Robert Suits

Just a reminder that if you're looking for a great Monday date night activity in London this week, this won't disappoint!

After Mind is available online now and in print 2nd December through OUP! I thought a good way to try to persuade people to read it would be to post random claims I make in the book! And hopefully this will not make me too anxious 🙃

A serious weakness in this paper by King and Worthington: The judges for the AI peer reviews are *not* experts in the field. They are former journal editors but no claim is made to substantive expertise in the reviewed papers. AI-generated reviews sound good *if you don't know the substance well.*

Congrats @kbruisch.bsky.social whose Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) has won the R. Zelnik Book Prize for outstanding monograph in History & Hon. Mention for the E.A. Hewett Book Prize, both awarded by @aseees.bsky.social

Looking for a beautifully-written, timely and incisive historical read? Here's The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants (Princeton, 2026) for your edifying enjoyment. For #Skystorians but more broadly for humans in our times.

VAGRANCY IN MODERN RUSSIAN LAW AND CULTURE examines vagrancy in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union as a historical, legal, and cultural phenomenon. #RussianLaw #Vagrancy #ImperialRussia #SovietUnion Learn more here: https://ow.ly/uuom50ZSiGu

Alix and I co-organized *A Historian's Handbook for Saving the World* over Zoom, therefore, ZOOM UNBOXING PARTY. It will be open access on Nov. 17th at the link below. If you could ask your library to preorder a physical copy, that would be great for MIT Press, who made open access possible!

Historians! Is there a recent(ish) historiographical essay that you like to use to demonstrate to students how to write a good lit review? Something relatively short and concise, so we can look at it together in class.

So, let me get this straight. Like two weeks ago we saw direct evidence that LLMs plagiarized a mathematician's notes on the app to publish a proof it "discovered." Then they dumped another tranche of proofs they generated and everyone's just taking it at face value?

I love it when institutions step up & face the challenges. And this is @ihr.bsky.social stepping up. Sure, will be directly helping only a few people, but what a solace to know clever people are trying to come up with support in the face of the overwhelming crisis. www.history.ac.uk/fellowships-...

This Day in Labor History: October 15, 1990. President George H.W. Bush signed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. This provided a path forward for compensation for Cold War uranium miners but still largely left out the Navajos, suffering and dying from their work for this nation's nukes!!

We aren’t talking enough about the peril the Amazon is in right now newrepublic.com/article/2162...

I wonder if Microsoft counts the roughly 50 times a day I accidentally hit the stupid copilot key on my laptop and then immediately close it in their "usage" statistics.

Just a little over a week until our first seminar!

Interested in developing a PhD project that spans Environmental History and Geography, with a focus on zoonoses and animal diseases? @geofrancismasse.bsky.social and I would love to work with you! Check out details for Durham’s Transformative Humanities Doctoral Scheme below.

October 8, 2026 marks the 155th anniversary of the worst fire disaster in recorded world history: the Peshtigo Fire. Peshtigo was the culmination of a terrible fire season that swept through much of the drought-stricken Great Plains through the Great Lakes. (1/3)

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

I'm delighted to share our schedule for the autumn for the Anthropocene Histories seminar at UCL. Poster attached, but I will put details and links to specific event pages below. Please share widely!

i'm over the moon working nature made it on this list!

In this piece for @prospectmagazine.co.uk I argue that it is time we stopped letting the AI/tech industry dictate the narrative, and I attempt to dismantle the self-serving terminology and myths it has created. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

If you are in London on the 26th of October, consider coming to this lecture by Princeton's Emmanuel Kreike, hosted by UCL Anthropocene! It looks to be a fascinating discussion of the Great Acceleration in Africa and the use of machine learning for historical imagery. www.ucl.ac.uk/social-histo...

If you are in London on the 26th of October, consider coming to this lecture by Princeton's Emmanuel Kreike, hosted by UCL Anthropocene! It looks to be a fascinating discussion of the Great Acceleration in Africa and the use of machine learning for historical imagery. www.ucl.ac.uk/social-histo...

Hey it's @robertsuits.bsky.social and THE HOBO in the NYRB! Hooray! www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

I once told two friends of mine who aren't in academia how little money we'd need to properly fund and run a humanities department and both were stunned at how miserly public universities are

Would anyone fancy joining @robertsuits.bsky.social and I for a quantitative data in environmental history panel for #ESEH2027?

It is a real delight to see my book mentioned alongside some all-time great cover designs -- I deserve no credit for mine whatsoever!

We picked some of our favorite nonfiction history book covers in recent memory. See what made our list and why, and tell us what you would add! www.draftingthepast.com/12-history-b... #booksky

Call for Papers – A World of a Thousand Cuts: Forests, Wood, and Industrialisation Across the Globe in the 19th and 20th Centuries 6-8 July, 2027, hosted by the University of Turin Proposal Deadline: 30 November 2026 niche-canada.org/2026/09/17/c... #envhist #foresthistory #globalhistory

100% -- I would gladly do this!

A few weekends ago I went to Miami and attended 9 open houses in extremely high-risk flood areas to see what agents are telling prospective buyers about them. Here is my journey

Publication day for my new book, Property Values! Get it while you can. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...