Michael Pittard

Just gonna point out how medievalism underpins this far right nostalgia #medievalsky

The great myth of empire collapse | Aeon Essays Societal downfalls loom large in history and popular culture but, for the 99 per cent, collapse often had its upsides

“… we have the idea of imperial ‘golden ages’ … followed by a descent into ‘dark ages’ marked by violence, poverty and stagnation. Yet this is history through the eyes of elites.”

Much to like and much to dispute in this article, but I definitely agree with this claim.

aeon.co/essays/the-g...

Reupping this call for papers! Send us your work (or force your students to send us their work)!

A Fish Falls From the Sky and Sparks a Brush Fire in British Columbia

For a medieval monastic chronicler, a headline to die for

Mellon Foundation The Mellon Foundation makes grants to actively unlock the power in the arts and humanities that helps connect us all.

“American Academy of Arts&Sciences reports 96.3% of humanities grads age 23-32 fully employed. Earnings in humanitiess comparable to social/life sciences, job satisfaction levels too. A serious mismatch bw actual employment for hum grads +general perception."
www.mellon.org/voices/human...

The Modern Far Right Canon Modern far right thinkers style themselves as an insurgent movement against power, combining a self-pitying victimhood with exaggerated fantasies of rediscovered manliness.

"Very frequently this counter-cultural disposition combines with a relentlessly indulgent capacity for self-pity and a sense of persecuted victimization. No one feels sorry for themselves quite like the contemporary far right." www.liberalcurrents.com/the-modern-f...

Against Technofeudal Education Pillars For Protecting Our "Core Infrastructure" From OpenAI

“The logical conclusion of a technofeudal oligarchy combining forces with an authoritarian political movement is compulsory enrollment in the security state’s platform architecture of surveillance, indoctrination, and behavioral modification.”

*taps sign*

in landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to the completion of the scene

William F. Buckley's Bill Never Came Due | Defector Perhaps the highest praise I can offer a book that took 27 years to complete and runs over 1,000 pages is that I can see why, and that it doesn’t feel like it. Sam Tanenhaus’s extremely long and anxio...

for Bills Week I decided to read the new 1000 page Buckley biography

The stuff about liberal arts here is fine and good. But this feels most important as a story about the shocking, intentional disconnect between university boards of trustees and the actual students who learn at that university.

“Noticing” is a rhetorical strategy akin to “just asking questions”—the idea is to lead your audience toward a socially controversial conclusion via a carefully selected trail of mostly errant data, while not actually making any controversial claims yourself, thus negating criticism.

Here's the link to YDG's website: honorscollege.uncg.edu/y-ddraig-goc...

If you're a professor, suggest to your students, no matter their field or major, that they submit & gain valuable publishing experience. Feel free to DM me with any questions!

Call for papers for YDG. A human hand and a robotic hand both touching a holographic globe.

I've recently become the faculty advisor for Y Ddraig Goch (YDG), the UNC-Greensboro interdisciplinary research journal! We're working on an AI-focused issue, & if you're an undergraduate or graduate student, please send us your paper by August 15! You don't need to attend UNCG to submit.

Is the AI Bubble About to Burst? In the years since Automation and the Future of Work first appeared, a new wave of technological enthusiasm has swept across the popular imagination. The catalyst this time has been the rapid advances...

"The present frenzy surrounding artificial intelligence will not last forever. As the limitations of become clearer+ as the economic returns on massive corporate investments fail to materialize at the expected scale, the speculative bubble will inevitably burst."

www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/i...

Humanities at Work Preps Spartans for Real-World Applications of Their Majors | UNC Greensboro UNCG’s Humanities at Work program celebrated its inaugural class at a showcase where students presented all they had learned.

“Humanities at Work brings together talented students with productive and transformative community partners and demonstrates to the world that pursuing a degree in humanities is a choice that students can and should make.” bit.ly/3ZkcWW9

"Medieval" as a Moral Argument Some thoughts on recent comparisons of 2025 to the "Dark Ages" and a New "Feudalism"

NEW PIECE by me & @lollardfish.bsky.social on our (always free!) newsletter. We talk about the recent "we're living in a new dark ages/ feudalism" discourse.

"Svetlana Boym warned that “unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.” And Medieval 2025 is beginning to breed some monsters..."

If you make me president of your university, I will find millions in cost savings by force-quitting shady EdTech contracts, & I will spend it all by giving faculty an annual budget to buy course books for their students.

Great collection of authentic bigfoots, haters will say they're bears

Dressing like a guy in Andor now. My shirt collar is also part of my jacket somehow. My tie is some kind of strap. I have two capes on.

"Do you mean a series of moral panics over at least a century based in nostalgia for a memory of Roman greatness that never really happened, at least not that way?"
"Well, actually kinda"

Opinion | What I Learned Serving on My University’s AI Committee What I learned serving on a university AI committee.

“Preserving art, literature, and philosophy will require no less than the creation of an environment totally and uncompromisingly committed to abolishing the linguistic alienation created by AI and reintroducing students to the indispensability of their own voice.“

Related fact: conspiracy theorists endlessly mimic the language of objective scholarship. Endless “facts.” Loads of footnotes. Continual reference to other thinkers. But pull one thread and it comes apart in your hands. It’s a rhetorical posture, not an epistemic approach.

Roses are redde
Noble are the manatees
Yf we wante a bettir future
Teach artes & humanityes

The most salient factor, IMO, is rising course loads across all ranks, combined with creeping enrollment caps on GenEd, composition, & introductory courses.

Both were intended to create more precarious labor & thus lower costs. they also increased student-to-faculty ratios & assessment loads.

Can't wait to be castigated by gen alpha for my boomer takes like "it's good to think"

Talking Heads: Assemblies in Early Medieval Germany by Stuart Airlie. From the book Political Assemblies in the Earlier Middle Ages, edited by Barnwell and Mostert.

And you may find yourself living in a thatched-roof hut
And you may find yourself living in the Holy Roman Empire
And you may find yourself negotiating with your lords
And you may find yourself in a beautiful hall, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

Mike Watt tried to warn us!

Nostalgia is just a "rumor of history", "just someone else's sentimentality".

Optimization, Nostalgia, Fascism, And The Root Of All Bad Faith It's when nostalgia is combined with the absurd notion of optimizing one's life that we get the most potent kind of bad faith.

Please remember that nostalgia is a trap (that I’ve fallen for over and over again)

bad-faith-times.ghost.io/desire-contr...