Explore our job opportunities focused on the Medieval and Early Modern periods (thread 🧵):
1. Assistant Professor in Early Modern British History, University of Warwick
memorients.com/news/assista...
Growing Up in the Early Modern World, a workshop Nov 27 in Sydney exploring childhood in institutional settings, & care, discipline & education across the life course. Please submit a 200 word abstract & 3-sentence bio note by 15 July to paula.plastic@mq.edu.au. Online/hybrid participation possible.
So many people in public health sounded the alarm about RFK Jr. and were ignored or called hysterical. Then everything we warned about and more happened.
They have not reformed. They simply want to win an election. But I fear that our warnings will again go unheeded.
The Regime is trying to spackle over their sustained attack on public health and vaccines.
Don’t believe that they’ve reformed. They are simply reacting to the unpopularity of their war on vaccines in advance of the election.
They will be right back at it after the election.
The front cover of A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines." The cover shows a black circle with the title and the author's name (mine!) in white. The bottom right of the circle is indented, pushed by the needle of a pre-WW2 syringe, held in someone's left hand. In the space between the hand and the spine of the book, there's a blurb by geneticist, author, and broadcaster Adam Rutherford: "Brimming with righteous anger, this book should infuriate you for all the right reasons, and arm you to take on the grifters and their war against science."
With all the horrors around us, talking up a book seems...weird.
But I have a book coming and it is, I believe, an important one—one hope help persuade the vaccine hesitant (those who've heard the noise but aren't yet consumed by anti-vax BS).
Anyway, here's the latest iteration of the US cover:
By this logic, I’ve made my way to 1774 and, yeah, that tracks.
Years ago our admin did a red and black report. It took salaries & how much $ each instructor made in tuition $ for classes we taught-you were in the red or black. They released numbers once & shut it down bc humanities were producing huge $ for uni & engineers, business and scientists were losing $
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
Anyone who knows me knows I gesticulate like a muppet when I talk. I also literally can't spell a word without also fingerspelling it in ASL. Why?
Rubella vaccines didn't exist in Kansas in the 1950s, so although my Uncle Marvin survived, it left him Deaf. My (hearing) Dad learned ASL, too.
1/2
I swear though, they can’t take this from us. We need this.
My second thought was, at least we can trust Jacob to protect it from Bari.
I see you and I had the same first thought.
I’m assuming this is good faith so I’ll bite.
The University of Iowa just opened a right wing “intellectual freedom” center with state funding. The center can’t make classes and has hired a marketing firm to assess (and try to drum up demand). Students don’t want this.
My article in the renewed Huntington Library Quarterly, with focus expanded to the global early modern, edited by @brettrushforth.bsky.social . An honor to be included in this wonderful issue! #earlymodern
I’ve been having the same thought, so I’m curious to hear how this gos for you!
Some historians write so beautifully. Others…
An unfortunate aspect of being an academic is you can’t just pass on a book because you hate how someone writes. You just have to suffer through it.
The Fine Dining and Restaurant industry is a dead format now that canned dog food exists. Food prep and service are unnecessary. Home cooking and baking are inessential. Restaurant and food reviewers are no longer needed. Dog food delivery services will make grocery stores obsolete in months.
Apparently this year’s version is a wily bastard and slipped right past the vaccine in my case. Still glad I got it, because I hate to imagine what this would be like without any mitigating effects
Suffering from the flu for the first time in I don’t know how many years (I always get the shot) and it really is the fucking worst
As God as my witness, I declared yesterday morning that I didn’t care what happened in the men’s hockey final because the US women had won gold and that’s what I really cared about. That take is aging like the finest of wines.
Another thing I love about Alysa is that her embracing joy, whimsy, artistry, authenticity and prioritizing having a healthy body and mind over aesthetic conformity and optimization blows a massive hole in much of the cultural messaging being pushed on women, esp young women, right now
Alysa Liu telling 60 Minutes “I love struggling, it makes me feel alive” is a legit revolutionary statement from a Bay Area native in a time when copious amounts of time and resources are being put toward convincing us to opt out of experiencing struggle, friction and self-actualization
William Max Nelson talks about this idea in his first book utppublishing.com/doi/book/10....
This means Ilya = the US and that already means we win regardless of the score
You know who really has a good vantage on what universities can and should be? Faculty. Not always the organizational structure and operation, because that's not the job, But what it takes to educate? Yep. Yet the overwhelming media coverage is by and about ppl w very little to no experience.
