Adam Bursi
@adambursi.bsky.social
Acquisitions Editor @ Fortress Press Religion in late antiquity/early Islam etc Wrote a book: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-traces-of-the-prophets.html Edited another: https://brill.com/display/title/62333 We should improve society somewhat
It’s true!
Chapter 29 Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) on Dismissing Sense Perception and on the Eternal Sense
"Chapter 29 Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) on Dismissing Sense Perception and on the Eternal Sense" published on 02 Jul 2024 by Brill.
doi.org
Karl Steel@karlsteel.bsky.social · 2h agoold news. Avicenna called this "wahm," estimation: is it a subrational operation of the common sense that perceives intentions without external sensory stimulus
Not often is the Syriac studies listserve a site of gender politics
OpenAI sent a bunch of big influencers on a "luxury eco-retreat" (!!!!) and those influencers came into contact for the first time with how intensely the public hates the company and the technology This person literally did the video with the bath water running www.instagram.com/p/Dbf0jO2j2JA/
JCRT Relaunches Its Book Review Section, Inviting Graduate Students, Independent Scholars, and Faculty to Contribute #acrel #amrel #aarsbl #sblaar jcrt.org/blog/book-re...
Book Review Section Relaunched
JCRT Relaunches Its Book Review Section, Inviting Graduate Students, Independent Scholars, and Faculty to Contribute
jcrt.org
For too long, the people who have done the real work of archaeology have not been recognised. At Dura-Europos in Syria, one of the ways this is evident is in the lack of credit given, or even names recorded, for the many workers there.
Ope! After implementation of St. Paul’s 60-day pre-eviction notice requirement, filings dropped nearly 70% in June and remained 45% below 2025 levels in July. As a result, St. Paul has experienced 10.7% fewer eviction filings year-to-date than at this point last year. homelinemn.org/12002/evicti...
Eviction Filing Update: July 2026 — HOME Line
Through the first seven months of 2026, Minnesota has seen 14,598 eviction filings, a 0.6% increase over the same period in 2025 and 6.4% above the average of the previous three years. While statewide...
homelinemn.org
HOME Line@homelinemn.org · 9h agoThe August '26 HOME Line Connection: -July = busiest month in tenant hotline history -Upcoming webinars: 8/26 Leases & 9/30 Tenant-Filed Housing Court Actions -Eviction filing trends through July -Help shape our 2027 Legislative Agenda -Rincón Español Read & subscribe: mailchi.mp/e145ac821a47...
I’m using my paid paternity leave (thank you, State of Minnesota) right now and I think it’s genuinely barbaric that we don’t guarantee this, and much more, on a national level
David M. Perry@lollardfish.bsky.social · 9h agoI never got a single minute of paternity leave and I’m still mad about it and I want every dad to have paid leave
Assma Ali, a Muslim, told the Mississippi Free Press her office has received threats after news of her appointment spread. “I was born in the U.S.,” Ali told the Mississippi Free Press. “I went to school in the U.S. I have all the accreditations to be a judge. I'm not anti-Christ," she said.
Muslim Woman Becomes Municipal Judge in Mississippi Delta Town Amid a Flurry of Bigotry
Assma Ali, a Muslim and immigration attorney, is now municipal judge in Benoit, Mississippi, but is also facing misinformation and threats.
mississippifreepress.org
Obviously this is extremely embarrassing to admit on its face, but also: why not just read another book?? It’s a historical romance novel, there’s plenty of similar books more attuned to your literacy level/aesthetic
Matt Pearce@mattdpearce.com · yesterdayI’m learning that the people who gamified paragraphs are having trouble reading books. www.axios.com/2026/08/11/r...
NEW: The NIH is quietly restricting funding for research that evaluates how public policy impacts human health. According to internal documents I obtained, the agency no longer considers policymakers "mission relevant" — a massive shift for the biomedical funder. My latest for @nature.com:
NIH limits funding for research on the health effects of public policy
US biomedical agency no longer considers policymakers as ‘mission relevant’, leaving dozens of grants in limbo.
nature.com
The key thing here: Mainline denominations (e.g., the top four here — UMC, Episcopal church, PCUSA, and ELCA) are hyper-aware of their aging congregations and talk about it *all the time.* Like, ALL the time. But Southern Baptists? Assemblies of God? Non-denoms? The convo is way, way quieter.
Robert Downen@robertdownen.bsky.social · 2d agoWe are ~15 years away from the possible collapse of numerous American Christian denominations.
m.soundcloud.com/deathpanel/t...
The Comstock Mindset w/ Melissa Gira Grant (03/28/24)
Play The Comstock Mindset w/ Melissa Gira Grant (03/28/24) by Death Panel on desktop and mobile. Play over 320 million tracks for free on SoundCloud.
m.soundcloud.com
Truthout@truthout.org · 5d agoBlanche said the Trump administration is pursuing policies “so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,” and is likely to try to limit abortion pills delivered by mail, perhaps by invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, which banned the mailing of “lewd” and “indecent” materials.
Anyone who thinks the Democrats in their current form are going to rebuild the NEH at anywhere near what it needs to be to support the demand for humanistic knowledge is deluding themselves. When Axelrod talks about “zany, liberal faculty lounge exotica,” he means humanists, not STEM professors
Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes.bsky.social · 6d agoWe all know that class discourse is totally vibes-based in the Anglophone world, but so is educational attainment discourse (Hong is a college dropout):
I don’t know if I’d compare it to a world war, or even trauma for me personally: but it was extremely formative to see how the government was torturing and murdering people in both open and secret wars throughout the world, and that a lot of Americans thought that was right and good
LOWρUFO 🇺🇦🇵🇸🌍@lowrhoufo.bsky.social · 6d agoWhy do elder millennials (with no connection to the military) talk about GWOT like it was a world war level societal trauma?
American telejournalists’ unwillingness to say “Sorry but what you said didn’t make any sense” is a small but not inconsequential part of why things are so bad these days
Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · last wk.Wolf Blitzer: Why is Israel, another country, your red line right now, this is what your critics are saying, rather than a domestic issue that impacts Americans' everyday lives? John Fetterman, visibly confused throughout the entire interview: Yeah, absolutely.
My day-to-day life would be no different except pdfs would open much more quickly
Ayo@darrylayo.bsky.social · last wk.Guys like this don’t realize that they are the freak
On the ideology embedded in pooping, see (for example) me: www.academia.edu/43694523/My_...
My Poop, My Self: Identity and Religion through the Lens of Bodily Waste
For the published version, see Adam Bursi, "Mijn poep, mijn zelf. Identiteit en religie door de lens van ontlasting," in Wie is er bang voor religie? Waarom kennis van religie belangrijk is,...
academia.edu
Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social · last wk.Oh my god the dietician who is telling everyone in the White House to only eat steak and sauerkraut doesn't wipe his ass.
Not good timing, but some extremely important points in this now unredacted part of the 2024 Autopsy: -loss more about Dem turnout decline than swing voters -Dem consultants extracting huge $ for bad advice -Biden shouldn'ta run -spam PACs ruining fundraising www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/u...
Author of Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Says Party Left Out Key Chapter
A dispute over the chapter between the author and the Democratic National Committee has added to the party’s turmoil as it tries to look forward, not backward.
nytimes.com
Always my go-to on how liberals were (and remain) generally pretty bad on Covid mitigations m.soundcloud.com/deathpanel/h...
How Liberals Killed Masking (Unlocked)
Play How Liberals Killed Masking (Unlocked) by Death Panel on desktop and mobile. Play over 320 million tracks for free on SoundCloud.
m.soundcloud.com
Nome@nome.bsky.social · last wk.My experience is of every American COVID-19 mitigation effort being obviously insufficient, and ended far too soon. To see people now argue that they somehow were too much, going too far? Not anti-vax or MAGA people, but folks just out here on Bluesky? It staggers me.
A primary way we used to (?) train to become better writers as teenagers was to read good writers and try to write something like them, in the process of finding one’s own voice. I wonder how that will change now
Caroline@caro130.bsky.social · last wk.So exhausted already by the meme that the "tells" of gen AI writing are when something is structurally aping the way a decent professional writer writes, rather than when it's meaningless word salad. (You will take my em dashes, sets of three, and lack of typos from my cold, dead hands.)
The diarrhea lettuce company, Taylor Farms, uses slave labor contracted from the Arizona Dept. of Corrections. The backbreaking labor is often performed by imprisoned Mexican nationals who would be otherwise ineligble to work in the US. They are paid $1.50 an hour.
The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor
The lettuce-producing Taylor Farms was linked to the widespread use of prison labor before its involvement in a cyclospora outbreak.
futurism.com
“Minnesota in May became the first state in the nation to pass legislation banning the practice of using AI to digitally remove clothing from a pictured individual.” www.upi.com/Top_News/US/...
Judge denies bid by Musk's xAI to block Minnesota nudification ban - UPI.com
A federal judge on Friday turned down a request by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company to block a law banning nudification technology.
upi.com
"we must allow for a real conversation about revisiting certain things" is simply too many caveats for the moment we're in
Acyn@acyn.bsky.social · 2w agoKamala Harris: I know this is going to be controversial coming from me in particular, we need to revisit the electoral college. We need to revisit the point of expanding the court. We need to revisit, if they so want, statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C.
I heard a story about a detained health researcher the other day and assumed this was it - but no, there‘s a second local scientist, from UMD, who is being held by ICE. On his way home from receiving a “teacher of the year” award. www.wbaltv.com/article/umb-...
University of Maryland pharmacy instructor detained in Dallas
Federal officials detained an instructor from the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy last week.
wbaltv.com
Eileen Clancy 🧿@clancyny.bsky.social · 2w agoAmeaka Fatima Nkempu, a Johns Hopkins University researcher in public health, was detained by ICE while boarding a domestic flight. She says she is Cameroonian in a Medium article that she authored. As of Thursday morning, the ICE Online Detainee Locator did not list where she was being held.
New from 404 Media: Google Earth has introduced an AI feature that lets anyone fabricate completely bullshit satellite images. In our own tests, we added a “bomb blast and crater” to an area of Los Angeles. This is a misinformation time bomb, will 100% be abused www.404media.co/google-earth...
"A concentration camp, in its most basic definition, is a place where a targeted civilian population, not necessarily accused of a crime, is detained and at least some of their basic rights are suspended," writes @jwashing.bsky.social. "That’s precisely what’s happening in the United States today."
Don’t call them ICE detention centers. Call them camps | John Washington
I’ve spent a decade reporting on immigration enforcement. The word ‘camp’ best captures the political function of these facilities
theguardian.com
A Minnesota religious studies professor is facing six years in prison, with the DOJ saying he is part of an "antifa" conspiracy against ICE Erik Davis speaks out about his prosecution, largely based on a handful of his comments in Signal chats. He's not accused of any violence “It’s petty revenge"
The professor facing prison in ‘antifa’ case: ‘They want to scare all who oppose ICE’
Erik Davis is accused by the government of a ‘conspiracy’ to obstruct ICE – experts say it’s part of a pattern to criminalize lawful organizing and ruin activists’ lives
theguardian.com
Re Erik Davis, Professor Mcalester College Buddhist Studies "The indictment....does allege...Davis helped facilitate an “emergency meeting” for residents interested in “resistance to ICE” that featured discussions of protest tactics" www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
The professor facing prison in ‘antifa’ case: ‘They want to scare all who oppose ICE’
Erik Davis is accused by the government of a ‘conspiracy’ to obstruct ICE – experts say it’s part of a pattern to criminalize lawful organizing and ruin activists’ lives
theguardian.com
