Strong Murc’s Law with this one
Author of NIMBY NATION: The War on Growth That Created Our Housing Crisis and Remade American Politics (Bloomsbury, 2027). American historian and Klarman Fellow @Cornell. Learn more: JacobAnbinder.com
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Strong Murc’s Law with this one
Vogue pulling a Kim Il Sung
I feel like RFK is that classic thing where future historians will be like “well obviously trust in public health declined because of Covid” but in reality the causes were much more stupid and random.
I have this and like it but if your yard is small it's probably more mower than you need egopowerplus.com/21-inch-self...
The original Fleming books are generally pretty bad and most of the great stuff the series has done has been in spite of the source material not because of it
It’s really useless to speculate on the president’s condition; just watch Fox News and when they cut from Hannity to Tchaikovsky you’ll know
You read the Times from 50 years ago and there is a degree of celebrity afforded to prominent members of Congress that is simply not replicated today.
Hard not to see Trump’s govern-by-fiat style as the inevitable result of increasingly sclerotic government in other realms. Congress way less active than it used to be, major social issues (e.g. housing) seem completely intractable regardless of which party in power.
Yuppies has a cover! And a release date! Out May 12 with @harvardpress.bsky.social.
“What the hell are these people saying?” -Pauline Kael
“Rocky” made with actual Philadelphia accents wins zero Oscars, kills Stallone’s career, becomes lost to time
Mannarino looks like the guy your friend dates in college where you’re like “he’s getting a masters but he also says he’s a club promoter? Wait did he just say he has a kid?”
It brings me no joy to note that Tesla has solved this
Especially because it means the preceding states are thus also turkey feathers? Even though the feather is supposed to symbolize Massachusetts? It makes no sense.
The current flag is bad
Apparently there are six feathers because Massachusetts was the sixth state, something everyone in Massachusetts definitely knows and cares about and mentions often
Great flag
Almost as if the vexillological community are simply a bunch of aesthetic scolds rather than people with interesting ideas
Best license plates too
Roman Mars does one TED talk and now we have to live with this shit forever
Jeez the finalists for the new Massachusetts flag are awful
I got a $15 parking ticket in Ithaca today, which is to say, it is cheaper to park in Ithaca illegally than it is to park in some cities legally.
Anthro is a surprisingly versatile PhD discipline. I see a crazy variety number of jobs where it's cited as a potential qualification.
pre-'08: surely there is a job out there for you 2008-2020: surely there will be a job out there for you eventually post-2020: 🙃
People interviewed in the article: -U Chicago assistant professor -U Chicago associate professor -U Chicago distinguished professor -U Chicago emerita professor -U Chicago dean People not interviewed: - anyone un/underemployed with a U Chicago PhD
"The professors seemed reluctant to define the success of a program by how many professors it creates" is a good summary of what it's like talking to people with tenure about the job market www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...
RFK is the perfect example of how Trump is transactional to a fault. There's basically no political upside for Trump to keep him around or implement any of his agenda but RFK was nice to him so here we are.
It will never not be funny that after 50 years of the left talking about it it was the right which actually ended up doing “defund the Ivy League”
These are the top editorials in the Times *right now*
That’s fine! I’m not asking people to like the New York Times. I am asking them to appropriately gauge its influence.
I’m sorry but “the Times does not regularly highlight how insane Trump is” is not an opinion grounded in reality.
“To my right” =! “On the right”
Sometimes I swear I am the only one on the left who thinks my views are unusual and not in fact widely held by a silent majority that would have a voice if not for the Sulzberger family
Isn’t the simpler answer here “the Times represents a point on the political spectrum that is more to the center than mine,” not “the Times is engaged in an elaborate scheme to trick people into believing things that they don’t.”
You seem to be annoyed that the Times is not the Nation, as if that isn’t proving my point
And anyway, if you really believed that they’re actually the Telegraph in sheep’s clothing, then why would you give a shit what they print? They’re not your paper clearly.
That is simply not true, and not coincidentally that description doesn't really apply to any major news outlet these days.
Because the Times is an innately center-left newspaper which lives in constant fear of being described as such
Anyway, if your premise is "the Times holds Democrats to a higher standard than Republicans," I agree with you. I'm just not sure it matters.
In hindsight I don't think they were making up very much about Biden!
Biden's mistake was he did no press and thus became a tabula rasa for journalists' speculations about his condition, which is evidently worse than saying crazy shit straight to journalists
I'm not excusing the Times but clearly there is a relationship there with the president's degree of availability to the media
well wrt the latter it turns out in hindsight to have been justified IMO
I agree but I don't think it's particular to Trump. It's a structural issue that arises any time a daily newspaper tries to cover a slow-moving tragedy.
"If the Times had run this story on A1 above the fold, instead of A3 below the fold, Kamala would've won Pennsylvania!"
I don't like everything the New York Times prints either but the way people now pick apart individual story-placement decisions like it's some sort of talismanic path to understanding why the world sucks is bordering on lunacy
he had the lowest incoming favorability rating of any president except for himself
We have four years of polling now showing voters care overwhelmingly about cost of living and election results showing they are willing to elect a guy they already knew was pretty bad to try to fix it. It's really important!
I do think cost of living is better messaging terrain for Dems than "democracy" but I also think it's not really clear Dems have a plan for cost of living so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If Twitter was famous for a rotating main character of the day, Bluesky is like a tribute band that plays the same three songs none of which was that good to begin with
A ball rolls onto the court, you take two. Someone walks behind you during a point, you take two.
Any public court hacker knows the chair ump’s call was obviously correct. The crowd was either dumb or raring for a fight in support of Med.
I am reminded of that study that found people reported worse relationships with their parents *after* going to therapy
This is not, like, a world of profound reason and logic we are inhabiting here
There’s no more annoying question from your kid’s grandparents than “why is he sad?” I don’t know, because he’s 3 and doesn’t have the deductive skills to understand why you can’t throw jars of jam across the living room?
This is why sports is good. Solo exercise is just mental sleight of hand.
I have made an effort to get back on the Peloton and I forgot that the main impetus to do cardio when you're in the habit is "you feel like a bad person if you don't"
I am old
a little gravitas, as a treat
The bribe should've been a 7pm reservation at Torrisi
When the "all conferences should be on Zoom" movement emerged a few years ago I was shocked to learn that some people think conferences are about giving papers
ChatGPT is from the Bay Area. It’s not going to move to Bemidji to teach a 4/4 for $62,000 a year.
“AI will take historians’ jobs” lol joke’s on AI there are no jobs
In addition to their reactionary politics, a stunning number of Gen Xers think "Moonraker" is one of the better James Bond movies
Every Target has 1 open checkout lane, 20 closed checkout lanes, and 4 self-checkout machines one of which is broken. It's like the only major retailer I frequent that can't seem to figure this out.
Our well water is cloudy again and the Wegmans spring water I bought to replace it is so clear it’s almost like it’s mocking me. Like, I could perform surgery looking through a glass of this water.
This is how I feel about when I tweeted “Oreos are great except when you dunk them in milk the part you are holding doesn’t get dunked; this is their Achilles heel.”
I guess Richard Scarry didn’t want to get into rentierism so rather than have Alfalfa go to a tractor dealer who adds no obvious value to the product he pretends that it’s made by a blacksmith
Kansas City was one of the first US transit systems to go fare-free. Now the fares are coming back. The city & transit agency had a choice: Eliminate bus service or charge for trips. They chose the latter. (Low-income riders can still ride free.) Good move. Service quality > Free fares
The power of state lines is that Ithaca is in Poland Spring distribution territory when by all rights it should be Deer Park country
In my field it’s pretty clear that LLMs can write a B/B+ paper if the prompt is relevant enough to the bot’s knowledge base. But that might say more about what passes for a B paper now than what it says about LLMs.
The boomer belief that any food will keep indefinitely provided it is placed in this exact cooler
Every city is now like “Welcome! Let us acquaint you with our regional healthcare duopoly.”
This sounds like a landmark case you would learn in first-year torts
MS Word sucks in its own way but conceptually it is a word processor. Google Docs seems designed to discourage its users from writing.
I am not an abundance debater, but I like a nice takedown. In this one, abundance guy Derek Thompson does the unprecedented by picking up the phone, calling the academics that leftists cite, and asking them if their work is being misrepresented. www.derekthompson.org/p/the-anti-a...
This from @henrymjtonks.bsky.social is v good. "Abundance need not be an instrument of Democratic factional competition. Instead, it has the potential to unite the liberal-left together around a vision for how to implement grand Democratic ambitions." hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/lessons-fr...
The thing is, it’s hard to grasp that a politician might be religious if your religion is politics
my favorite movie
RIP Tom Lehrer. He was said to have called Little Boxes "the most sanctimonious song ever written," making him by definition the ur-YIMBY.
We literally elected Goldfinger
I think a historian would be scared to publish anything with this few citations
Maybe I'm not party to these disputes in history but it seems weird that in this particular field it's considered normal to just constantly churn out lightly researched op-eds where you snipe at people you don't like
IMO the reasons Bernie is not a Democrat are idiosyncratic to '70s Vermont politics and not particularly instructive for anyone else
I am thinking more about the quality of housing. But also Park Slope has desirable amenities beyond the school district.
Hear that, urban transport nerds? Take it from Politico! Next livestream of Look Both Ways with David and Wes is this Thursday at 6p ET. Audio recording to follow via podcast platforms (episode 1 is available now). Livestream link: www.youtube.com/live/ZZ633Gc...
that took a turn
I don’t know
If you’re childless I think this is true. It’s hard to think of a place though where your cost to maintain the same quality of life scales more dramatically with each kid than NYC.
We love too see it
The problem is our landlords are not small-batch artisanal
me, an idiot: “there are too few homes” you, wise: “no, a fifth of the homes are owned by companies that are too big”
Honest to goodness trying to figure out what “corporate power” is supposed to mean in this context
Also a v good book
Highly recommend Margaret O'Mara's first book, Cities of Knowledge, for a history of how elite universities became so dependent on federal largesse
Wow I can’t believe someone got a photo of the meeting between Blanche and Maxwell
The people who say academics are always the latest with everything have never tried to have furniture delivered
not only have multiple home maintenance people ghosted me here, I’m locked in a protracted struggle with my lawnmowing guy to invoice me for services he has already rendered.
