Ah shit. Another book to add to an increasingly unwieldy TBR list.

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

Congratulations!

Angine de Poitrine - Full Performance (Live on KEXP) YouTube video by KEXP

Yes the world is fucking awful, but have you heard Angine de Poitrine?

losing contact with the earth for 40 minutes sounds nice

Unrelated, but your profile pic is the greatest. For now the nets are full of fish…

This reflects a fundamental underestimation of the socioeconomic value of unpaid labour – most especially women's labour – throughout history. @jwhittle.bsky.social and her team at Exeter have done wonderful work on addressing this in regards to early modern history 🗃️

March sees the return of bumblebee queens as they emerge from hibernation – here are some of the common species you can spot this month 👀

Have you spotted your first bumblebee of 2026?

🔎 Brush up on your bumblebee identification skills: https://ow.ly/af3U50Yi2iq

How Italians Came to Run Ireland’s Chippers - Italy Segreta From Italian villages to Irish chippers: the story of families who fried, served, and shaped a nation’s taste.

Just in time for St Patrick's Day, a little piece I wrote about Ireland's Italian chippers. italysegreta.com/how-italians...

What’s all this ‘we’ business

That’s terrible news!

Me again!
Us Irish are obsessed with the weather ... for good reasons!
☔

“History teaches, but it has no pupils.”

—Antonio Gramsci

SSHM 2026: In/Out Location: University of Leeds Dates: 30 June to 3 July 2026 Submission Deadline: 5.00pm (GMT) 11th January 2026 Conference Co-Convenors: Dr Alexia Moncrieff & Dr Katherine Rawlin…

As we welcome in the New Year 🎉 and things to look forward to in 2026……
A reminder of the deadline for proposals for #SSHM2026 (University of Leeds, 30 June- 3 July 2026)
Deadline for abstracts: 11 January

‘I’m not out to kill foxes’: Hunting splits rural community as St Stephen’s Day chase held Meath landowner says this month’s defeat of Bill on banning foxhunting was ‘diabolical’

Fucking blood-thirsty Barbarians.

‘I’m not out to kill foxes. But if we chase and torture them and some end up dead, oopsie!’

www.irishtimes.com/environment/...

Also, as you are a historian of early modern Navarre, Jose Manuel Fradejas Rueda is an outstanding source on birds of prey in the early modern Iberian peninsula.

The Encyclopedia of Falconry This lavishly illustrated encyclopedia contains some 1,500 terms and idioms, related to or connected with falconry, with explanations, derivations and notes. It is illustrated with photographs, figure...

This is a good primer on birds of prey, not just falconry as the title suggests: books.google.ie/books/about/... If you can’t find it let me know. I have a scanned version in pdf.

Word salad spam

Academic scam/spam emails are getting weirder

Cruelty is anhedonic. It rarely delivers the euphoria promised because, in the abstract, what feels righteous and joyful inevitably reveals itself to be sordid and small. Then it's "No not like that". "No not enough". "No the real battle, the forever war to make this feel good starts now". Forever.

You’ll always be Fiftystatesians to me.

‘Thanks for pointing that out. Feedback like yours helps me provide better responses. Let me restate: it is, in fact, not easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. The point was exaggeration, but thank you for calling me out on it.’

It's been a pleasure being on the great organising team at York and Northumbria for next year's NEHN meeting - a collaborative worksop on the many histories of 'unwanted life'. Do see the CFP below, and send in a submission if it appeals!

Kathy Sheridan: Where is the kindness when we talk about trans people? Number of trans people in Irish society is tiny – and each one is a human being

Kathy Sheridan: Where is the kindness when we talk about trans people?

The Stone Roses - Love Spreads [HD] YouTube video by Juan Jordan

RIP Mani

The Iberian Colonial Repository is my own an initiative to facilitate the access to primary sources from the Iberian world to MA and PhD students. Traveling is difficult and expensive. An old source can put someone on a research journey. Please consider sharing them.

Will do this week!

Reminds me I need to get my ass in gear to upload some more stuff to the archive!

I have a copy of this! Got it a few years ago for a short description of aletos and wasn’t disappointed! I think I digitised it too but obviously forgot to upload it to the online archive….