The Week (or Four) in Links

It's been a weird month. So here's a roundup of the best things I've read and viewed on the internet but failed to post amidst the strange. Update about two minutes after posting: I double checked and see that it's actually been about six weeks since I've done one of these. So there.

I'm not the only one cranky about the state of the profession these days:

Bunch of Rankers

And Sometimes There's the Perfect Response

But in news from the more menschlich branch of the Soloveitchik family, one of their rank is the new president-designate of Yale. We've come such a long way from quotas to having a Jewish president of the university. He's a good guy, to boot. Take a look at his comment in the thread:

Salovey's Rabbinic Legacy

Spain has eased the procedure by which Sephardic Jews can (re)claim Spanish citizenship. There are more details in the link in Spanish, which makes the parameters sound so broad that I think that I (American Spanish-speaking Jewish medieval historian of seriously Eastern European extraction) could just about qualify. I'm not sure what this all accomplishes in the way of restitution, in any event:

El gobierno reactiva la concesión de la nacionalidad española a los sefardíes

Spanish Citizenship Process Eased for Sephardic Jews

John Green's Crash Course, which posted wonderful, humorous and pedagogically useful videos about the history of the world has now taken on literature. Very exciting:

I have such fond memories of my summer as a curatorial intern at the Brooklyn Museum, so I was especially pleased to see this video. It makes me more than a little nervous to see people dancing in a conservation lab, but not as nervous as the assault on free speech that they were protesting:

There's nothing new here if you are in the know, but it's still cool to see this treated by the popular news media (even if, speaking of free speech, it's only there because they can't speak out about what's happening on the ground in Egypt presently):

The Andalusi Legacy in Alexandria

Yet another fantastic post from the British Library's Medieval and Earlier MSS blog. This one was particularly resonant for me because I'm dealing with other types of medieval book lists and library catalogues right now in my research, and there seems to be a tendency to want to compare medieval English booklists with Provençal Hebrew-language ones (like the one's I'm writing about). So this was just a nice, refreshing little tidbit to mull over. Plus it's a good detective/academic puzzle story. Plus plus, how great is the name of the Reading Abbey Library?

Found in a Bricked-Up Chamber: The Reading Abbey Library Catalogue

Slapstick comedy for the internet age, from my home institution. I don't fault the tech guy so much for the mistake as I do for his subsequent attempt to coin the term replyallpocalypse and (one of my biggest language pet peeves) his misspelling of queue as que:

What Happened When NYU Students Discovered They Could Email 40,000 People At Once

Those are the highlights. Normal service as they say (where they = John Cleese as Basil Fawlty) has been resumed as soon as possible.