Fascinating on the ethics of historians using material collected by surveillance and ‘inauthentic actors.’

Why Yale’s term paper on what’s wrong with college gets a ‘D-’ | Will Bunch An Ivy League university’s report on the loss of faith in higher ed ignores what really killed the American dream of college.

"The New York Times seems to constantly forget, or just doesn’t care, that only about 1% of U.S. college kids attend the dozen so-called Ivy-plus top-tier universities, and that less than 30% attend any type of private university." - @willbunch.bsky.social

share.inquirer.com/JuBLs2

Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators Some online colleges allow students to take unlimited courses on their own time, leading to quick degrees and worries about devaluing credentials.

AI has almost completely invalidated online instruction, which once held a ton of promise. It can still be saved, but only if faculty are willing to do a whole lot more work for no additional pay.

www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

Before orange slices as soccer halftimes treats, there were lemons.

“One of the new rules of the [Utah] soccer union is that the Home team … must furnish lemons for the visiting team.”

“Complete record of the 16th Ward Soccer Club,” 1922, Salt Lake City, Utah.

@oah.org bound!! Feel free to join our roundtable on unfree labor in the American Southwest. I will be discussing sugar and Black convicts in Texas. Come indulge and please buy our newly released book, Capturing Labor!! @utexaspress.bsky.social 💪🏾💪🏾 #OAH2026

Doe had broken up with the user in 2024, and he used ChatGPT to process the split, according to emails and communications cited in the lawsuit. Rather than push back on his one-sided account, it repeatedly cast him as rational and wronged, and her as manipulative and unstable. He then took these AI-generated conclusions off the screen and into the real world, using them to stalk and harass her. This manifested in several AI-generated, clinical-looking psychological reports that he distributed to her family, friends, and employer.

For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.” Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.” Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.” “He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”

Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT. In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.) The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school. “I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'”

A woman sued OpenAI last week alleging that ChatGPT reinforced the obsessive, violent delusions of her stalker (her ex-boyfriend.)

This woman's claims (as detailed by TechCrunch, left) are chillingly similar to those of a completely different woman whose story Futurism reported on in Feb (right):

ICYMI: I chatted with screenwriter @colehaddon.bsky.social about the links between politics and pop culture, and the entangled history of humans and monsters.

💙📚 🗃 #medieval #earlymodern #histsci #histmed #politics #HAMH #monsters

Faculty warn of shared governance’s ‘erosion’ after portfolio review The portfolio review process did not include a faculty vote, reviving concerns over shared governance for some SU faculty members.

“There is a massive difference between faculty in their own departments determining that programs are no longer viable—which has been the usual way program closure has been initiated in the past—and such closure decisions being made solely by administrators."

Crystal Bartolovich, Syracuse U AAUP

They're here, and they're spectacular.

Thanks to all for your help over the decade-plus it's taken to get here.

Why You Should Read Academic Books (Even If You Aren't An Academic) History publishing operates along largely two tracks: the first is the more traditional scholarly monograph published through an academic press (Cambridge, Oxford, Brill, etc.). The second is what is often called "popular history" and is published through a trade publisher (Random House, etc.). People can be real snooty about this

Continuing my "meta" arc, this time I'm talking about why its worth reading academic books even if you are not an academic. Also why I think a lot of the criticisms against academic works don't hold up, and how the line between pop and academic work isn't always clear cut. #medievalsky #history

Really interesting website by @remiwnd.bsky.social, an engineer and historian, that documents the origins of "wind and site engineering" for wind energy projects.

Portrait of Badin, unsigned replica of a lost pastel portrait by Gustav Lundberg (1695-1786), dating from 1776.

Pleased to see @mirandabryant.bsky.social's report from the new Badin exhibition at the National Museum in Stockholm, curated by my friend and colleague Åsa Bharathi Larsson of Södertörn University.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

Aeolians.net Wind & Site studies

@remiwnd.bsky.social Great presentation yesterday! I also enjoyed checking out your aeolians.net site. I’ll tag it for anyone looking at #envhist #energyhist or #histSTM, even if hashtags mean less over here.

#skystorians #earlymodern #vastearlyamerica kindly note that retirement = library downsizing and potential books of interest are available on Ebay for reasonable price/best offer

If you’re teaching DH right now, how are you thinking about your students’ relationship to generative AI? Are you ignoring it? Banning it? Discussing a policy with them first? Encouraging vibe coding?

Interested to see how educators across the continuum of opinions are managing it.

Hello, I made you a feed of your cats watching the Artemis II splashdown bsky.app/profile/did:...

The Illiteracy of the Trump Administration What happens when U.S. foreign policy is run by faux intellectuals rather than people who have actually read things?

A good post from @dandrezner.bsky.social about the difference between reading books and reading the wikipedia summaries of books. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-illite...

Opinion | I’ve Covered Women in the Workplace for 15 Years. Something Alarming Is Happening.

Don't miss this (gift) article: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/o...

so, fellow historians, this is a 12-alarm fire if "learn about history" is the top use of AI (related to the Humanities).

this should be an all-hands-on-deck conversation with @historians.org and every history department to work K-16 to get us away from history as just "names and dates"

Great round up of lunar maps, charts, globes and photographs #histSTM

Learned yesterday that AI monitors Bluesky "Starter Packs" to determine who to cite for academic expertise.

So I'm starting one for Media History.

I'm too busy to search for every name. If you're a media historian nominate yourself in the comments and I'll add you.

Can AI responses be influenced? The SEO industry is trying Marketing firms are going all in on AI search.

When ads came to ChatGPT, users were mad — those who had been using it as an editor or therapist suddenly saw ChatGPT as vulnerable to manipulation by brands and marketers.

The reality is that it was happening the whole time. I wrote about the new SEO gold rush:

www.theverge.com/tech/900302/...

How to take restitution into your own hands Relooted is a video game that allows players to pull off heists and reclaim artefacts – and doubles up as a short history of African art, writes Samuel Reilly

‘As a history of Africa in 45 objects, it would be hard to top the developer’s selection here.’ Samuel Reilly plays Relooted, a video game that allows us to pull off heists of African art from Western institutions.

I like to prepare my students for archival work by making my handwritten comments on their essays near incomprehensible.

Do any film/tv/media scholars have recommendations for narratology theorists? I'm specifically wanting to read up on pacing.

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

Update: The US Auto industry has retreated from EVs. That strategy will relegate them to the domestic market only or to extinction. The world is shifting to EVs. Global sales of fully internal combustion engine vehicles peaked in 2017. 🧪🔌💡☀️💨💧🔋 Paywalled link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I feel like “the world passed peak gas-powered car sales in 2017” is not a widely known fact

And the SAT, which is required for public school juniors in states incl CO, CT, DE, IN, KY, NH: "College Board may use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other computational methods (collectively, 'AI'), including in the development and scoring of tests and for test security purposes."

Forest Service Will Close Research Stations That Study Wildfire Risk

Just as the American West enters an abnormally warm spring and summer after an abnormally dry winter (and more of that pattern likely to continue).