@parriblue
Environmental historian & associate prof. at Sciences Po Paris. First book on #disasters (https://shorturl.at/cXZBh) now writing on #rivers & growth in the Po Valley of Italy. All things #water & #climate, #envhist news, & adventures in daily life.
“A.I. chatbots contain the sum of all human knowledge” is so egregiously wrong that I don’t know what to say.
Chatbots have been trained on corpus of digital(ised) text - ABSOLUTELY NOT the sum of all human knowledge. Paper, experience, embodiment, oral tales all missing.
These people are fools!
Et voilà ! Merci @sklafon1.eurosky.social pour l'info !
Without considering the sources of claims, efforts at epistemic vigilance become play-acting. With LLMs, we don't know the sources.
Excellent thread from @mjcrockett.bsky.social
Watch it on a large screen if you can! The visuals are just incredible, but their power might be lost on small screens.
It's available on the Internet Archive: archive.org/details/touk...
A shot from the movie showing the two main characters sitting and smoking, very stylishly dressed, with tall yellow grass in the background
Yesterday, I watched TOUKI BOUKI, a 1973 movie by pioneering Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty.
Easily one of the very best movies I have ever watched: outstanding story, shots, acting, editing...and a good movie to pair with F.Cooper's recent piece on "decolonization."
Title page of book proofs, Transforming Night: The History and Science of Light Pollution
#TransformingNight 🌌💡🌃 🤩
#LightPollution #ArtificialLight #ALAN #Night #Darkness #LightJustice
#envhist #envhum #envjustice #histtech #histsci #sts #Anthropocene
It is so important to keep hammering in this point. People always ask me why I would have to go visit archives - why not just look at a scan? Because they haven’t been scanned! And they are never going to be! There are millions & millions of pieces of paper in every archive.
Right, another key thing that historians do is working with important records that have not been digitized.
And the vast majority of the world’s records *have not been digitized* and thus do not exist in any format that LLMs/AI can work with.
Which is why I am astonished that no one has proposed a version of the Universal Basic Income idea as the only logical conclusion of the AI-boosters' model of society. Do you really want to replace all our jobs with your AI? Then we'll have to take your money.
A leading historian of decolonization, Fred Cooper, on the uses and pitfalls of the inflationary invocation of decolonization.
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
After seeing the same clip of Farag* for the third time in my feed today, I need to say this:
If you repost the outrageous take of (any) fascist politician, you ARE amplifying their message, regardless of how smart or witty your takedown is. If you don't like fascists, don't broadcast fascists.
Dear friends,
We at the Center for European Studies @sciencespo-cee.bsky.social are opening a position of Assistant Professor in political science, with a focus on climate transition policies.
Please apply if you're super good (and not afraid to work with me ;).
www.sciencespo.fr/centre-etude...
Applications are invited for a 3-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at our Centre in Paris, starting on 1 Sept 2026. The post is in connection with the research programme on economic & environmental history. Application deadline 19 Feb 2026. Click below for further particulars & how to apply.
I don't see it anywhere in the thread, so I'd add Frank Zelko's Make it a Green Peace!
📢 We are hiring! Tenure-track position in environmental history with a focus on long-term socio-ecological research. Exciting opportunity for post-docs working at the interface of environmental history & sustainability sciences. Deadline Jan 6, please spread far and wide! boku.ac.at/fileadmin/da...
Félicitations! Au plaisir d'en discuter le mois prochain au CHSP @sciencespo.bsky.social
On the international dimension specifically, Nicolas Delalande's Struggle and Mutual Aid: otherpress.com/product/stru...
Several great suggestions in the thread, to which I'd definitely add A.Horowitz's outstanding book Katrina. For a case coeval to the 1906 disaster but outside the US, I humbly suggest considering the 1st part of my book, Fault Lines, on the 1908 Messina earthquake. Happy to send a PDF if interested.
I’m glad to share that my MarieCurie Fellowship at the Centre d'Histoire de Sciences Po has officially started
The project “FluidBorder. Sharing the Lower Danube During the Cold War” investigates the complex relationship between Romania and Bulgaria along their shared Danube frontier.
Tastes Like Chicken by Emelyn Rude should fit the bill: www.emelynrude.com/tastes-like-...
Exactly a year ago, Ellen Wohl, @parriblue.bsky.social and I spent two days in Providence thinking about #rivers and how we conceptualize them & live with them. Here’s the result of history and fluvial geomorphology teaming up. #envhist
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Félicitations Elsa!!! 🥳
Congratulations, it looks great! I just ordered a copy for our library
And there is undoubtedly something to be said about plastics and psychedelics ("cellophane flowers of yellow and green").
I recommend reading Primo Levi's concluding story in The Periodic Table, if you haven't already. It's all about the worldly travels of a carbon molecule...Rebecca Altman knows it (and likes it, if I remember well).
Andy Horowitz, Katrina is as much a history of NOLA as it is a history of disaster, and it stands out IMO. And as NOLA is a good city to think with, I highly recommend Colten's Unnatural Metropolis, which to me models how to foreground the physical environment in urban history.
I am in Cambridge, UK, for the next few weeks. If you are in town and would like to meet to talk abt #envhist, #rivers & more, feel free to reach out!
Letter signed by members of the Columbia History Department urging resistance to the Trump Administration's efforts to dictate university policy.
"Should this control be realized, here or elsewhere, it would make any real historical scholarship, teaching, and intellectual community impossible."
Might be. I haven’t had the chance to teach to 1st year students abt the Anthropocene in a while