US official to Axios: "We aren't sure who's in charge [of the Iranian negotiating team] and neither do they."

www.axios.com/2026/04/20/t...

All bad things are genocide actually, the ultimate bad thing.

I really should do a review thread of Samuel Helfont's "Iraq Against The World" on here, very relevant to the current debate over the rules based international order.

Best whimsy I ever added to an exam was an extra credit question about whether Peppa Pig met the class definition of "Megafauna."

Well this is quite the escalation.
And yes I believe it's a sign the IRI is fracturing from within.
Someone wants to force a restart of the war.

I think what's actually happening here is that different factions within the IRGC can't agree on whether the strait should be open or closed.

Received a publishing contract from a major academic publisher which required me to sign over all rights to future derivatives of my work which were created by AI.

I crossed that section out. Let's see what they say...

All these stories about Trump comparing Vance and Rubio as potential 2028 contenders are hilarious to me, because Trump can fire Rubio whenever he wants but he can't fire Vance even if he wanted to. Which surely affects how each one of them approaches Trump.

Are these emotional support activities in the room right now?

Most incredible is the gap between Robert Pape the heavily cited scholar ("Bombing to Win," "Dying to Win") whose work is very relevant to current geopolitical crises, and the Robert Pape who has spent the past few months beclowning himself posting AI-generated output on X/Twitter.

Making Congress safe for people that are more MAGA than Trump and hold Trump's feet to the fire for not being MAGA-extremist enough is the possible outcome here.

Given Massie's politics, I fear the result of breaking this wall might not be what you're hoping for.

Forgot to mention video games but even then I don't think there's very much there either? As opposed to Desert Storm, which has been the subject matter for countless video games.

Thinking about popular depictions of the War on Terror (movies, popular nonfiction, novels) and almost all are about Afghanistan.

Exceptions: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk; American Sniper; Hurt Locker and the latter two avoided the war's politics so completely they could have been set anywhere.

Some of these ("classical civilizations" "digital humanities" and what I assume is a BA in Fine Arts instead of a BFA) seem like "easy route" majors of the type many schools created in a misguided attempt to increase humanities enrollments.

Losing Classics, German and Russian is what really hurts.

Strongly suspect that they see number of majors = measure of the ability of the department to attract new students to the university who otherwise wouldn't attend, while gen eds = students who would just take another class if Classical Myth was no longer being offered.

Further evidence towards my thesis that aside from millennials of a very specific age band, the long term cultural impact of the Iraq War is nil.

I asked my Modern Middle East class what they had learned about the Iraq War, fully expecting something simplistic like "Bush lied about WMDs so he could steal Iraq's oil."

Instead they all said they knew nothing besides that it had happened.

They knew about 9/11 and the Afghanistan war, not Iraq.

Does anyone else get a lot of article ideas from teaching? I’ve had two ideas from my “Ancient Rome in the Movies” and refinement of others by teaching a slavery course too —this semester alone.

Pretty much the same. The ones who see these things clearly and still want to try are the ones who have what it takes to make it through a PhD program anyways.

This includes Grammarly BTW.

PSA: if you're a scholar writing in English who is not a native English speaker, and you're tempted to use AI to polish your English prose, you should know that the "AI voice" is very obvious to native English speakers in a way that probably isn't immediately obvious to non- native speakers.

Topics I'm teaching about this week (as an Assyriologist):

1994 Rwanda genocide
The First & Second Congo Wars
The end of Apartheid in South Africa
The Crusades
The Mongol Invasions
The Iraq War & American foreign policy in the Middle East in the 1990s-2000s
The Arab Spring
The war in Ukraine

Seconded. Here's my recent course load:

1) World Civ 1 (to 1700)
2) World Civ 2 (1700-present)
3) Modern Middle East
4) Historiography
5) "Justice" (an Honors course covering everything from Hammurabi and Plato to utilitarianism to reading Ta-Nehisi Coates and Derrick Bell)

I'm teaching about the Congo today. Here's Zaire's interior minister Leon Engulu Baanga Mpongo in 1975:

"God has sent a great prophet, our prestigious Guide Mobutu... our Messiah...Our gospel is Mobutism. This is why the crucifixes must be replaced by the image of our Messiah."

Yeah, that was my first thought. Rare to see one side of the political spectrum get totally crushed over a two decade span, but it does happen.

So if I am reading this chart correct there are literally no left of center parties left in Hungary?

I suspect that both sides entered the negotiations intending not to reach an agreement but to use the negotiations to exploit divisions on the other side.

This is Trump tightening the screws.

The number of formerly well regarded authors currently beclowning themselves at the other place with clearly AI-written tweets is actually pretty incredible.

(They think no one can tell)

The difference is that in Iran you need at least two or three competing factions of the IRI and IRGC to get this level of confusion while Trump just tweets out three contradictory positions in the course of one 24-hour period.