iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by melanie newport

Abigail Swingen @abigailswingen.bsky.social · 2h

Two things, #18thc folks. 1. Follow the Lewis Walpole Library on Bluesky! 2. Consider applying for a 2 or 4 week fellowship to consult the collections. 🗃️

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 2h

NBC on Christa Pike: “Will she be put to death again?” I hate it here.

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 6h

finally replaced my lost noise cancelling headphones and whew buddy these are really not optional for me as an autistic person

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 6h

has anybody heard about the possibility of the AHA functioning as a credentialing body? is this a twinkle in anyone's eye?

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 7h

it is a real testament to my @uconnhistory.bsky.social colleagues that I can leave an important department meeting feeling energized. in this economy!

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toilet bones @toiletbones.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Found the email I sent when I got accidentally added to the faculty listserv of an orthopedic surgery clinic and nobody would remove me so I sent this email to all faculty/staff/med students and they removed me almost immediately

Hello Bone Colleagues,
I have invented a new type of ankle and I'm very excited to show it to you. Early raccoon trials suggest a 60% increase in scurrying speed and dramatic increases in fine motor banditry. I know we are not supposed to create super raccoons, but I think you'll change your mind and professional ethics when you see how cute they are. I believe we are on the cusp of a new era in advanced human scurrying because if medical science has taught me anything, it's that improvements in raccoons correspond 1:1 to improvements in humans.

--
[My name]
Chief Bone Inventor
Chair, Department of Foot and Leg Innovation
Lord Mayor, Musculoskeletal Medicine
Hartford HealthCare,
The Bone & Joint Institute at Hartford Hospital.

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

it’s wild that the second episode of Fraggle Rock includes a captivity song referencing jail and bail, as well as Wembley Fraggle saying "I guess sometimes slavery feels like freedom"

static.klipy.com

Fraggle Rock

Alt: Red Fraggle from Fraggle Rock- a yellow puppet with googly eyes and red pigtails and a red tshirt says “wow” looking weirdly humbled

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Reposted by melanie newport

🔪🔪Jonah 🔪🔪 @chateaucat.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait of the Duchess de la Salle, 1925

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PBS News @pbsnews.org · 06/10/2026

In Tennessee, lawyers for Christa Pike say she is awake and speaking after surviving a botched execution attempt last week.

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

here’s my life hack, because my toddler’s fav food is rice and beans (in any form): sear a pound of boneless skinless chicken thighs on each side, cook em in seasoned rice for whatever time is on the bag/box with 1-2 cans of beans. I am now a person who makes dinner

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Law & History Review @lawandhistrev.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Law & History Review is pleased to announce publication of our joint special issue with The William and Mary Quarterly: New Legal Histories of the American Revolution [vol. 44, no. 1, Feb., 2026] Here is our table of contents with links. ALL articles are open access ✅ and ready for download/view.

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

with your name signed in blood, or nothing! (blood must be your own)

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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · 06/10/2026

It's arrived!! I gave this book everything I had and I hope there's something in here for you. It's not officially out until 10/20, but @yalepress.bsky.social seems to be shipping orders now. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300...

A white woman with dark hair holds a book called Seeing Like a Supply Chain: The Hidden Life of Logistics, by Miriam Posner

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Stephanie Kollmann @slkollmann.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

$117M for the public defender $261M for the state's attorney $400M for the jail $420M+ for the sheriff in addition to the jail

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Modern American History @modamhist.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

On first view! 1980s California saw both calls for larger police budgets and limits on taxes. Apparently at odds, David Helps reveals the conflicted relations between “neoliberal” austerity and carceral state-building. Link Below.

LAPD Chief Daryl Gates (middle) and LA County Sheriff Sherman Block (right) receive a metaphorical “blank check” for gang suppression from Governor George Deukmejian (left) in 1986. Source: Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection, Library Digital Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. By permission of The Regents of the University of California.

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Reposted by melanie newport

shawn @mulchy.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

new: ahead of thursday’s budget address, a coalition of more than 50 community, faith, policy, and social services organizations are calling on the cook county board of commissioners to freeze spending on law enforcement. it comes as cook county faces a $550 million budget gap for 2027.

chicagoreader.com

Cook County groups want a budget freeze for the sheriff and state's attorney - Chicago Reader

A coalition of more than 55 organizations wants Cook County to freeze spending on the sheriff and state's attorney amid a $550 million deficit and redirect the money to public defenders and violence p...

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

good times at UConn, where we are heading into arbitration because the university refuses to pay negotiated, earned faculty raises on time. @uconnaaup.bsky.social

Salary and Merit Pay Arbitration:
Two out of thirty-four state employee's unions have not received their negotiated increase in salaries and merit pay for FY 27 - UConn-AAUP is one of them.
Your union has filed for arbitration on this lack of payment on the August 23, 2026, and is asking for interest on the money that should be in your pocket,
not in the university's investment accounts. Your union will inform you as soon as an arbitration date is scheduled.

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

thought I had finished a draft of this paper but alas there are 113 footnotes to clean up / condense / delete

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whet moser @whetmoser.com · 05/10/2026

salary cap but for coaches

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

his DOJ investigated college students instead

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Richard Bell @richardbell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

My new book, Imprisonment in Early Modern England: Politics, Debt and the Origins of a Carceral Society, is (sort of) out now! Currently available online for anyone with institutional access: www.cambridge.org/core/books/i...

Book cover of Richard Thomas Bell, Imprisonment in Early Modern England: Politics, Debt and the Origins of a Carceral Society

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Please, for the love of God, leave me behind with all the books because you don’t read. I want to be left behind!

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Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

A thread about a great cat, and the post-retirement creative evolution of a great artist, in 20 images...

My late cat The Bear in a box marked Hotel California, realising he can check out but he can never leave.

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Ian Petrie @icpetrie.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

And of course (since he does repeat this about three times in six pages)

Bird doing a set at an open mic, who is labeled Foucault
"Things are like prisons" they say
A man at a table shouts "Booo! Get better material."
Closeup of the bird's face, sweating
Closeup of the bird's note cards: the top reads:
factories are like prisons
schools are like prisons
hospitals are like prisons
barracks are like prisons
prisons are like prisons

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

My apologies this is The Vacant Lot, I watched a lot of CBC growing up youtu.be/e7pRd8NYgW0?...

youtu.be

The Vacant Lot episode 4

YouTube video by The Vacant Lot

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The guy trimming his nose hair and it won’t stop growing

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jj skolnik @supremenothing.myatproto.social · 03/10/2026

also: a reminder that restorative justice is definitionally within the control of the person who has been harmed and not ANYONE ELSE. it cannot be a route chosen for them, and they have full control over the process. otherwise it’s just sparkling mediation

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Stuart Schrader @stschrader1.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The new book I co-edited with @juliango.bsky.social, IMPERIAL ENTANGLEMENTS OF POLICING, is now shipping from @dukepress.bsky.social. Order your copy here: dukeupress.edu/imperial-ent...

Cover of Imperial Entanglements of Policing (red with black netting and white letters)

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jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 03/10/2026

New longitudinal study finds that prison education programs may increase political engagement "by recuperating students’ sense of citizenship and exposing them to new people and ideas, inspiring political self-efficacy." doi.org/10.1177/2632...

doi.org

“I will bring change to this country”: College-in-prison and political empowerment - Iolanthe Brooks, Taylor Domingos, Kaitlin Devaney, Mary Pattillo, 2026

Incarceration is politically disempowering, teaching lessons of civic exclusion and voicelessness. Although this is well-documented, incarcerated people's ...

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

unboxing our latest from the Chicago Visions and Revisions series @uchicagopress.bsky.social. Scream! Bleed! Take Off Your Clothes! the story of Chicago’s Organic Theater Company and an inspiring book about the joy of finding your people and making stuff with them. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

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Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

In 1974, Cornell lecturer Lin Farley began recognizing a pattern in the experiences women shared in her Women and Work course: women were being pushed out of jobs by men’s sexual behavior. Farley coined the term, “sexual harassment.”

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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"The plaintiffs are suing to restore visitation rights and ask a court to force the county to disgorge the hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits it has made from video calls." www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/u...

nytimes.com

Families of Inmates Fight Against Jails That Profit From Visits

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Jeff Melnick @melnickjeffrey1.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

There are many things that grieve me about the “students are illiterate” stuff and one is that it pretends that literacy is a static and transhistorical subject. But (just for instance) today’s students are much defter readers of visual texts than they were 30 years ago.

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

my dad was also an electrician and if I hadn’t begged him to take the hit on social security and retire when he did, I am not sure how much of his mobility would be left. 40 years of high voltage work destroyed his back.

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

maybe 300 words from finishing a complete draft of this historiography I’ve been working on for 3 years. at one point it was like 22,000 words long and I can’t believe I am almost to the point where I can start to clean it up and maybe even send it out

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

apropos of recent events, there is a VAST scholarship on the death penalty and this list can get you started www.oah.org/process/capi...

oah.org

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

this passage popped into my mind again today, and rereading the essay by Kiese Laymon really drives home for me how much work it is to feel good in an environment that feels perfectly engineered to isolate and break us

When the rain washes us clean, we will know.
We will feel so good. I believe that. If we find, however, that the rain has actually left more bruises, soaked us in more sour than we ever imagined, and if that bruised sour feels so good, it is then that the pleasurable work actually begins. Many of our hearts are stone.
Much of the beauty here has been sacrificed, and most of it stolen. There is no commercial, doctor, or wellness regimen to smudge that truth. Home is gone, but there is responsible pleasure to be found in the wreckage, in the pathways of the wrecked, and in all the goodness beyond where we've been allowed to discover.

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

punctuating this week with a desperate search of the office for ibuprofen, feels about right

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Timothy J Lombardo @timothyjlombardo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Just two more weeks until this deadline

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melanie newport @melanienewport.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

the thing about my student loan debt: I was fortunate to have a great outcome and there should be better ways for people who grew up in trailer parks to get PhDs. Trying to get all the education you can get is not a moral failing.

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