iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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NBER @nber.org · 10/08/2026

How elite are the people we elect? Linking members of Congress born 1830–1950 back to the census household where they grew up, to trace the economic origins of political power, from @jamesfeigenbaum.bsky.social, Andrew B. Hall, Daniel M. Thompson, and Jesse Yoder www.nber.org/papers/w35569

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Alexandra Steinlight @asteinlight.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

FYI idiots, apparently you’re supposed to say your child’s name when you address them

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Alexandra Steinlight @asteinlight.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

When the vibe is acute political instability, social fragmentation, and looming fascism, choose cb2

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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 02/01/2026

insane story, this - a note was sent over the summer to the cleaners of the RATP (Parisian equivalent of TfL) asking them to remove all plastic water bottles from the bathrooms in case they were being used by Muslim staff to do ablutions before prayers???

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Seems bad!

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Max Berger @maxberger.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

The ADL has decided to treat fascists as allies and progressives as enemies. For a group that is tasked with protecting American Jews, that is a world historic fuck up. I will never forgive these people for their moral decrepitude.

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Alexandra Steinlight @asteinlight.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

Kid at kindergarten drop-off this morning with monogrammed backpack with initials “WMD.” Tell me your political consciousness wasn’t formed in 2003 without telling me

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Briony Neilson @brionyneilson.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

One like, one Presses universitaires de France book cover from the 1990s

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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

Thing I am an absolute complete total reactionary about: there has not actually been invented a better model of conveying information in a learning environment than the basic structure of a traditional lecture. A speaker standing in some sort of unique focal point for the attention of listeners...

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Laprofmme @laprofmme.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

As a historian, I have been curious (and appalled) by this choice of pseudo. The interpretation below is quite common, but not in fact correct. It was an 1865 law (sénatus-consulte) that made “Muslim Algerians” (a racial category divorced from actual faith) French nationals without citizenship 1/

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Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 17/06/2025

'“I don't think that people appreciate how few people are working to keep these collections online, even at huge institutions,” Weinberg told me. “It's usually an incredibly small team, one person, half a person, half a person, plus, like their web person who is sympathetic to what's going on.'

404media.co

AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums

"This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”

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Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 07/06/2025

found out tonight through some slightly random googling that Charlemagne is known as "Karl der Große" in German, a fact I find to be hateful and undignified

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

“The Left controls universities”

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Aviel Roshwald @avielroshwald.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

🗃️ Sad news of Pierre Nora’s passing away.

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James Feigenbaum @jamesfeigenbaum.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

Watch out bosses, the 5 year old has turned his attention to labor organizing

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Andrea Matranga @andreamatranga.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

The tragic landslide in Blatten gives me the excuse to tell you the story of how we found out Ice Ages existed. It's a cool story and the most important bit is rather similar to what's happening now.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 22/05/2025

very cool that for ten years people at the heights of political commentary insisted to the point of rage that the paramount threat to free speech was “censorious” college students

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

say it again: 4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

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Alexandra Steinlight @asteinlight.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN was mediocre if entertaining, but it did afford me the opportunity to learn that @jamesfeigenbaum.bsky.social thought “threw the bums a dime in your prime” was “do the Bumpsy Grind”

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will pooley @willpooley.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

“has let too many people leave their sticky fingerprints on her book” wtf? i finally read pedersen’s review of sasson’s ‘the solidarity economy’ and i just think there’s just a fundamental disagreement about scholarship, community, and gratitude here www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Sasson thanks, excluding family, some 250 people for help in producing her book.
It began life as a dissertation written at Berkeley under the supervision of Thomas Laqueur and James Vernon, whose students have done so much to document the way neoliberalism shaped every aspect of British life - financial markets, town plan-ning, culture, humanitarianism. (Sasson thanks Berkeley faculty and graduate stud-
ents, and 52 'fellow travellers of the mind and the archives' for support and encouragement.) She then took up a Past&Present postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research and a research affiliation at Cambridge,and thanks a host of scholars, seminar conveners and journal editors on both sides of the Atlantic for feedback during these years. She 'really began writing this book', though, as an assistant professor at Emory University inAtlanta - and thanks some forty to fifty Emory faculty members, students and staff for providing everything from 'the time and resources to work on the book' to mentorship and camaraderie. She thanks senior scholars (including Vernon) for flying in for a workshop on the manuscript and colleagues at Virginia,Yale,Stanford,Princeton,Manchester and Harvard for comments on talks. She thanks the peer reviewers for PrincetonUniversity Press (among them Baughan) and the editors and indexers who saw it into print. Sasson has recently taken up a job at Oxford.We all need conversation, and exchange and support, but these acknowledgments gave me pause. Sasson has let too many people leave their sticky fingerprints on her book; it would be better if it were less critical of'non-profits' and more self-reflective about the academy and its disciplining work. Admittedly, nothing is harder than clearing your mind of the frameworks and paradigms of the moment, but it is crucial to try. We want to address issues relevant to our time, of course, but to what extent? If we can't think our way outside it, the hive mind just speaks through us

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Mary Lewis @profmarylewis.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

Outrageous behavior from the chief of Harvard University Press and kudos to the Crimson for exposing this.

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Alexandra Steinlight @asteinlight.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Thrilled to share this very special issue of French Politics, Culture & Society in honor of Herrick Chapman that I co-edited with Nicole Rudolph. The intro is open access: www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journal...

berghahnjournals.com

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Alexandra Steinlight @asteinlight.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Help, my child is reading royalist propaganda

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Benjamin McKean @blmckean.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

among other things, this is literally and explicitly an affirmative action program for conservatives - galling to announce this at a time when any efforts to support and encourage research by women and students of color is branded illegal DEI

Finally, scholars from JHU and AEI have designed a program, the Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative, that aims to encourage conservative, libertarian and heterodox students and graduates to consider a career in higher education, and to support them in their efforts. The program has begun work with department chairs and other senior faculty members across the country to mentor talented young ideologically heterodox students who are interested in applying for doctoral programs and exploring careers in academia.

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

"His son spent days crying...and has now stopped speaking." This is our Georgetown colleague, whose office is down the hall from where I teach. The mind can't assimilate how the University has mounted no public response; I had thought the usual institutional cowardice might have some moral limit

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

"Prime, but with human beings"

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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 04/04/2025

I am so angry that so many people, here and elsewhere, were willing to pretend they thought that protests against genocide were antisemitic. That playacting allowed them to get here.

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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Big ups to the Columbia trustees and administrators who convinced these absolute cretins they had the recipe to destroy American higher education.

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Ben Schmidt @bschmidt.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Was waiting for slightly more official news to RT one of these threads: Jason was a senior program officer at NEH for 12 years so seems fair to say the gutting of the National Endowment of the Humanities has commenced.

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

regional public Us serve the vast majority of the 20 million students enrolled in higher ed, are largest employers in countless regions, and are being demolished for the oligarch’s pleasure

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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

Universities globally are now receiving such letters; the British Association for American Studies (founded in 1955 'to promote, support and encourage the study of the United States' lost their US embassy small grants funding in January for refusing to scrub 'DEI'. Which way will these groups jump?

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Jeppe Mulich @jmulich.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Deeply disappointing to see my alma mater cancel a talk by former MSF president Johanne Liu, apparently out of fear that she would address the destruction of Gaza.

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Celeste Ng @pronounced-ing.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Boston folks--rally this evening to support the Tufts PhD student, here on a visa, nabbed off the street yesterday 👇👇👇

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Paul Cohen @paulecohen.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

Le Monde reporting that a French scientist traveling to Houston to attend a conference was denied entry to US after a search of his phone & computer revealed messages critical of Trump's science cuts, "which [says CPB] conveyed hatred of Trump & could be qualified as terrorism". Computer confiscated

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jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 14/03/2025

Columbia President email confirms DHS raid tonight in University housing (dorms?). Truly, get us all the fuck out of this place.

Dear fellow members of the Columbia community:

I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in two University residences tonight. No one was arrested or detained. No items were removed, and no further action was taken.

Federal agents from the DHS served Columbia University with two judicial search warrants signed by a federal magistrate judge authorizing DHS to enter non-public areas of the University and conduct searches of two student rooms.

The University has a clear protocol in place. Consistent with this protocol, our longstanding practice, and the practices of cities and institutions throughout the country, the University requires that law enforcement have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including residential University buildings. Tonight, that threshold was met, and the University is obligated to comply with the law. Our University Public Safety was present at all times.

Columbia continues to make every effort to ensure that our campus, students, faculty, and staff are safe. Columbia is committed to upholding the law, and we expect city, state, and federal agencies to do the same.

I understand the immense stress our community is under. Despite the unprecedented challenges, Columbia University will remain a place where the pursuit of knowledge is cherished and fiercely protected, where the rule of law and due process is respected and never taken for granted, and where all members of our community are valued and able to thrive. These are the principles we uphold and that guide us every day.

For students in need of support, I’ve included a list of University resources below.

Standing together for Columbia,

Katrina Armstrong
Interim President, Columbia University in the City of New York

Available University Resources:

Support from your school: Contact the Dean of Students office for your school.
Counseling and well-being resources:
Morningside and Manhat…

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Alexandra Steinlight @asteinlight.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

our drafty Victorian house with original windows is (finally) going to bankrupt us

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Rebecca Spang @rlspang.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Since the 1950s, Summer Language Workshops at Indiana University have provided training in Russian, East European, and Central Asian languages. Generations have come to Bloomington to study Romanian, Polish, Kazakh, etc. Rubio just cancelled all of them languageworkshop.indiana.edu/summer-langu...

languageworkshop.indiana.edu

Title VIII: Funding: Summer Language Workshop: Language Workshop: Indiana University Bloomington

Title VIII Fellowships

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Yuliya Komska @ykomska.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

Not very fun fact: thousands of Jewish immigrants with whose presence Germany has decorated itself, my parents included, are not voting today b/c they don’t have a path to citizenship, despite living there for two decades or more. www.juedische-allgemeine.de/gemeinden/ke...

juedische-allgemeine.de

Keine Stimme: Warum ein großer Teil der jüdischen Zuwanderer aus der ehemaligen Sowjetunion nicht an den Wahlen in Thüringen und Sachsen teilnehmen darf

Ein großer Teil der jüdischen Zuwanderer aus der ehemaligen Sowjetunion hat selbst nach Jahrzehnten noch keinen deutschen Pass – und darf deshalb nicht an Wahlen teilnehmen. Wie kann das sein?

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James Feigenbaum @jamesfeigenbaum.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

If I ran a newspaper in the higher education, health care, and biotech center of the country, I might stop the presses and put the White House's order to kill universities and med schools via illegal NIH changes somewhere on the front page

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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Dude this is so fucking bleak; I know I’m naive but I still genuinely cannot believe we have people in the humanities normalizing this stuff

Think of an LLM as a research assistant. An extremely knowledgeable, well-read, and over-caffeinated research assistant. They can accomplish quite remarkable things but they will also make mistakes - like mixing up “Selia” and “Delia”. Unlike most research assistants, LLMs will occasionally hallucinate (ie. make up) things that sound quite convincing. Don’t take their output at face value and always check their work.

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Paul Kelleher @paulkelleher.net · 24/01/2025

Your baby, in reply:

A Post-it note that says:
I’m sorry
I can’t
don’t hate me

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Alexandra Steinlight @asteinlight.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Telling my baby “if you’re tired you take a nap-a, you don’t move to Napa” every day until morale improves

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Alexandra Steinlight @asteinlight.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

Overcooked pasta with sauce from jar (Rao’s, at least) Wilted arugula Animal crackers eaten behind 4-year-old’s back Terry, can I come over

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roxanne panchasi @rpanchasi.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

In 2013, I started a French Studies channel on the New Books Network & hosted it solo for over a decade. This interview w/Emily Marker re: BLACK FRANCE, WHITE EUROPE is my last official episode (for now, anyway). Biggest gratitude to all the authors & listeners out there. I had the best time!✌️

newbooksnetwork.com

Emily Marker, "Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era" (Cornell UP, 2022) - New Books Network

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