New Zealand's famous blue mushroom. Three in a cluster with moss in the background.

My favourite photo of the day. #fungifriends

I do not want to be on guard when I read manuscripts. I do not want to be on guard when I read slush. I do not want to be on guard when I listen to music, when I look at visual art, when I WATCH A FUCKING COMMERCIAL. I hate Altman so much I burn with it. He and his kind have stolen the WONDER.

I'm traveling in a new place where 24' is considered unseasonably warm and saw a man gardening wearing shorts, shirtless. Pretty sure that would also be normal in Ohio yet somehow not criminalized under this bill 🙄

The Japanese scientist who painstakingly reconstructed 1,200 years of data on peak cherry blossom blooms in Kyoto to show the effects of climate change has passed away; fortunately, another scientist has volunteered to continue his project.

what do we want?

OBJECT PERMANENCE

when do we want it?

WHEN DO WE WANT WHAT

you: please act normal Ed you need these people to like you

people: hello Ed nice to meet you

me: the British discoverer of aluminum called it “aluminum” like Americans do now and a couple of editors decided “aluminium” would be better because it matches the cadence of sodium and calcium

Poster for the talk by Banu Subramaniam (University of Massachusetts Amherst), entitled "Migrant Ecologies: Plant Worlds and the Afterlives of Empire". It will take place on Monday, 20 April 2026, at 4 pm (CET) via Zoom.

Next Monday, we will kick off this semester's lecture series with the talk by Banu Subramaniam. Banu will talk about migrant ecologies, plants, and the afterlives of Empire.
Just register for the talk via the link and join us on Zoom!🤗 rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture...
#HPBio #HistSci #PhilSci

Last month in The Onion:

The most vicious part of the assault on US higher ed in general and international students in particular is that it is an all out assault on one of the most world historically effective systems of producing knowledge outside and beyond strictly policed social hierarchies, both local and global.

Sunset over a South Asian cityscape with a call for dissertation workshop proposals on articulating futures, projects, and practices.

**Updated CFP** PhD candidates are invited to apply for our October 3-5 dissertation workshop on "Articulating South Asian Futures," to be held at NYU Shanghai.

Thanks to Henry Luce Foundation for supporting this program!

https://bit.ly/AAS-SouthAsianFutures

On the Brinck | Places Prize: Call for Proposals 2026 We are pleased to announce that proposals are now being accepted for the latest round of the On the Brinck | Places Prize. Applications due July 17, 2026.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: On the Brinck | Places Prize on the American Southwest.

The prize recipient will receive an honorarium of $7,500 to research & write a major work of public scholarship for publication in Places, and present a related public lecture at the SA+P @unm.edu.

Submit by July 17, 2026!

Associate Professor (297742) | NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology Job title: Associate Professor (297742), Employer: NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Deadline: Sunday, May 3, 2026

My old university NTNU in Trondheim is finally! recruiting a fully tenured associate professor in modern environmental history. This is a great opportunity for the right person. #envhist

Again: for any big liberal donor who wants to funnel millions into fixing this country's politics, the ROI on buying any struggling paper and simply tasking it with doing real reporting on local news is vastly higher than the same $$ given to some group that does mass ad buys every election year.

It’s infuriating when a woman comes forward about a man raping her in his hotel room after drinking and the response is “Why would she go to his room?” “Why would she drink with him?” This is Mike Pence logic. Women should be allowed to hang out with men without expecting they will be raped.

... is this not the entire purpose of cargo pants and/or generously sized handbags?

Related to this, I once snuck a thing of hummus into the movies, with sliced cucumber for a quiet scoop. Ziploc full of cut fruit or grapes is also elite tier. Movie snacks can be anything, anything!

Imagine a study that found kids with ADHD have more visits to doctors than kids without ADHD — and used that finding to suggest ADHD treatment doesn't work. That's the standard of evidence the anti-trans braintrust is willing to accept.

Many Popes Have Been Entangled in Politics. Here Are 5 of Them.

exhausted historian of christianity screaming into the void, once again: christianity has never been apolitical. to wit: jesus was executed by the roman state.

Six days left to apply for this very cool #envhist postdoc with us here @greenhouseuis.net - it's a great opportunity to join a vibrant and active research environment with much support for career development and a good community.

As a member of the International Advisory Board of LUCK, Lund's Centre for the History of Knowledge, I recommend this highly: apply and visit Lund.

post a picture of yourself as a doctor

It’s #NationalPetDay! 🐾 …Are these typical pets? 💦🦜🐅 Enjoy this 1860 depiction of a Dutch woman with a parrot and leopard, by Utagawa Yoshimori I! Held by the Philadelphia Art Museum: www.visitpham.org/objects/249308

We reviewed hundreds of pages of ICE death reports, autopsies, and other records from 32 deaths with a total of 14 doctors.

Doctors determined that at least 17 times, people died after medical staff delayed or failed to provide critical care that might have saved their lives

When the world is graced by people with Horse Autism, then we also have Thousand Mile Horses. Such horses are actually quite common; it’s having enough Horse Autism to recognize them that’s rare. Hence, though a horse may be an S-Rank pull, it is humiliated at the hands of a filthy casual, dying in a stable without ever being recognized as a horse that can run a thousand miles.

I collected several of my "New Internet Translations" of Classical Chinese passages in the style of social media posts onto one page. https://xn--hmr.net/classicalchinese/livinginternet/

#classicalchinese #translation #philosophy #localization

We Need to Talk About Louis - Part 1 YouTube video by Comedy Without Errors

Good work, it's infuriating to see him worming his way back into relevance. If anyone wants a deeper dive, Comedy Without Errors has an incredibly thoughtful and nuanced deconstruction of CKs biggest non-apology, read against his larger oeuvre.

all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant

Original cover of A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA

I don't know why people are talking about Harry Potter again but all I have to say on the matter is Ursula Le Guin wrote a far better series of novels on the subject of a boy wizard, decades prior, which Rowling adapted without attribution

Environmental/climate history postdoc! #envhist ⬇️

“By using GenAI:

I accept the models were trained on stolen data.
I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.
I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.
I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.
I accept …”

Once again, the national average pay for adjunct professors with PhDs is a flat fee of $3900 per course.

I'm reminded of a painting that Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam made in 1937, before Picasso's painting.

And Wifredo Lam was actively involved in Spanish Civil War until he became ill.

#BlackSky #ArtSky

Wifredo Lam's 'La Guerra Civil / The Spanish Civil War', 1937

Still at MoMA for a few days.