'The Walking Dead' star throws support behind movement to 'Save Cable Bay' A Vancouver Island environmental campaign is drawing high-profile support as an actress is speaking out against a proposed industrial rezoning near Nanaimo's coast.

cheknews.ca/the-walking-...

Our Board member Prof. Valerie Wayne @valeriewayne.bsky.social has written an introduction to the ODNB’s new set of entries on female stationers:

Very exciting: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography published a cluster of new entries on women stationers. See the intro by Valerie Wayne: www.oxforddnb.com/newsitem/906...

ODNB entries are so helpful in identifying women from traces on printed material. So happy to see this work ❤️

A plethora of new ODNB entries on early modern women stationers! Entries from Heidi Craig, Andrea Silva, Kirk Melnikoff, @mgyarn.bsky.social, Andreas P. Bassett, @tarallyons.bsky.social and @georginaemw.bsky.social, me, and of course from @valeriewayne.bsky.social who cooked up the whole cluster.

Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn't making that clear. When I was a kid, there was a popular phrase--"what if they had a war and no one came?" What if we ...

www.meditationsinanemergency.com/please-shout...

Guest, Host, Ghost A Dinner Party in Kyiv

Guest, Host, Ghost
open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p...

Concentration Camp Labor Cannot Become Normal

Concentration Camp Labor
open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p...

Canada’s Trump-Fueled Brain Gain

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/w...

VIDEO | In Hungary, the fascist Orban government tried to ban the Pride Parade🏳️‍🌈and threatened to punish those who joined.

The response was clear: a massive march with hundreds of thousands of people.

Protest in Honolulu estimated at 7-10 thousand—which is really big for us!

Help the Humanitarian Research Lab Keep Finding Ukraine’s Abducted Children The Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) at Yale helps to locate and bring back Ukraine’s children who have been abducted by Russia. But without additional funding,

One of the worst crimes of Russia’s war is the abduction of children. This Yale lab tracked the kids. Trump and Rubio cut the funding. You can help. Urge Rubio to reinstate the funding — and donate here.
medicine.yale.edu/lab/khoshnoo...

See you there for this important demonstration!

Last Year's Move to Toronto And This Year's Politics (video and commentary)

Last Year's Move to Toronto
open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p...

Opinion | Harvard Derangement Syndrome

Steven Pinker’s nuanced take on Harvard and its contributions. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/o...

This is by Arjun Appadurai.

‘An autoimmune disorder’: how Trump is turning American democracy against itself

Screenshot from a Zoom presentation that shows a PowerPoint slide introducing a talk, "Selling Your Plan in Jacobean England," by Aaron T. Pratt of the Harry Ransom Center. In a camera feed located in the upper-right corner, Pratt begins his talk.

If you missed my sniffly @nvshakespeare.bsky.social talk on author attribution in early English playbooks—both print and manuscript!—last month, a recording is available online:

newvariorumshakespeare.org/news/

You can find it by scrolling down to the April 2, 2025 news item about my visit.

ACLS, AHA, and MLA sue over the dismantling of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Read it:

www.mla.org/content/down...

NIH grant terminations under Trump have totaled at least $1.8 billion, analysis finds Researchers calculated that $1.8 billion in National Institutes of Health grants were terminated in just over one month

In the short run, loss of America’s appeal to scientists around the world. In the medium term, economic depression. In the long term, the US reverses its development.
www.statnews.com/2025/05/08/t...

Terrific news. “…the court ordered the administration to immediately take steps to restore the agency’s employees and grant funding activities.”

www.infodocket.com/2025/05/13/r...

Trump Is Trying to Take Control of Congress Through Its Library Donald Trump’s administration is pushing to take over the Library of Congress, its latest effort to subsume the legislative branch.

www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

NEW: Congressional Republicans are pushing back against Trump’s attempted takeover of the Library of Congress after a brief standoff with DOJ officials this morning.

w/ @ktullymcmanus @jordainc

t.co/BJ79oZAj9C

Republicans are deploying every trick in the book to gut Medicaid while claiming they’re not cutting it.

The CBO estimates the latest GOP plan would kick nearly 9 million people off Medicaid.

Why?

To fund tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit corporations and the rich.

“This colorful view of a crowded reading room may show the 135th Street Library---now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture---where the country's first significant collection of African American literature, history, and prints opened in 1925. Everybody appears absorbed in their books, and the standing figure in the front looking at African art may represent the artist as a young man, delving deeper into his heritage.” Smithsonian American Art Museum

‘The Library’

1960, Jacob Lawrence

So if I am getting this right:
Thursday the librarian of Congress was fired.
Friday the copyright office rushed out a draft report suggesting genAI training on copyrighted works shouldn’t be legal.
Saturday the head of the copyright office is fired.

Dr Carla Hayden was a truly great Librarian of Congress. It is an outrage that she has been sacked - a national shame on the United States. I had the pleasure of knowing her and working with her - she’ll continue to do good in the next phase of her career whatever that is.

Photograph of a printed broadside from 1605 that depicts and describes (in German) the people and places involved in the papal conclave that May.

This German broadside from 1605—by Heinrich Ulrich— illustrates the papal conclave that elected Camillo Borghese that May. He became Pope Paul V.

(@ransomcenter.bsky.social Popular Imagery Collection 285)

eight leatherbound books all titled "FERNS" volumes 1 through 8

Everyone in the past was neurotypical, which is how we got things like this single-author, eight-volume encyclopedia of ferns

Today ACLS, AHA, and MLA filed a lawsuit in federal district court seeking to reverse the recent actions to devastate the National Endowment for the Humanities, including the elimination of grant programs, staff, and entire divisions and programs. bit.ly/4lWubq5

Rev. Barber, surrounded by police, praying in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

Rev. Barber, surrounded by police, praying in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

BREAKING: Police just surrounded Rev. William Barber, prominent activist and pastor, as he and others prayed in the U.S. Capitol Rontunda.

Police then expelled everyone (including press!) from the Rotunda to (presumably) arrest them.

I've covered protests here a lot. Never seen anything like it.