Love to ride the rails! (Spend 8 hours travelling on four trains from Brighton to York with a 16 month old baby because of a systematic meltdown by Southern Rail then get gleefully charged fifty pounds extra by LNER because we missed our connection)

Unsurprising intervention on Gaza from Zadie Smith given her fiction, even at its best, has been insistent on a naive universalism that denies/disparages political conflict. A point made in this wonderful essay by wife of the mind vulture.com/article/zadie-…

Nice to see that the absolutely absurd spatial metaphor of the political “spectrum” untethered from historical context is crippling the left as well as the right.

👀x.com/StockportMBC/s…

This is 'safety' and 'free speech' at Dartmouth 🌲: former director of Jewish studies and history professor Annelise Orleck thrown to the ground by cops while engaged in nonviolent protest. Her 'crime'--emphatic speech. Shame.

Just got a very exciting email. An opportunity to write for a brand new journal 'contributing to the inheritance and continuation of human civilization.' It costs $450 to submit an article and the typo-filled email had no subject, but I'm sure this will be a boon for my career!

good morning *especially* our sheffield student encampment. our university *more than any other in the UK* profits from the arms trade. excited to be talking there later about why western humanitarianism has historically failed to prevent or condemn genocide.

Assuming fifty years from now the universities will be ashamed of their actions mistakes the regime of accumulation we are entering for the last one.

This footage of dozens of armed police in riot gear raiding an academic office in Columbia piled high with books is going to be playing as b-roll in my mind for weeks. x.com/prem_thakker/s…

Columbia's web page discussing its regret for calling in police to arrest students in 1968 is displaying a warning about limited access due to NYPD on campus arresting students.

May Columbia never live this down.

What can you say? I used to teach in this building. Solidarity with the extraordinary, brave Columbia students and the faculty defending them. Infinite shame on the administrators who have signed off on this brutality. Free Palestine. x.com/BenjAlvarez1/s…

It’s the time of the teaching year again when I set fire to a daisy and a lump of coal in front of 150 students to illustrate the historical consequences of the shift to fossil fuels without, I hope, setting the fire alarm off.

Finally reading Michael Romyn's extraordinary article about Black identity and the history of British basketball which I'm teaching this week, and struck by this incredible image of Michael Jordan at the Brixton Recreation Centre in 1985. academic.oup.com/hwj/article/93…

Now on FirstView: Sean Irving Sean Irving analyzes British conservative thought by engaging with the work of Kenneth Minogue on free-market economics, global “competitiveness,” and the concept of the Anglosphere as a distinct civilization bit.ly/4dbvT2B

Desperate, gestural, performative cruelty - as Stuart Hall once put it, 'the racism, not of a dominant, but a declining social formation.' theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/a…

As always, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is the person to read on the history of modern Iran and the present regional crisis. newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/…

At Urban History (Urban History Group) we are hiring an early modern book reviews editor! If you would like join a fantastic team, earn an annual stipend and shape the present and future of urban history then you can apply here: cambridge.org/core/services/…