Reminder that this is tonight! :)

This Day in Labor History: April 17, 1905. The evil, vile, terrible, no good Supreme Court outdoes itself by issuing Lochner v. New York, saying laws stopping employers from forcing workers to labor as long as they demand are unconstitutional. Let's talk about Neil Gorsuch's favorite case!!!

Can I get my $49 back?

Serial Failure Sal Khan Wants to Take Over Higher Education And anyone who cares about human-centered education should hope he fails.

Sal Khan is spinning up an alternative post-secondary credential in concert with the largest tech companies in the world. Anyone who cares about human-centered education should wish it nothing but failure. Thankfully, Khan has practice at that. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Fire in the station, not bad enough to evacuate.

bumping this for the #GreenSky #EnvHist #Booksky #infrastructure crowds: free e-book about wildlife conservation, coastlines, and infrastructure!! I'll put a review in the next post

The Liebox That Wears Our Words A call to hold the line against Claudeswallop.

This got a bit more polemical than I expected it to when I started out

It's the annual Ask a Manager salary survey! Every year, vastly fewer men fill this out than women. Men, please share your salary info (anonymously) so we have concrete salary comparisons to inform pay negotiations and fight the pay gap

🚨#History Job Alert: My Department is hiring an Assistant Professor in the History of Capitalism.
🗃️

Come work with us at Warwick. You'll get both excellent colleagues and great students!

See details below... And do not hesitate to spread the word...
👇👇👇

warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/appcentre...

Vol. 35, No. 96 (2026) of @rhi-ihr.bsky.social is out! Vol. 2 of New Perspectives in Global Economic History, edited by @alkaraman.bsky.social, examines global-local interactions via migration in Shanghai, migrant remittances, poor relief, and US debt diplomacy. revistes.ub.edu/index.php/Hi...

Once again reporting on LLMs reminds me an awful lot about how normies reported on both the metaverse and crypto. "I don't get the appeal, which means surely I'm going to fall behind."

I find the surety of people that they will "fall behind" to be strange. LLMs and even "agentic AI" aren't actually particularly new anymore. If these enabled massive productivity gains, wouldn't those be showing by now?

The marketing has been much more successful than the actual tech.

While I'm by no means a British historian nor a historian of London, it was a lot of fun to throw together an environmental history of London lecture for my undergrads here! There's a ridiculous wealth of materials to explore.

Emily is running the London Marathon in support of research on rare cancers -- cancers like the one she herself had, and like the one that took my father's life a few years ago.

Please consider donating a little, if you can spare it!

Emily's page This is a cause that is deeply personal to me - in more ways than one. I was 27 years old when, just days after I graduated from my PhD program, a routine medical scan uncovered a large tumor in my ap

I’m trying to raise £2500 for the Institute for Cancer Research by race day (April 26), and I’m halfway there! Any amount really helps (even a coffee’s worth!) please consider donating! #londonmarathon #ICR #appendixcancer #melanoma
2026tcslondonmarathon.enthuse.com/pf/emily-web...

“Cancer research is one of the most important fundraising causes out there” – Emily’s London Marathon story “Cancer research is one of the most important fundraising causes out there” – Emily’s London Marathon story

So honored that the #ICR featured my London Marathon story this week! As many of you know, I was diagnosed with a (luckily early stage) rare cancer in 2021. A few years later, we lost my wonderful father-in-law to his cancer.
www.icr.ac.uk/research-and...

who feels this way, not the working in publishing part...

so it's not just me!

Yikes

Blueskis, THE WESTERNERS will be out in one week! (March 31)

Here's an introduction to the seven westerners whose stories I tell in the book, and whose lives put the lie to the frontier myth.

#skystorians #USWest @scribnerbooks.bsky.social

Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental History (297163) | University of Stavanger Job title: Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental History (297163), Employer: University of Stavanger, Deadline: Monday, April 20, 2026

We're hiring! 🌿 The Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger invites applications for a 3-year postdoc in Environmental History. See thread for more details. #envhist #envhum

Canvas Unrolls AI Teaching Agent The new AI agent aims to save faculty time on “low-value tasks,” but stops short of fully automating grading. But some experts worry that the rise of agentic AI could lead to a dead classroom, where c...

This says “trap” in letters three stories high with flashing lights and a siren, and still some profs will walk right into it.

Impossible to overstate how much most of the students I talk to find AI-first initiatives laughable. I think it's increasingly a branding disaster for universities that make it a core part of their pitch.

All I'm going to say that: If I had never done a thing, I wouldn't be so quick to jump into discussions about whether "AI" can do the thing.

Spain Says the Sun Shields It From Rising Gas Costs. Is That True?

Stunningly bullshit framing on this NYT story that insists that somehow renewables are a dicy unpredictable thing and downplays that they're far, far cheaper most of the time by focusing on how they're not always. As is often the case with the NYT, comments smarter than article.

PDF of book proofs: SEEING LIKE A SUPPLY CHAIN The Hidden Life of Logistics MIRIAM POSNER Yale University Press New Haven and London

*breathing into a paper bag*

People are commenting about how this is about "powerful" men, but in a society that listens to men over women and girls, that treats the former as competent and credible, the latter as not, every man is empowered to abuse, and it happens at all levels and in all sectors of society.

Last call for today's seminar online at 3pm GMT!

thought it would be a good time to share my syllabus on the global history of petrostates. turned out to be more topical than I could have imagined!

Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens, and People Defied the US-Mexico Border by Mary E. Mendoza (UNC Press; April 2026)

Mary Mendoza's DEADLY DIVIDE (April) brilliantly shows that ideas about race and ideas about nature have always been intertwined at the border, revealing how environments and bodies shaped a contested landscape. Historians of the US‑Mexico borderlands, the environment, and race-relations: take note!