Megha Manjari Mohanty reviews Art and the Critical Medical Humanities, exploring how the volume positions art as a methodological tool for rethinking medical knowledge and care alongside cultures of illness and health.
thepolyphony.org/2026/04/21/c...
Perfect name for something you use for your science and not give any credit
The double meaning of “agent” — a) initiator of action vs b) proxy who represents another actor — is becoming a very load-bearing equivocation.
Same! It was so traumatizing, and fascinating that my first thought was not that I'd gone viral for something smart or funny. An indictment of social media.
Follow • •• me and the boys have a couple of chains wrapped around the sword in the stone hooked up to mikes toyota tundra gonna pull that fucker out like a tooth. ••• Me and the boys misunderstood the arcane nature of the stone and now the Toyota is king of England
May the House of Toyota reign a thousand years with magnanimity and honor
What I want to say: "Why don't you issue me a concrete mixer, and I'll go put curb cuts in the sidewalk too." It's perpetually exhausting the extent to which institutions will strategically moralize our labor to pave over their failings.
Tenure folks should be doing a ton of reviews. I actually have turned down multiple AE/Editor roles because I think the field needs me doing reviews more than editing.
Texas "bbq"
Screenshot of Figure 6, rankings over time of the top 10 institutions in 2025 across all fellowships. Ranking in 2025 includes Harvard (1), Columbia (2) Stanford (3), NYU and UCLA (4), Princeton (6), Yale (7), Northwestern (8), Michigan (9), and Berkeley and Chicago (10). In an attempt to drill down into the stability of the status hierarchy, we trace the rankings over time of the top 10 institutions from 2025 across all of the fellowships (Figure 6). There is some movement in these rankings, but they are generally fairly consistent, particularly for a country with thousands of colleges and universities. Five of the eventual top 10 start in the top 10 and three were tied just outside the top 20. Since the 1980s, every eventual top 10 institution has been ranked somewhere within the top 20 institutions regarding institutional affiliation.
Screenshot of article which reads: That means that, for four and a half decades, the top institutions for university affiliation have remained at the top. The acceptance rates for such fellowships are quite low, and the organizations themselves often acknowledge that they receive many more qualified applications than they can fund. Under these conditions, it seems inevitable that arbitrary distinctions come into play at some point in the selection process. Even so, the hierarchy has been remarkably durable across time.
We went by year and added up the fellowship wins by first affiliation. We grabbed the top 10 universities in 2025 and then we tracked them all the way back to 1925 (gray bars are when a fellowship begins). We found a reaaaaal steady hierarchy.
I’m reading the Expanse again. Miller and Holden were being treated for lethal radiation exposure and the crew had to constantly override the automated medical systems which considered their survival probability so low that it initiated palliative care.
This is madness.
@lastpositivist.bsky.social offers a thoughtful reply in a later post. I offer a hasty image critique of the original post. The rules invoked just don't match the game being played.
In Bruges scene where Colin Farrell is pointing a gun at his head and Brendon Gleeson is also pointing a gun at Colin Farrell's head
Current status of the Strait of Hormuz dispute
I do like how obvious it is that academics say "the ____ Turn" to avoid saying "the ____ trend"
Call for conttributions to special issue of @bioethicalinquiry.bsky.social on 'Bioethics for the Planet', mixing medical ethics & environmental (climate) ethics - edited by Paul Komesaroff, Cara Platts, Natasha Rooney and me. EoI by May 31 to c.platts@unimelb.edu.au
#bioethics #medhum #envhum #STS
Appropriate since snakes do not have arms.
“Health economists warned that this AI coding arms race — fueled by AI scribes and autonomous coding tools maximizing codes on one side, and by insurer algorithms trying to minimize payments on the other — is a zero-sum game that could really hurt some of the most vulnerable providers”
I don’t think BlueSky is dying but I do think it‘s stagnant because there are only so many unpleasant terminally online politically hyper-engaged left of center aging millennials with personality disorders and a history of underachievement to draw from. We’re pretty much all here already.
This is wild
Graphic with text “Before World Literature: The Trickster Tales of al-Ḥarīrī in an Age of Commentary. April 9th, 2026, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM in RLP 2.606. Join us to hear Barnard College's Dr. Matthew Keegan discuss his new book: Before World Literature: The Trickster Tales of al-Ḥarīrī in an Age of Commentary. Before World Literature offers an account of Arabic literary history through the lens of the reception of one of the most widely read Arabic texts of the postclassical period: the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī. Funding provided by the Barron Ulmer Kidd Centennial Lectureship,” with image of Speaker and Author of Before World Literature, Dr. Matthew Keegan.”
The Humanities Institute is co-sponsoring:
Before World Literature: The Trickster Tales of al‑Ḥarīrī in an Age of Commentary. RSVP liberalarts.utexas.edu/mes/events/
“The journal’s retraction was prompted by a December 8 email from Markowitz and Rosner to the journal, which identified a glaring conflict of interest. They presented evidence that the commentary was written by a consultant paid by Johnson & Johnson” @profgoldberg.bsky.social
![Screen capture of email flagged as spam: "[UTEXAS: POSSIBLY MALICIOUS CONTENT] Faculty Annual Review 2024–5. WARNING! The University of Texas at Austin email defense system has identified the following message as possibly containing malicious content."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:em4abyeua3qk4ca6fy7vgoft/bafkreied2uybwq2drn2afaox5x46ggnkxxhvshbngszrtbs5f6corxeoyy)
Screen capture of email flagged as spam: "[UTEXAS: POSSIBLY MALICIOUS CONTENT] Faculty Annual Review 2024–5. WARNING! The University of Texas at Austin email defense system has identified the following message as possibly containing malicious content."
Great- now I'm afraid to read my annual performance review
I've never met anyone who celebrated the beauty of cursive that didn't do so in a strict normative way. My fine-motor limitations didn't cause trauma in art b/c of the diversity of accepted aesthetics. Maybe there's a way to do that with cursive, but it's hard for me to imagine given my history.
Same: Re: Westwood Elementary 40 years ago. Reading this catalyzed waves of repressed trauma.
Not an answer, just an anecdote. Trinity College Dublin trustees told faculty what, how, & when to teach. Upset by both what/how and his assigned lecture hours, anatomist James Macartney sold his teaching collection to Cambridge in 1834 leaving TCD without one. There's probably a lesson here.
The Spanish Atlantic on Paper: Methods on Material Culture and Critical Bibliography April 9th - 10th, 2026, 9:00 AM - 4:30 PM Located at the Institute for Historical Studies and the Benson Latin American Collection This two-day symposium convenes a diverse group of scholars working on textual, visual, and material cultures across the Spanish Atlantic world and beyond, from the sixteenth through the twentieth century. The program features five invited speaker lectures, a showcase of the Benson Latin American Collection’s Treasures, a book discussion, and three panel discussions on archives, digital objects, and curatorial practices. Funding provided by the Viola S. Hoffman and George W. Hoffman Lectureship in Liberal Arts and Fine Arts
The Humanities Institute is co-sponsoring:
The Spanish Atlantic on Paper: Methods on Material Culture and Critical Bibliography
Join us for a two‑day symposium bringing together scholars of textual, visual, and material cultures across the Spanish Atlantic world. RSVP: bit.ly/SoFCBSymposium
