Native American remains found at UC Berkeley construction site The Berkeley Scanner was the first to report this news.

www.berkeleyscanner.com/2026/04/16/u...

In Your Spare Time: From the Blog of Ursula K. Le Guin: Julie Phillips reads "In Your Spare Time" This week, Julie Phillips reads Post 1, "In Your Spare Time," which Ursula posted in October of 2010. The original post can be read at Julie Phillips' website is  

I'm up this week on the @ursulakleguin.com blog podcast, reading the title essay, "In Your Spare Time." It's a great Le Guin for skeptics and beginners, a little bento box of her ideas and prose—irreverent, thoughtful, and moving.

inyoursparetime.libsyn.com/julie-phillips-reads-in-your-spare-time

“In memoriam Ian Maddieson (1942–2025)” by Patricia Keating (Apr. ’26) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Terrible indeed, but I wonder if the reading is right. It could be that "based on the budget request" means "if the budget request is approved", which we could hope against hope will not be the case.

^to *be* more like

Photograph of Andrew Pawley (a smiling bearded man)

Andy Pawley's recent passing led me to read this memoir article, which I highly recommend. I have always admired his work, but this essay made me see him as the kind of linguist we should all hope to more like.

nzlingsoc.org/journal_arti...

UC Berkeley: "On this day in 1868, Gov. Henry Haight signed an act catalyzing the audacious idea that California should have a great public university - one that would serve equally the children of immigrants and settlers, landowners and industrial barons."

Another webpage celebrates “the audacious idea that California should have a great public university—one that would serve equally the children of immigrants and settlers, landowners and industrial barons” (UC News 2018). Not served, it seems, are the children of those whose land was taken.

I was surprised that @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social celebrated Charter Day yesterday with rhetoric suppressing the presence of Indigenous people. My take in my 2023 book is here too.

Unmasking Academe’s Gilded Boys’ Club The Epstein files reveal an elite, chummy, and venal scholarly network.

A great article about a sorry subject.

www.chronicle.com/article/unma...

Jeff Galloway, Olympian Who Transformed American Distance Running, Dies at 80

Lovely and inspiring, an obituary and an appreciation of Jeff Galloway, "the most important person in the history of American distance running."

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/o...

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/w...

I was there!

In person, Lowie was fundamentally unassuming, slightly shy, affectionate to family and friends. He claimed little, made his own way, took with fortitude and serenity what fate dealt him. He was candid, incorruptible, and loyal; it did not occur to him to scheme or to suspect it as possible in his friends. His life flowed amiably and cheerfully. Passions rarely shook him; his work pace was even and cumulative. Although he did not return to Europe until 31 years after leaving it in boyhood, he remained a scholar in the old European tradition: respectful of learning in itself, imbued with its dignity, unexpectant of worldly rewards. Humane in attitudes, sedentary in habits, he was fond of discourse with intimates, and given to analysis but not argument; and he possessed the gift of true conversation, stimulating, gentle, wide-ranging. He is missed by all who came to know him. - A. L. Kroeber

The last lovely paragraph of a short obituary of the anthropologist Robert Lowie

www.jstor.org/stable/43643...

How the mighty have fallen. Even @newyorker.com uses "begs" = "raises" the question! (End of old-person rant.)

Decals on a wall at Oregon Contemporary read: Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. THE CREATION OF ÉA

One last shot taken while packing up the exhibition.

John Haiman

A lovely appreciation of John Haiman by Stephanie Farmer

www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Students need to remember that Inigo Montoya method for emails and greetings:
"Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Polite Greeting
Name
Relevant Personal Link
Manage Expectations

Keep it BRIEF.

Participants at the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages

Apply now to participate in the 2026 Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages, held at UC Berkeley and sponsored by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival in collaboration with @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social!

www.aicls.org?page_id=566

The Word For Man Is Ishi | The Last Archive In 1911, a Native American man, the only member of his community to survive a genocide, encountered the new Anthropology department at Berkeley University.

There is also some relevant speculation here: www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the...

The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism In the past two months, I’ve found myself thinking back to an essay Ursula K. Le Guin posted on her blog in November 2016. It was one of her last long essays, and she wrote it at a time when she—li…

When I wrote this a year ago I had no idea how bad things would get. Today, eight years after she left us, I'm trying to follow Ursula's advice: write and worry. Write and act. Worry and keep writing.

lithub.com/the-way-of-w...

Why Professor Holliday Doesn’t Use Generative “AI” Why Professor Holliday Doesn’t Use Generative “AI” This is a (very) incomplete list of journalistic and scholarly sources that provide information about limitations and documented drawbacks of variou...

My course syllabi now contain a link to this document, "why Professor Holliday Doesn't Use Generative AI". Feel free to share/repurpose or just check out the links for your own reference. It won't stop some of them, but I want students to know why. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I wish I had contributed to this!

Some fine books here!

Agreed, good forensic work. What it shows is repulsive.

This paper is batshit insane. It also (of course) has A TON of bullshit references that do not exist. Hey @springernature.com retract this AI slop and fire the editor that let it pass. There is evidently no review or quality assurance process in place at this journal.

A pencil case with colored pencils, annotated with the initials and dates of two owners: "A.L.K. 1876-1960, U.K.L. 1929-"

I forgot this item, maybe my favorite: Alfred Kroeber's (and then Ursula's) pencil case. In my imagination these are the very colored pencils that decorate so many Kroeber manuscript pages.

Robert Spott with young Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, probably 1933

Juan Dolores with young Ursula Kroeber, late 1930s

Small rock, labelled "Vincennes 2-III-54" (March 2, 1954)

Drawing of four cats by Ursula K. Le Guin, with words: "CATS, identification chart: Leonard, Neko, Philip, Bonzo"

Some highlights from today's visit to "A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin" @oregoncontemporary.bsky.social in Portland, Oregon. A great show!

Next year, the 19th Encuentro Internacional de Lingüística en el Noroeste (ELNOR) will take place at the University of Sonora. Here is the first call for abstracts. Abstracts and presentations may be submitted in Spanish or English. Please share.

The authors also explain how and why they turned multistate traits into binary traits, and why (in their view) this does not mess up the stats.

The paper was published in the year that she married Alfred Kroeber, in whose seminar the paper was developed by three students.

Figure from Clements, Schenck & Brown, "A New Objective Method for Showing Special Relationships" (1926), showing Polynesian cultures with more resemblances than predicted by chance

TIL that Theodora Kroeber invented lexicostatistics. OK, an exaggeration, but in this 1926 paper she ("T. K[racaw] Brown") & coauthors counted Polynesian culture traits & worked out culture pairs w/ more matches than chance predicts & which are therefore closest.

www.jstor.org/stable/661296

Cover of Andrew Garrett's "The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California", with a picture of the first letter of the word Kroeber being removed from a wall

My book The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California (2023) is now open-access to read or download:

escholarship.org/uc/item/59w3...

Thanks to @mitpress.bsky.social, where you can still buy lovely print copies (mitpress.mit.edu/978026254709...).