Marta Kvande

Historians of the future: Rest assured, millions of us know all this in real time. We are horrified, shocked, enraged, and ashamed. We are acting, in a thousand ways, to oppose it. This cannot, and will not, be how the United States ends. trib.al/EOixNrF

“The house is on fire”: Texas GOP plots its next chapter amid civil war, depleted staff, funding drops Under outgoing chair Matt Rinaldi, the party’s donor base has shrunk as it aligns with two far-right megadonors.

And here is a much longer story on the slow takeover of the party and, now Texas Legislature, by far-right forces -- most of them funded by West Texas oil tycoons Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn. (Dunn is now emerging as a major player in national politics; learn his name if you dont already know it).

Sam Altman also wants your biometrics for a worldwide identity service so I'm sure this is all fine

Also works for an academic

@biblioraptorphd.bsky.social Happy birthday!!!!

From today’s reading:

“Virtue as an ideal is empty: it is meaningful only as action, in relation to other people.”

Katarzyna Bartiszyńska

"They are so afraid of us": trying to keep this in mind as the life of the mind is maliciously wounded over and over

If you've ever used the Polity data, read this from Monty Marshall.

tl;dr Polity is coding recent US events as an executive self-coup and an adverse regime change.

Life-saving research, people’s jobs, tech transfer, the economy. The public benefits to supporting indirect costs are far-reaching.

BREAKING: 22 states sue NIH over Trump administration's new 15% cap on overhead for federal research grants. Suit filed federal court in Boston contends lifesaving research 'will grind to a halt' under the policy. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Came across this poem again today: UA Fanthorpe's "Atlas." I really love her plainspoken attention to the ordinary.

shandean.blogspot.com/2025/01/ua-f...
#poem #poetry

Whenever I feel bad about missing deadlines:

A catalogue of the MSS at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, was conceived in the late eighteenth century, and work began in earnest in 1814.

The first of many volumes (described in reviews as “much-anticipated”) was published in 2015.

A first map of the territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities in Europe! Bebbington et al., Ambio. doi.org/10.1007/s132...

YouTube video by Lil Monkey Fella Monty Python's Flying Circus - Agatha Christie Sketch (railway timetables) -1970

Leading logically of course to this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F5F...

I've just come across the insult "cucumber-headed men" in an 18C text, and I kinda love it.

Map showing the line of Hadrian's Wall with the symbols representing the forts, milecastles and turrets, and lines for the Wall, Vallum and north ditch. The basemap is different shades of green, and there is a legend on the right side of the map.

I'm super excited to let you know that the WallCAP WallGIS is now available on @ads-update.bsky.social! Every feature of Hadrian’s Wall has a record in the WallGIS with detailed info & spatial data, which can all be searched/viewed online! shorturl.at/FSr2z #Archaeology 🏺

What the current cuts to the Humanities demonstrate is not about career success for students but rather a new bet being placed that Humanities skills (languages, critical thinking, composition) can be turned into service departments staffed by contingent labor at extremely low cost.

They responded, and they're safe and all is well. They appreciated that someone was concerned for them, too, and gave permission to let the first student know they're safe.

People still care about each other and want to help each other be safe.

Here's a small good thing. Last night during my online class, one student saw something in another student's setting that made them concerned about the other student's welfare. They messaged me about it and I saw it too. So I contacted the second student to check on them.

I made a Google quiz using the poems listed on the paper’s OSF site if you want to try your luck at guessing which are human and which are LLM. forms.gle/nGCGawDb9c6f...

The Thing Is BY ELLEN BASS to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.

Because maybe you need this poem as much as I do.

“There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.”
Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick," published on this day in 1851

Worth pointing out that at least on windows and android there are several "connected experiences",and includes features like accessing stock photos or downloading templates.

The one that's most direct about feeding your stuff to the slop machine is "connected experiences that analyze your content".

A flowchart to decide whether a book is a novel, using the criteria of whether it's prose, long, and fictional.

Last night my students were mildly horrified to learn that "book" and "novel" aren't synonyms. One of them joked that they needed a flowchart to decide whether something was a novel or not . . . . so I made them one. 😂

On Organizing time to level up / an early draft of a playbook

So, I read smart people.

There is a playbook for this next chapter.

I believe we can do this. It won’t be easy, but the map is there.

Featuring resources & wisdom from Dr. Erica Cheoweth, @prisonculture.bsky.social @mskellymhayes.bsky.social, @jaclynf.bsky.social & more.

A screenshot of my most popular ever tweet, which reads: "Happy to announce I'm offering a new fall class, "Singular 'They' is 700 Years Old. What Is Your Problem, OMG," which will consist of me standing on a desk yelling at you in Middle English. (3 credit hours)."

Time to bring this banger back:

Today's #TypoOfTheDay -- I meant to type "disobedience" but it came out "discobedience" which could be a great term for the genre of narratives about defiant dancing 😂