how this Malaysian journal from 1938 gently cajoles this Japanese businessman to convert
Chicago friends: a colleague’s stepdaughter has organized a night of Irish and Palestinian music to raise funds for Gaza relief. Saturday might at the Irish American Heritage Center. Posting the Chicago Reader write up on the event below.
If I were training AI systems I would only use content produced before 2005, around when Mark Zuckerberg started to make us all babbling idiots and well before Elon Musk came along for the coup de grace.
Imagining a regressive AI feedback loop where AI makes humans dumber (college students incapable of writing an essay, etc.) and then this dumber human-produced content is fed back into AI data systems. In this scenario, humans and machines just keep getting dumber and dumber together, ad infinitum.
Cryptic street sign in London as endlessly malleable metaphor
🚨 JOBS KLAXON
Thrilled to announce we're hiring @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social Music Dept:
Anthropologist/ethnographer of popular music in the Global South and/or diasporas.
Job details below. Deadline 16 Feb 25.
Please circulate! #anthropology #music #musicology
www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DLO459/l...
I assume this applies to grants in the humanities, too? NEH? Fulbright? Does anyone know?
The word "systemic" is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran's Administration, but we can't study trauma now?
I love university librarians so much. I sent an email at 5:19 PM to UCLA library with a question about the Center for Near Eastern Studies archives. I got a detailed response from special collections at 5:42 PM ❤️
It's actually theft of taxpayers money when websites go dark. We paid for that data
incredible things are happening on the federal employee subreddit
