@eugene-smelyansky
Medieval historian: religion, cities, heresy, intolerance, inquisition, environment, medievalism. Assistant Professor (Career-Track), Washington State University, Pullman. Views my own. he/him. https://eugene-smelyansky.com/
Every single person in the entire chain of command that massacred the schoolgirls in Minab, and that is currently carpet bombing Iranian civilians, needs to be tried and jailed in The Hague. Sick, depraved monsters drunk on imperial hubris.
[teacher’s voice] Ok kids, remember, barbarians were BAD because they use violence. But Charlemagne? That’s right, Charlemagne was GOOD because he used violence! Very important you get it right.
This is the way
I also cook compulsively. I don't know if it helps my mental health but hey I get food out of it!
Eileen Keenan, a waitress at 1203 Restaurant, a restaurant owned by Ukrainian immigrants, in Washington, D.C., puts up a sign for “Free Borsht in celebration of Stalin’s death” on 6 March 1953, a day after the death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953.
Happy death of Stalin day to those who celebrate, as I do! It’s always best when people like this meet their end from natural causes, speedily and in our days, preferably covered in their own piss, if you know what I mean.
We need better Democrats.
Not a single dollar more for Trump’s illegal war.
Both were engineers. One was an acoustics engineer who worked for Soviet navy R&D (e.g., submarine sonars). But also built furniture and knitted in his free time (most likely to cope with WW2-related PTSD).
The other worked a for a factory that designed and made cables and wires of various kinds.
have a little taste of the episode! plus @profgabriele.com does a silly little voice - which is exactly what Edward Gibbon sounded like. it's true. we're historians
youtube.com/shorts/mnDzB...
Congratulations!
Get in, losers, we're going to Canossa!
Also, if you are interested in learning more about Russia (past and present) using and abusing its medieval past, my book “Medievalisms and Russia: The Contest for Imaginary Pasts” is now available in paperback and at a more affordable price. www.arc-humanities.org/978180270064...
I had so much fun recording this episode! But also it’s never a bad day to remind the world that Samuel Huntington and the people who use his theories do indeed suck.
Oh great, we’re doing “special military operation” now 🙃
These words are designed to slide off of our brains and be forgotten.
Say it plainly: No murdering children overseas. No locking up children in concentration camps here. No pedophiles in government or any positions of authority. No Republican freaks inspecting children's genitals.
I think you might need to stop writing about Chaucer. I'm afraid that's the only explanation.
I’ve been using their free version (also as a non-native speaker), because it basically only checks grammar at that level. But even their free interface got significantly worse over the last year or so.
There’s something morally grotesque about reporting the words of a genocidal war criminal as if they were uttered from a genuine place of authority rather than from atop a pile of Ukrainian corpses.
When someone is a celebrity (scholar), they just let them write all kind of nonsense, huh?
It’s good to know that whatever astroturfed “rally around the flag” moment this criminal admin is trying to drum up at the moment will be likely ruined by whatever the next stupid, reckless, evil, criminal thing happens to be on their hellish to do list.
Saving the people of Iran from being massacred by their government in the streets by massacring elementary schoolgirls from the air.
This is fucking nonsense and anyone spouting it should be primaried and run against and campaigned against and hounded out of politics forever.
Government of pedophiles, by pedophiles, for pedophiles. Government of war criminals, by war criminals, for war criminals.
other people can make inroads and find common ground with regretful trump voters, in my personal capacity as a private citizen i am committed to hating those dumb motherfuckers for the rest of my life
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.
Congratulations! This looks excellent!
Trans rights are human rights 🏳️⚧️
Fuck this and everyone who helped get things to this point. Trans rights are human rights—full stop.
I think in one of the Latin classes I took in undergrad, we used “English Grammar for Students of Latin” and I vaguely remember it being useful (especially as an ESL learner).