Virginia voters approve redistricting plan that could boost Democrats’ seats in Congress Virginia voters have approved a congressional redistricting plan plan that could help Democrats win up to four additional U.S.

Sic Semper Tyrannis, Irrumator Aurantiacus.
apnews.com/article/virg...

Victory and Death still puts me in tears every time I watch it.

Generally I feel like Filoni gets Star Wars best of anybody, but does best when he has plenty of time to develop, with early seasons being uneven. This is the first time like I've felt he's nailed it from episode one.

I liked Rebels and Bad Batch a lot, but imo they never reached the same heights as the best of TCW (though never were as bad as the worst, either).

Agreed. In my opinion, the Ahsoka, Clone, and Mandalore arcs on TCW, especially the final arc where they all come together in season 7, are the only things post-RotJ to equal the original trilogy.
But this may be even better. Won't know until it's finished, but damn, what a start.

Maul: Shadow Lord is what I've needed since I first saw that double-bladed crimson lightsaber back in 1999. Finally, a show about a core character from the films that isn't pointless fan service. This is what great Star Wars looks like.

My preference would be for a chronological coverage from Marcus Aurelius to Gregory the Great, in part because I personally feel Rome falls with the last act of the Roman Senate in 603, but I realize that's a broad scope & few books will do that.
Also, it needs to lean hard into "undergrad friendly"

I'm trying to decide on a book for my new "Many Falls of Rome" course. I want to include excerpts in the back half of the course (going back to Gibbon & Pirenne) to show how scholarship evolves over time, but for the baseline narrative, what would experts recommend? #medievalbluesky #antiquity

I mean unless they fail the class, I suppose?

It does when they take courses from me.

If a college education did nothing but prevent you from ever acting like you were 100% sure about something ever again, & made you feel like you always needed to learn more & question your assumptions, it would be the best education money could buy, & worth the government providing it free to all.

US spending on ‘reckless’ Iran war could have saved 87m lives, says UN Head of UN’s humanitarian agency frustrated that $2bn weekly cost of conflict comes amid big cuts to aid budgets

It would be so easy to have everybody in the world love us. Soft power is so much cheaper than war.

But no, because then we'd be helping poor people, and we wouldn't feel big and strong.

www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

It's £330 of course. Really hoping @archaeopress.bsky.social has a sale at Kalamazoo or Leeds this summer...

Holy cr*p, Winchester Studies 4.i is finally on preorder. Very few of you will appreciate what that means to me, personally, as a researcher. I've been looking at "title forthcoming" listed next to that since I started grad school nearly eighteen years ago.

The last we in that post should be corrupt politicians working at the behest of auto lobbyists.

I would have thought the same about America, but here we are. It wasn't overlooked , it was dismantled to suit other interests. We're not lacking railroads because we didn't like them or have a good network, we deliberately dismantled ours to make car sales go up.

Oh I agree, it's unbearably stupid, even for racists. But it is important to point out that the reason we don't approve racism isn't just because it's immoral, but also because it's fundamentally irrational.

As an American, I can tell you from painful personal experience that that is not something you can count on. I would actually begrudgingly congratulate anyone of any political persuasion if they improved our abysmal passenger train network even slightly.

Didn't say they did, said it was their bar for success. It was, and they did improve rail infrastructure to a degree, albeit in a corrupt, authoritarian way.

But also because it was funny.

It's embarrassing to live in a country where the would-be authoritarians are so profoundly and obviously stupid and incompetent, and yet have made it so far.

Also, you have to wait to alienate the Catholics until after you've finished oppressing the Jews, Muslims and atheists. That's just scapegoating 101.

Come on. The Italians managed to pull off fascism better than this, and their explicit bar for success was an accurate train schedule.

If you're going to be a bigot, could you at least be a bigot who makes semi-coherent antisemitic references? Because this is pretty sad, even for Hegseth.

Evangelical white nationalists, if this is the best you have to offer, your übermensch needs some serious work.

The thing about bigotry is that it intrinsically doesn't make sense.

This is even useful advice to mediocre cishet white men.
So I hear... 😒

Ah yes... Pure Michigan. Almost always said sarcastically, in my experience.

I identify with the Luddites, but I can't help but feel that they lost - at the very least, the PR war. I am sure you know that story better than I!
I am also reminded of the druids supposedly refusing to write their lore, or the many times Christians have returned unsuccessfully to Donatism.

It would be really nice if academics would remember that higher ed is not monolithic, and not make assumptions about how other institutions work, or don't work. There are lots of different ways to be scared and struggling out there, and lots of different ways we have to fight the good fight.

I can't assume you've never worked at an institution you were worried would be closed in a year. Please extend me the same grace and assume you don't know what every kind of solidarity looks like, or is even possible, in the multifarious hellscape of modern higher education.

That didn't get accomplished because I got known as the difficult, uncooperative one. It got accomplished because I volunteered to chair despite not being tenured, volunteered for unpaid extra service on committees shaping my institution, and built political knowledge and capital.

I think it's pretty clear you think you understand my position when you don't have to worry about fighting every day to keep your colleagues employed. My solidarity was getting one of my vap colleagues moved to tenure track so they wouldn't have to spend years on annual contracts like I did.