Colleagues, Skidmore’s Religious Studies department is looking to hire a 2-year VAP in American Religions on a very short timeline. I’d appreciate your help in getting the word out to your networks! Happy to answer any questions, just send an email or DM. eodq.fa.us6.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...
Reading Mir’s poem about his favorite cat, one realizes that toxoplasmosis is perhaps the only human cultural universal.
🟢 The energy shock is now going global This is the part many people still underestimate. Economist Steve Hanke warned the conflict has restricted the free flow of critical goods from the Gulf — including helium and fertiliser. Energy analyst Ketan Joshi suggested fuel rationing and work-from-home rules could become enforced measures as governments urgently try to reduce reliance on complex global fossil fuel supply chains. Multiple countries showed signs of the spreading impact: Sri Lanka ordered street lights, neon signs and billboard lighting switched off to cut energy consumption by 25%.
It is very fun to get google alert hits for my own name now that reveal completely fabricated statements / quotes thanks to reliance on chatbots. Absolutely wild how the choking pollution of our information environment is being powered by literal choking pollution from fossil fuelled data centres
Academic life goals being achieved right here.
I am broken-hearted at the terrible news that my alma mater, @hampshirecollege.bsky.social, after 56 yrs, is closing. Its death is a victory for conformism, for corporatism, for higher education's dull love of hierarchy & status. It's a grievous defeat for imagination & experimentation.
Just sent off edited page proofs and the index to SUNY Press. Monograph is one step closer to reality! sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-...
Currently, the all-time most blocked accounts on Bluesky are:
1. JD Vance
2. The White House
3. ICE
4. Bluesky's AI app that was announced 24 hours ago
Oberlin students showing how it’s done!
A poster for the old TV show "Saved by the Bell", with superimposed photo of Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, stars of "Heated Rivalry”
After binge-watching Heated Rivalry with my partner over Spring Break I kept wondering why the show was hitting all the ladies of my generation so hard. And then I had a realization.
Smith College just posted a 2-year lecturer position in Buddhist Studies: apply.interfolio.com/182632
I wanna read this to see how it compares with Aleister Crowley’s “translation”!
My colleague @rhcraig.bsky.social is in the next issue of JAAR with a fascinating comparative study of Early Christian preaching manuals, African-American homiletics, and early Buddhist preaching: academic.oup.com/jaar/article...
A modified “This is Fine” meme, in which the dog in a burning room looks around and smugly says “So I have a book coming out.”
Just learned that the monograph drops in August! sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-...
A grey gravestone featuring a winged skull, scrollwork borders, and a lengthy incription with roman and italic lettering. The stone leans slightly to the left. Other graves, bare trees, and buildings are visible in the background.
The remains
of Sᴛᴇᴘʜᴇɴ Cʀᴏsʙʏ A.M.
A Gentleman of virtuous morals,
And highly eſteemed,
Who died
On board yᵉ letter of mark brig Vᴇɴᴜs,
Near port,
July 19ᵗʰ. 1780. Aged 28 Years.
Are here deposited
till the reſtituſion of all things.
“Thy way is in the Sea, thy footsteps are not known”
While not TTRPGs, the complex board games from Wehrlegig (Pax Pamir, John Company, and Molly House) all have really lovely scholarly bibliographies!
Discord wants to know how you feel about AI.
Go tell them: discord.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
Just subscribed—gotta support awesome writers writing about games!
Ignoring the news and engaging in the most wholesome shenanigans today: watching the Massachusetts poet laureate kick off the Moby-Dick marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
pixelfed.social/p/overbey/91...
Robert H.N. Ho has passed away. His foundation helped the field of Buddhist Studies in the USA survive and thrive during a time of tough headwinds in the academy. Forever grateful for the fellowship that established my position at Skidmore College. www.rhfamilyfoundationglobal.org/media/pdf/ob...
Reddit post in r/AirForce: Plastered all over the Pentagon today A real picture of an AI-generated poster of Pete Hegseth saying "I Want YOU to Use AI"
Fifty different problems in the world just locked into one big uniform piece like a Rubik's cube in my head.
Data Workers’ Inquiry continues its excellent project of amplifying voices of the human labor too often overlooked in debates about genAI. This latest report from Michael Geoffrey Asia is an essential read.
If you follow these constraints it seems likely you have a good chance of not quickly bearing a son. Which means it’s a golden opportunity for your ghee-lubed brother. The only reasonable conclusion is that this Dharmaśāstra was written by a brother with a ghee fetish.
Some basic math: in any given cycle you should only have sex with your wife on 16-4 = 12 / 2 = 6 days per month. There’s I think a roughly 40% chance that one of those six days is a lunar change day, so some months there are only 5 possible days of sex. And we are not even counting sick days!
Reading Olivelle’s translation of the Yājñavalkya Dharmaśāstra, I find myself genuinely curious whether, if these rules were ever taken seriously, the combination of verse 1.68 & verses 1.78-79 mean that the wife having sex with a brother-in-law completely slathered in ghee was nearly inevitable.
My employer, Dartmouth College, today boasts it's 1st Ivy "to launch AI at an institutional scale." It is doing this by partnering--"more than a collaboration"--with Anthropic, a company that stole the books of many faculty, me included, which many of us are suing.
A page from the History of Akbar: MUZAFFAR KHAN FALLS FROM FAVOR At all times, through the rising of the luminary of imperial guidance, in accordance with his noble characteristic the emperor draws the veil of uniqueness over his world-adorning beauty. During these days he made the game of Parcheesi a veil for his spiritual beauty and played it avidly. Mastering the special moves of this game, which contains much wisdom, the emperor kept a group of courtiers in attendance for playing it, and wonderful sessions were held. Although outwardly he appeared to be playing, inwardly he was assessing people and disguising seriousness ina garb of sport and fun. One day Muzaffar Khan, besotted with worldliness and incompetence at the game, which was a measure of competence, had become so intimate with the emperor that he acted rudely. The emperor relieved him of his office and sent him to the Hejaz in order that his corrupted state might improve through unimportance and exile.
Abu’l-Fazl trying real hard to flatter the idiot Mughal emperor Akbar in the _Akbarnama_. No real gamer would ever say Parcheesi “contains much wisdom.”
Cover slide for Elsa Marty’s “Bitcoin is Freedom: Rituals in Bitcoin Maximalism”
Elsa Marty on Bitcoin faith as ritual imagining of freedom and dignity. #aarsbl25
Picture of the video list of Christian influencer Ashley Hetherington, titled “becoming THAT christian girl”
@smhedgecock.bsky.social with a super smart talk on prayer closets as contemporary evangelical gendered practice. #aarsbl25
There’s a certain irony to the fact that in order to make it to the Sheraton for this wonderful talk, I had to leave dirty breakfast dishes in the sink. #aarsbl25
