Hi Eileen! Still going!

AI needs historians as much as historians need AI Digital history did not fail in isolation—it failed just before the world discovered how much it needed it.

AI’s hardest problems — retrieval, ground truth, alignment — aren’t just technical. They’re historical.

The future of trustworthy AI may depend on historical methods.
computationalhistory.substack.com/p/ai-needs-h...

The Lost Promise of Digital History And why computational history is now needed more than ever

Digital history didn’t fail; it stopped short.

It built archives, not cumulative research programs.
Now AI is asking the questions DH left unresolved.

Computational history is what comes next. computationalhistory.substack.com/p/the-lost-p...

Thanks Eileen. We’re all okay but a little shaken, esp our CDC friends and neighbors.

Look around, the case for more, not less, liberal arts education remains stronger than ever.

I can't stress enough how studying philosophy at a liberal arts school prepared me for my career.

Logic problems, organizing abstract concepts, neural nets and models of cognition, language and conversation, the nature of experience.

Honestly expected never to see a trolley problem again tho.

Detail of a copperplate print showing Carlos de Bastida y Biedma. The monk is sitting at his working desk, surrounded by opened books, and other objects. Source: https://dev.hab.de/portraits/werk/28624/

3 tabs opened, a note-pad with a to-do-list in front of you, and a pair of spectacles handy. Surfing on the #earlymodern internet in 1622. #skystorians

Is it too late to give Sacha Baron Cohen an Oscar for this? Not a damn lie told. 🇺🇸

This is cool. Johannes Uhl and colleagues use historical maps and settlement data to generate a dataset of the approximate date of every road in the United States. Check it out: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16625 @jhuhl.bsky.social

So.

Less ability to forecast hurricanes, and a crippled FEMA so you can’t get federal aid for the damage…

Let me know if you ever need a reader. I like where you’re going with this, and I think it’s vital to describe so many of the things you touch here. I’ve been troubled by the cavernous silences.

I believe it! Are the chapters drafted yet or just in your head?

Now if only they would publish the data on their findings so that we could understand the work of government and the sacrifices of public servants. Because every past government committee in a democracy committed to transparency publishes its findings, right??

Exciting new threshold in dh!

Profound personal statement about the power of the humanities, the risks associated with losing the university as a bridge to social mobility, and how much is at stake as we abandon the infrastructure of research. Thank you for writing this, Karin. We need the long form version.

I wish more of my neighbors in Western North Carolina realized this.

I really appreciate the share! Greetings from holiday in Amsterdam, Wilko.

I do love that it was helpful to a China scholar, Tom! I’ve been hearing the same thing from sovietologists as well. Thanks for weighing in!

Super powerful Sunday meditation on America in despair by theologian Diana Butler Bass @dianabutlerbass open.substack.com/pub/dianabutle…

Man just let us get out of this hiring freeze. I’ve written memos about it already.

Hear hear!

Awesome!

Chicago

Great writing and research, Michael! Love seeing this kind of detail and thought from Texas (my home).

This is a remarkably thoughtful essay about standing ruins in urban landscapes today and what they mean -- a portrait of Austin's long battle to attract IT, and about international bulldozing as a way of life in our wasteful economy.

"The world is beautiful, and outside it there is no salvation."

Most surprising of all is his address to the landscape -- say the landscape of sunbathing on the beach -- as a perpetual present where people aren't required to perform duties to family or the state. The "unbearable" sublime, for him, is wandering the hills of Florence.

I'm astonished to find something like the corollary of Henry David Thoreau. Unbridled odes to beauty, truth, the body, the power of love.

Reading Albert Camus's A Short Guide to Towns Without a Past (French edition 1950) -- new to me, but essays written from 1937 to 1950 in northern Italy and Algeria. I'm used to the dour short stories of Camus assigned in high school, but these are different.

How to Redistribute the Globe | Novara Media It's the Land, Stupid.

Listen to my new podcast/interview with the brilliant young British folks at NovaraFM, where I talk about participatory mapping, land reform, and their fascinating histories -- "How to Redistribute the Globe"
novaramedia.com/2025/06/13/h...