we’re not getting hit with the imperial boomerang so much as we built an automatic imperial boomerang-throwing device and loaded thousands and thousands of boomerangs into it
Professor of Russian & Soviet History at Queens College, CUNY. Author of The Essential Guide to Writing History Essays and An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia. Knitter & spinner. antoshki.com
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we’re not getting hit with the imperial boomerang so much as we built an automatic imperial boomerang-throwing device and loaded thousands and thousands of boomerangs into it
Been thinking a lot about Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago. It was built on land donated by Chicago's wealthy elite to have a nearby army base so troops would be around to break strikes and respond to labor unrest. Sheridan Road existed in large part to transport troops to Chicago's south side.
I still maintain that these unidentified and unidentifiable “federal authorities” can be traced to Betsy Lou Who DeVos’ brother Eric Mercenary Prince. We used to have journalists who’d be on the money trail like bloodhounds. Now they just whine at us online for disagreeing with them.
I know, I know, but: The president of the US saying, literally, "we're going in" in reference to sending the military to an American city for no reason beyond terrorizing the local population should be the most immediately impeachable shit imaginable
The fact that he's talking about Baltimore when Baltimore *very famously* lowered their crime rate significantly under the current mayor...tells you everything you need to know. He's gonna come after Minneapolis when we elect a new mayor, folks.
So the governor of Texas and the President want to violate the sovereignty of the state of Illinois with well armed soldiers. Tomorrow at work: Not sure how our brains don't explode at some point.
Beautifully written and sharply observed. Decades ago, I had an extremely clever student who (for reasons I never understood) worked summers as a blackjack dealer. She referred to casinos/gambling as "the lunatic fringe of capitalism." Now. as the saying goes, the lunatics are running the asylum.
Academic dudes, stop assuming the woman you're talking to doesn't know 1000x more than you do about A.I., LLMs, computers etc. I just watched a psych Ph.D. talk down to a C.S. person who is tenured in an A.I. dept. It's a golden opportunity to ask questions of an expert. Be polite and ask nicely.
Yale researchers studied 578 people with long COVID and found that nearly one in three developed POTS, mostly younger women, facing worse health, more severe symptoms, financial strain, and social isolation. www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/...
True of k-12 also. Attaching sports when it could just as easily be done separately is just batshit and totally destructive of educational goals. Like Americans ever gave a shit about those.
Murderland explores why so many serial killers are from the NW and the lead/violence theory, but as with her other book, Fraser is brilliant at making very large connections over time and space. In this case - from the Guggenheims and industrialization to murderers to Trumpies. It seems v important.
Prairie Fires wove together Laura Ingalls Wilder and the genocide of natives with the destruction of the prairie/creation of the Dustbowl & the culture of extreme individualism of the 20s & 30s that grew later into the modern "real Americans" conservatism I grew up with. It's my family history. 1/2
Trump may not be dead but I think we should keep going with the conspiracy theorizing, maybe it’ll eventually force the media to cover how he’s obviously demented.
Roland Barthes: "Anti-intellectualism is a historical myth, linked no doubt to the rise of the petite-bourgeoisie... yet its *political* danger must not be overlooked: it is quite simply fascism, whose first objective always and everywhere is to liquidate the intellectual class."
I don't know who needs to hear this, but any of you refreshing social media every day waiting to find out he's dead should relax. You'll know it happened when your phone blows the fuck up, because we'll all be texting everyone we know, and God willing will prove to be the best twenty minutes of 2025
Religion in America is mostly for personal gain. It’s generally performance Christianity. Usually from the most immoral people out there. The louder their performance Christianity. Is usually from the most immoral of them.
Bah, they had some other asshole talk first so I could still turn it off before he opened his stupid mouth.
I’m amazed there is a whole class of people paid to have dumb opinions. I have even dumber opinions for free
Is he going to be suspiciously airbrushed sitting on a bench with an inconsistent number of slats telling us about the cancer scare he did or did not have?
if a democrat ever does the "but how will we pay for it" routine to weasel out of providing social services ever again i will go where they are and i will slap their face so hard that it flies off their head and does mode 7 style scaling and rotation
If he's not out by 2:15 nobody has to pay taxes today
Folks, he's too modest to say, but Andrew Dessler has led and coordinated a full-court scientific response to that execrable, climate-denying "report" from the DOE. It was a massive effort, accomplished in mere weeks. And the response itself is of historic importance, because... 1/2
Last weekend, I retraced the steps of two of the most important moments in American (and Chicago) labor history, starting with the Haymarket Massacre. But the Haymarket Massacre wasn’t just a tragedy. It still provides a compass for us to fight against fascism today:
Followed by: I wrote 3 books and won a global prize for my research on an incredibly vital research subject that saves lives but I was just fired, anybody know of openings at Costco?
if you are a 40 year old man complaining about being “bullied” on a social media platform, I have great news for you: you are allowed to log off
Every screenshot in my feed today is like: I'm a pundit who makes $650,000 a year because I was right one time 13 years ago. I spend my days obsessing over a website I claim not to use. I just retweeted a thread on the feminization of toaster strudels.
White America: Fascism is better than having to actually think
this is the core essence of Overpaid Centrist Pundit Brain
theyre nazis
the thing that always baffles me about the bubblesky™️ discourse is that it just makes me feel so sad for the kind of person who has only ever seen social media as a place you must extract tangible value from--political clout, or clicks for your hot takes, or idek what they're doing. I like people.
Trump take yarn
One of the biggest topics in the history of this time is how the media simply ignored this guy's ignorance, poor cognition, mental health issues, lack of basic morals and simply treated everything he said as a a serious proposal instead of as the unhinged rambling of a truly foul human being.
Great piece on what Democrats can learn from @wutrain.bsky.social as the party debates its strategy newrepublic.com/article/1997...
proselytizing is so embarrassing, like please believe everything i do or else you’re in big trouble
Every now and then it becomes clear that a lot of leftists broadly and fundamentally do not understand the dynamics of right wing Christianity in the US and this is absolutely one of those cases
I get this kind of complaint once in a while, though usually not from history majors, and I always wonder what the rest of life is like for them.
This is not reporting. This is propaganda.
Yes, Americans are afraid of transit because they are more afraid of a homeless or mentally ill person near them than getting in a car accident. This is because Americans have pudding brains.
This is a good summary.
if you present them with evidence that women with college degrees have MORE kids and are more likely to get married (which is true) you'll be stunned to know that their views don't change
America’s intractable problems are those that require left solutions. That’s no coincidence, because the left in this country is powerless and we’ve been run by the center and right for many decades.
As the new semester starts, I want to keep the focus on the ongoing genocide in Gaza (and US complicity in it). Honored to have the chance to co-write this with another parent whose child was suspended from Barnard/Columbia for protest activity. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Wealth and power are poison
The millionaire CEO who stole a hat from a child at the US Open is, ultimately, indicative of the whole ruling class. This is what we’re up against, a small number of people and a system that will gladly and unapologetically steal from children and from all of us. www.jphilll.com/p/who-steals...
This year has flown by like a passing kidney stone.
The next Democratic president should declare that the National Emergencies Act and Article II of the Constitution allow him to: •admit D.C. and Puerto Rico as states •abolish ICE •grant citizenship to any immigrant •disband the 5th Circuit •expand the Supreme Court Seriously: Why the hell not?
Eric Daugherty has a bachelor's degree from Florida Gulf Coast University, but assumes he's qualified enough to assess Judge Jia Cobb, who graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern and cum laude from Harvard Law School, clerked for an appeals court, taught law, and made partner in a law firm.
we don't have high speed rail because Americans aren't interested in moving people quickly, especially those of us who are Black and brown — wouldn't want us to be able to run instead we have freight trains that can move war machinery around the country this is on purpose
Just imagine what is being saved for the book this week.
LLM companies are beta testing experimental products our children, and educators are facilitating it.
As a human in DC right now I would get a significant boost to quality of life via a widely available COVID vaccine compared to armed men harassing my neighbors. Would call my representatives in federal government to point this out, if I had any
they’re so close
Looking at this collection of words and wondering how this company still exists.
The MSM is actively cheering an invasion of Chicago.
Talking about IQ is like talking about penis size. It's not important but it tells us you're worried you don't have enough.
These people have no business being anywhere near children. Let them experiment on themselves and curdle what’s left of their asinine wits and abilities. And leave us and our children out of it.
I hope when Kevin Costner dies his obituary identifies him as “American Actor Who Portrayed White Characters”
🤮
In 2007, Ghislaine Maxwell became a licensed helicopter pilot. Epstein bought her a helicopter so she could transport people without commercial pilots knowing who was being taken, ensuring secrecy and privacy. She called her helicopter Air Ghislaine 2.
The worst trick Hollywood ever played was convincing people in their gut that respectable-looking white people are basically decent.
The United States is the only place on earth where poor people shun unions, free healthcare, and free education because the rich tell them to.
I'm mostly on the Trump had a stroke bandwagon because of the "flood the zone" media manipulation tactics. The "many people are saying" narrative juices reactionary algorithms. This is very important because of the strongman myth-making that's a pillar of fascists.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
I like Oxford a lot. Its architecture, and bookshops, and cafes, plus its all-pervading ambience of history and learning, but I think what I most like about it is its commas.
"The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are 'still' possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable." -- Walter Benjamin
it wasnt covid restrictions that turned people crazy, it was a group of immoral cynical right wing media grifters who took advantage of their scared followers to get clicks and subscribers and make money
Dead or alive, still want to see the Epstein files.
See, if you retire you get a cookie!
Has anybody tried giving him his childhood sled yet?
Bajillion dollar idea: a maximum wage
You know all those slasher-horror movies where they go in the haunted house or down the basement? And you scream, "OMG, how TF could they be so dumb!?" Yeah, well – that's America right now, with RFK jr as the head of HHS, including the CDC, NIH, etc. No good endings. Insane AF.
Big deal! I can detect heart failure far faster than AI, as long as there is no particular requirement for being right.
Note the econ prof's interpretation is way off and a big part of the problem.
When your “superpower” as a country is self-delusion about upward mobility it enables the status quo. Because nobody is demanding substantive change if the majority believe they’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, as the saying goes.
Without the quotes.
again i will say this today, the greatest threat to democracy, individual freedoms, and most citizens personal safety is not islam, socialism or wokeism, or someone's sex or sexuality. The greatest threat today is "christian" nationalism.
Elon Musk is a Nazi sympathizer with a breeding cult and it says a lot that the mainstream media works so hard to cover this up
“those opposed to autocratic capture need to organize, build infrastructure and stop being polite.” -Kim Lane Scheppele, Sociologist, Princeton University. Sept 2, 2025
New York does not miss. The bleach did it for me. 😭
I can't help but to think that if our students thought more about the people pushing AI into every facet of our lives, they might become more skeptical of AI.
We need a Hakeem Jeffries of the right.
Indeed.
Nate Silver mostly exists just to remind the rest of us to be grateful that we are not Nate Silver
Faculty and students ARE the university.
Klompen dancer and tour guide in a windmill (not a joke). It was slightly more than minimum wage iirc
The US has only had one president born after 1946. (Obama, 1961). This country has *never* had a president who wasn’t alive at same the same time as people who were or had been enslaved.
Present company excluded but I wish more people realized that good teachers are the product of *years* of training and education and professional development and mentorship and practice, not magicians who go into the classroom and just wing it on Charisma.
RFK jr's cult beliefs in no way supersedes anyone's right to prevent death or disease in their self or their family. Full Stop.
big tech hasn't come up with anything paradigm-shifting and useful since the smartphone in 2008 and I'm tired of all the shit they keep shoving down our throats trying to recapture that high
Is he not physically able to make a speech without his decIining heaIth being apparent? But you know, keep talking about the health of the last guy in office, who was just spotted coherent, smiling and getting ice cream the other day.
If all the documents were released, all the records, all the interviews, if every shred of paper written on the Epstein sex trafficking operation were released tomorrow, there would still be horrific things we’ll never know. Think about that.
One reason for Democrats to ditch their reflex to say "You have a point" to the other side is the right wing hasn't had a good point about anything in most of our lifetimes
Everything that is happening now, politically and socially, is because the whole system fell apart. And now everyone’s grasping - at straws; for power - in all directions as we freefall.
Part of the reason im convinced so many US news publications are primarily ideological, rather than "motivated by ratings/clicks" is so few have pushed back in any way whatsoever against X and Meta throttling outgoing links.
When the canary in the coal mine kicks, you don’t shrug, keep working, and put in an order on Amazon Prime for more vulnerable birds. You get the fuck out of the mine, and work on fixing whatever the issue so that it’s safe for canaries.
Alas, exactly.
Sir David Attenborough, Mel Brooks, and Dick Van Dyke are all 99. If they all outlive the current President, that will be exceptionally pleasing.