I have a very "is this going to be on the test" group this semester and I've already done too much historiography for them so just no.

Who has two thumbs and isn't going to talk about Benzion Netanyahu in today's Inquisition lecture? 🙋‍♀️

Castilian, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew

Teaching my students #MedievalSpain through the quadrilingual epitaph of Fernando III (1199-1252), dedicated by his son, Alfonso X. It never ceases to illuminate.

Grateful to @homophonous.bsky.social for the translations and to the invaluable #PosenLibrary.

Free Spain!, 1938-58, Albert Camus,
'... since the fall of Barcelona, there has existed in the most intimate part of us an absence, a void, a waiting. In a world that calls itself liberated, we turn our gaze to that country, because it speaks to us of injustices and regrets (1946)

Technofacism? Why Palantir's pro-West ‘manifesto' has critics alarmed Palantir's 'manifesto' has been described as an 'AI-driven threat to humanity's existence' and 'technofascism'.

Palantir's 'manifesto' has been described as an 'AI-driven threat to humanity's existence' and 'technofascism'.

Reddit emailed me this to entice me to their site: My professor died. How is this going to affect my final grade?

tbqh, it tracks with the semester I’m having.

Earth and Moon from DSCOVR NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured this unique view of the Moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth last month. This view shows the fully illuminated “dark side” of the moon that is never visible from Earth. Ian Regan processed this version of the image to account for the Moon's motion. NASA / NOAA / Ian Regan

I hadn't seen this before. This is pretty remarkable.

Earth and Moon in one NASA photo.

ht @astrokatie.com

Good morning poetry is not a commodity

I feel like I should get a credit against my alarm clock for the sleep I lost to the guy *screaming* across the street at midnight, repeatedly and for quite a while, that he’s such an asshole he doesn’t understand how bananas work(?).

Didn’t work exceptionally well for the Lusitania…

Strips from a MS of the commentary on Aristotle's De sensu et sensato by Thomas Aquinas, used to line the quires of another MS (@ubleipzig.bsky.social, MS 232)
nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:b...

Three Pages of Don Quixote Here was a woman who had lived through a dictatorship, been through three marriages, and built a brilliant career in a relentlessly male-dominated field. And she was happy.

A year ago, my friend Alexandra Bellow died: a Romanian mathematician, former wife of Saul Bellow, and an extraordinary woman who was in love with Don Quixote until her very last day. I wrote this small tribute in the days just after her death.

www.guernicamag.com/three-pages-...

Worth a visit to the Met:

😱

Yeah

www.nyu.edu/about/leader...

Trump doing Bible reading day and fighting with the Pope and the DHS Protestant-coded Christian nationalist tweets abd Hegseth's weird shit amd Mike Johnson arguing theology...

Christian nationalism was never a unified movement, and all these groups would rapidly try to put each other on the Wall.

…where you can’t touch anything.

Maria Bartiromo is on the NYU board of trustees.

In niche, depressing cultural news, the Metropolitan Museum cafeteria has replaced its salad bar with a bulk candy bar.

In the Afterlife by Mark Strand In the Afterlife She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn’t. There was a house,...

In the Afterlife by Mark Strand
www.divasofverse.com/2026/04/in-a...

'Awful people can be correct': Mary Beard on how history compares with today's world Our Writer at Large talks to the acclaimed classical scholar and public intellectual about the ancient world and what it teach us about today’s…

Professor Mary Beard & the Culture Wars

I talk to Britain’s leading public intellectual about freedom of speech and her battles with the far-right, white supremacists, the extremists who push the Great Replacement conspiracy theory & the misogynists of the manosphere

In @heraldscotland.bsky.social

Just sobbed hardest I have since my mom died in 2020.

She missed these trials by a few months.

One of most ruthless cancers. Hard to fathom that maybe she'd still be here.

I feel such a hole inside.

In case you're wondering if we should fund mRNA research instead of another stupid war ... yes.

“There is a solution. And the solution is to concede that we are confronting a social, economic, and political problem; not a technological one.”

A grid of newspapers have slogans like ‘health care we can afford’ ‘flexible hybrid work’ ‘keep union work in our union’ ‘real AI guard rails’ and ‘fair wages’ painted on them in red

On Thursday at the company all hands @nytimesguild.bsky.social members read these hand painted papers while the CEO gave her remarks to remind her of our priorities and I’m so proud of how they turned out