I've definitely been working on Carolingian moral instruction for too long. After receiving a slightly ungrammatical e-mail, found myself pondering the wide moral difference between: "We hope you are doing well!" and "We hope you are doing good!".
NEW: Bahrain orders citizenship review as Iran war-linked crackdown escalates: What to know
The move comes as Bahrain tightens security measures amid the war, targeting alleged Iran-linked dissenters and considering additional citizenship revocations.
www.al-monitor.com/originals/20...
My occasional reminder that academia is as much chance as it is meritocracy.
I think most of my tenured colleagues are smart, hardworking, and creative.
But we should all remember that lots of others, equally smart, equally hardworking, equally creative, never got a chance at the brass ring.
Anyone who thinks woke liberal academics never criticize aspects of various cultures doesn't know shit there's just a way to do it where you have to be contextual, specific, and not a totalizing racist and these guys just wanna be totalizing racists
I’ve been waiting for this one ever since I heard Chihab present part of it in Cairo! A cultural history of the Egyptian state.
Kuwait has officially stripped citizenship from an astonishing 5% of its population - over 70,000 people - and a full 20% may be impacted. Good backgrounder on what’s going on by Sultan Alamer and Fatimah Muhammad.
newlinesmag.com/essays/kuwai...
This is more broadly generalizable: If you don't do the research yourself, you have no idea if AI is making stuff up. And if you do the research yourself, then AI isn't saving you much labor, if any.
I just got an email from #Starbucks encouraging me to use #ChatGPT to decide what to order
The circle of death is:
Cut faculty (or non-replace) so you offer fewer classes so fewer people enroll so you cut faculty so you offer fewer classes so fewer people enroll so then the market has spoken.
“Israel shall preserve its right to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks. This shall not be impeded by the cessation of hostilities.” Israel-Lebanon ceasefire does not require Israel to cease fire.
www.state.gov/releases/off...
Read in the March #AHR: In “Nakba: Catastrophic Ideation and the Meanings of Disaster (1895–1948),” Adrien Zakar explores the formation of nakba in Arabic as a concept of disaster and how the Nakba of 1948 Palestine redefined Arab intellectual standards on selfhood, sovereignty, and objectivity.
For those of you who might not follow this, Barghouti is the individual who currently has the most credibility with a wide spectrum of Palestinians, very likely the best interlocutor the Israelis could have if they were serious about negotiations.
They aren't and he's been in prison since... 2002
And you can get good advice for a pitch by reading @lollardfish.bsky.social's The Public Scholar, which breaks them down with examples: www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...
Now coming out in about a month!
Somehow I was expecting this listicle to stretch back farther than the middle of the 20th century. #medievalistproblems www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/w...
Open Access from @bloomsburyacademic.bsky.social, Controversies in Formative Shi’i #Islam: The Ghulat Muslims and Their Beliefs, by Mushegh Asatryan
True
Hormuz red pigment is well-known and mentioned in my book and I even include a swatch (I'm sure there are different grades but this one was sent to me by Heidi Gustafson in an exchange).
(reposted without the follow-farming thread full of fake-ass photoshopped imagery)
The video does happen to be a few months old - perhaps a sign of what was to come
The island of #Hormuz is actually known for its colors. This is from my book The Medieval Persian Gulf - I really hope to see them myself in better times. #Iran #PersianGulf #ArabianGulf
I feel like if the White House staff had included a medieval magician trained to look for bad omens, U.S. strategy would have been different
After a bunch of autocrats sucked up to Trump at the big dumb ceremony nobody except Morocco and UAE have actually delivered promised money for Gaza via Trump’s corrupt and stupid Board of Peace. Meanwhile Gaza continues to suffer mostly unnoticed.
www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...
It is early in a two-week "ceasefire," and I am not clear Trump wants to resume strike
Women of the Empire: Life and Labor in the Achaemenid Persepolis Archives #Iran @degruyterbrill.bsky.social
It is always interesting and often fun to see
🧵 on AI chatbots as a confidante for Iraqi women from conservative backgrounds
Celine Debourse, Repekka Uotila, and Andrew Danielson
Today, this year's penultimate meeting of HAANES at Harvard:
@repekka.bsky.social giving her talk, "Keeping an Archive in 7th c. Assyria during the Alphabetic Turn".
Look, there's no question that Trump (and the US by extension) has been humiliated by his foolish overreach. But I question the notion that Iran has emerged "stronger" from all of this. Its "control" over Hormuz is that of a spoiler, not a power. And its Arab neighbors also get a say, going forward.
Coming next month from @edinburghup.bsky.social, an edited collection about Middle Eastern #Christianity from the rise of Islam to modern times
edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-christi...
