Ellen Muehlberger

What’s Going On With That Michigan Boarding School Report? There is something fishy going on with a state-sponsored investigation of Indigenous boarding schools in Michigan. As one headline put it, “Michigan Spent $1.1M Probing Tribal Boarding Schools Then…

Why did Michigan shelve a report on the state’s history of Indigenous boarding schools after paying more than a million dollars to have the report completed?

I don’t know, but I read the report and have some thoughts.

Congrats to Marianna Cerno for publishing a new ps. Clementine text she identified recently, for which she suggests a date of composition in the fourth century!

Basically, new apocryphon just dropped.

You can find a discussion of her book here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmQe...

immediate follow

😬

1. Are you currently using an AI tool for work-related tasks or projects? * Yes * No, but I would like to (PLEASE SKIP TO QUESTION 7)

My employer asks me to complete a survey on AI usage for which this is the first question (required):

I've got a tenner that says they'd be happy with you using it for everything *but* grading

how that happens---how men are convinced that they know what needs to happen to other people's lives, aspirations, bodies, and that other people surely want for themselves what men imagine them to want---is worth study, because the resulting ignorance-that-feels-like-knowledge is destroying us

Smarter people than I have pointed out that the mess we are making of the world stems from politicians not having a theory of mind for other people

I'd go one further: they *have* a theory of mind for other people---and they're convinced it's the same as their own

That study is open access here---it explains how young men in the ancient Mediterranean learned to pretend to be women, and it gave them the sense that they knew women better than they knew themselves: luminosoa.org/reader/chapt...

Much smarter people than I have written about AI use and how it trains the writer now---all I've got for this is a study of how ancient people trained writers and how it affected their view of the world and of other people

I care about the morality of AI use in the classroom because how we teach people to write is how we teach people to think---not just about ideas, but about other people and about the use of power over those other people

There is absolutely no reason why any of this has to be this way, truly none

A billion dollars a day solves most problems, and it is to our eternal shame that we do not the political will to spend that kind of money on anything but destruction

At ~$1 billion/day, the US has spent as much on the war in Iran in ten days as the entire FY25 budget for the National Science Foundation ($10 billion).

Trump's FY26 budget request for the agency declined to $3.9 billion, due to a "realignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment."

👀

*Raises hand* I wrote an article about this very thing happening in the 1920s.

Antonovich, Jacqueline. “White Coats, White Hoods: The Medical Politics of the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s America.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 439-469.

all I want to know is what's the Columbus version of Cottage Inn and what was his standard order

a close up of a man 's face with a blurred background . Alt: Close up of a man who gestures as if he is about to say something, then thinks better of it and puts his hand over his mouth in resignation

Wolverines, usually very vocal about every single little problem that comes out of Columbus:

this this this

I saw two on a bike ride yesterday!

Over the next two days, we'll hear papers from @sarahparkhouse.bsky.social, @mbinzurich.bsky.social, @kelsbot.bsky.social and Jill Unkel, Nils Korsvoll, Christos Tsirogiannis, Rebecca Usherwood, and myself and Daniele Pevarello.

yes

COUS

welcome

Whether it has to do with environmental degradation or degradation of our politics or of people, it seems as if the public is hungry for an individual to be a counterweight to Trump and Trumpism. I don’t know whether that person is Zohran Mamdani or Gavin Newsom, who is clearly trying to position himself that way. But for whatever reason, that person has yet to be identified. Why do you think that is? One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war. I denigrate politicians I don’t respect as windsocks. I just want us to understand that most of the important change is collective. Image

Black and white image of Rebecca Solnit with the text "The Interview: Rebecca Solnit says the Left's next hero is already here"

God I just love Rebecca Solnit so much. Gift link here!

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/m...

There is absolutely no reason why any of this has to be this way, truly none

“A Clear Account of the Codex Simonideios:” Ideological Infrastructures of Biblical Vulnerability in the Nineteenth Century In: Philological Encounters Author: Andrew S. Jacobs Online Publication Date: 24 Feb 2026 Abstract Metadata References Metrics Abstract Soon after Constantin Tischendorf (1815–74) publicized his “discovery” of the Codex Sinaiticus, notorious manuscript broker (and forger) Konstantinos Simonides stunned elite literary circles by announcing that Simonides himself had produced this biblical codex in his youth as a gift for the Russian tsar. Simonides claimed that his “Codex Simonideios” was illicitly being passed off as an ancient biblical codex after being mutilated and disfigured. I argue that this brief but explosive debate about manuscripts, forgeries, and “find” narratives produces a biblical text liable to revision and emendation, due to new discoveries or new methods, and so vulnerable to mischievous actors manipulating the possibilities of new discoveries and methods. The iterative process of attack and defense on display in this codicological debate has remained, in various guises, from collegial disagreement to scorched earth campaigns, an ideological component of critical biblical studies.

well helloooooo

brill.com/view/journal...

hooray!!

From Bar Bahlul (ed. Duval), cols. 1760-1761, some cat-words in Syriac 🐈 🐈‍⬛

ܩܛܘ
/qaṭṭu/ cat, big cat

ܩܛܘܢܬܐ ܘܩܛܘܣܬܐ
/qaṭṭontå/ or /qaṭṭostå/ (small) cat, kitten

ܫܘܢܪܐ
/šunnårå/ cat

^^^^^^ this! I experienced it once, but since then have gotten to see it happen to other people over and over, and it is always *glorious*