And, you know, not for nothing that these sorts of weird little spaces tend to be where new (though not necessarily better) ideas come from, historically speaking.
Historian of early America and bits of Britain. Apostate southerner. Yells about maps, St. Louis, and higher ed.
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And, you know, not for nothing that these sorts of weird little spaces tend to be where new (though not necessarily better) ideas come from, historically speaking.
Fwiw, Bluesky’s irrelevance is its greatest strength for me. Since no one here is getting rich or famous based on their posts, there is no real incentive to cater to power. That in turn makes it a usefully less-compromised place to discuss how power works in society, imo.
Like, there’s still the boring old social-scientific “a group of people coordinating effort within a system can in fact effect change, and that can be good, even if the long-term consequences remain unpredictable.”
…or the paralyzed nihilism I’m seeing in my younger students (“can’t predict chaos so may as well wait for the storm”)
It’s taught generational helplessness, either in an over-reliance on “great man” individualistic causation (“bigger butterflies cause bigger storms”)…
Perhaps no concept has done more damage to humans’ understanding of causation than “the butterfly effect.”
Like, how do we end up at a point where the metric of how “smart” you are is that you despise democracy and desire a strongman?
Among the many, many things we have to figure out how we get a media apparatus less openly bigoted against huge swaths of the population and, by extension, less hard-wired for fascism.
If this is our Vatican smokestack, I cannot think of a more appropriately American one…
I want to believe but this is also the closest Domino’s to GW…
Like, here’s what we’ve got for you. Also a still-working Hardee’s. And two more abandoned Hardee’s.
In western Virginia you should read this sign more like “Food Gas Lodging”
And another reminder here that a standalone “national capital” so easily becomes “the palace court” and maybe instead of statehood, we should just abolish DC altogether and make Congress meet in a downtown Marriott just like the rest of us do whenever we need to have an event.
Worth noting how closely X’s base of government officials, national political journalists, billionaire interests, and prep school Nazis matches the parts of DC someone like Schatz sees every day and therefore how easy it is to mistake X for “real life” when you live in that world.
Mark Rober and Dude Perfect have twisted a whole generation of guys’ houses. Gonna need a whole new federal department to unrig this nonsense.
It’s still a massive, massive port, rail, and logistics hub. That geography hasn’t really changed. The town’s struggles are human-created self-sabotage.
You’d think that these people who “felt safe” in the middle of all that would learn that their feelings are not the most reliable data for crime levels and yet…
And no accident these same aging children elected this Peter Pan-looking motherfucker to be their leader.
You see it in the FB comments on the “local history” pages where people long for the “low crime and prosperity” of their teenage years in… 1980s St. Louis.
If only this town loved children as much as it loves reports telling it how much it hates children.
*ahem* IT’S THE SEVENTY-YEAR FIGHT AGAINST PUBLIC SCHOOLS BY PEOPLE LIKE YOU, ASSHOLES! Look for my six-figure invoice Tuesday a.m.
Mission accepted.
Well shit, after a week of prattling on about the value of history as a discipline and the necessity of human review of research I guess I should probably get this reader report in…
State’s gonna suspend local government just to create more travel vouchers for the Dave and Busters crowd.
Whole city’s being bankrupted because people really really want to spend time in a first-class lounge on their way to an Austin Marriott. It’s not just the depth of the corruption that gets me. It’s the smallness of the ambition.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s the illusion of a gap closing with young salary-earning families moving out of gentrifying neighborhoods and older retirement-income empty nesters moving in, who are still rich but might not show up in the MHI data the same way.
Them: “Just give us a clear timeline that tells us is going to happen.” Me, after discoursing vaguely on broad sweeps of time and the unreliability of knowledge for twenty minutes: “Probably suffering.”
Weirdly I always thought the scene in the Harry Potter books where the centaurs try to teach a class best captured the distance between what people want historians to be and what we actually are.
And yes I’m still mad about Cori but not mad just about that.
Dems’ choice to focus on purging their own membership in the middle of an active coup situation rather than consolidating power will be remembered as one of the stupidest and deadliest self-owns in history.
If you reword it all as “purging challengers to their authority” it slots in more easily with historical patterns.
When you think about just how far the nearest Best Buy is from East St. Louis, this dog’s achievements become all the more remarkable.
What parts of this administration, exactly, are disproving the “woke” idea that white straight dudes are a predatory band of incompetents who violently cling to power because they know they can’t wield authority any other way?
How dare historians rethink this concept that was invented by other historians?! It would be like physicists denying the eternal truth of phlogistic theory!
Just a reminder that, unless your state is 70% retired millionaire federal contractors trying to start a horse farm, Virginia’s politics map terribly onto the nation and please stop trying.
50/50 chance that some frustrated someone once told our dense baby president the National Guard was “kind of like the country’s property management company” and that analogy stuck.
And I guess Newsom’s just jumped ahead to 1787’s, “No, we didn’t mean *all* of your rights” vibe.
Tried explaining to a French colleague not so long ago why Americans would do something so dumb as abandon the idea of the state.
Not for nothing, “We will use the power of the state to protect your basic human rights and not abandon you to be brutalized by your neighbors” was, like, the main idea of the Declaration.
Wheel of Fortune-ass weather.
“Anyone’s fault but mine and they look weird…”
Way happier over being my irrelevant alienating academic self than whatever the fuck it is those goons are.
To be fair, if that straw barista ever vanishes for Nichols, Brooks, et al, all that’s left is them being held accountable for the very large and very real roles they played in destroying democracy and plunging the republic into fascism.
It really is almost impressive that leadership as a field has managed to take something as diverse, decentralized, and varied as American higher ed institutions and get them all to fail at once everywhere.
They will all shuffle sideways to new positions in new places and chase the next thing as a cure-all for the ruin the last one left, same as they’ve done for two decades.
I will always be grateful for his phrase “desultory rioting” and everything it taught me about the mentality of British historiography.
Just a quick tour of the Google News tab for “Fall 2025 enrollments”
Good news is university enrollments are up everywhere. Bad news is university enrollments are up everywhere.
It is truly one of the most powerful and beautiful museums I have ever been to. Interpretation elevated to art and it is only an absolute monster who could be blind to it.
Wrote this on FB after Charlottesville and still feel it is one of my better thesis statements.
And to be clear, these dudes are driven to mass murder for experiencing just once in their lives an echo of just one of the myriad horrors of Atlantic slavery.
I dunno, given how many action franchises are built around the merest hint of the family separation that was the core of the Atlantic slave system maybe the institution was pretty freaking awful and we should remember that.
That horrible, unimaginable thing that drove Liam Neeson to insane levels of violence in those “Taken” movies? Baseline of daily life. Starts there and gets worse.
They are absolutely going to raise a Confederate flag outside the White House, “unofficially, as a joke” within three weeks.
One of the thousand reasons I’m shifting grading in my intro classes from product to process. Don’t know if it will work but the only way out is to quit the game this thing is playing.
Adding “I’m not mad, just disappointed” as an option on all my rubrics.
Yes I’m taking a break from writing my syllabus statements on the hazards of gamifying learning and Ai to play Duolingo, and I’m already aware, Mr. Ironypants, so just keep walking.
Say what you will about the neo-cons, they at least read enough Trotsky in their youth to understand how state power works.
🤬 Shame on @stltoday.com for allowing Editorial Board member Lynn Schmidt to publish her latest racist, MAGA rant There are plenty of news accounts and an entire Action St. Louis Report on the community's 🌪 Tornado efforts actionstl.org/tornado
He always tested well so his failures must be society’s fault.
Pretty sure we know the answer to that. Or maybe he just likes constantly referring back to Cellini in conversation because he likes “deep cut” Renaissance masters.
His fantasy is to one day meet a woman who knows on sight what the tattoo means and they will be together forever, mass-procreating and buying weird eyeglasses together
He hasn’t done it yet because he’s kind of scared of needles, but this guy totally has plan to tattoo his SAT score on his left pec, closest to his heart.
Talking to actual students is still the best antidote to the headlines. Really glad for the semester to be starting.
Really beginning to see that the core characteristic of a fascist is their inability to understand linear time.
Grim as it is seeing stormtroopers in real life, I am nonetheless impressed with how well Star Wars captured their general bumblefuckery.
Every campus should have a little hole that lets you run away into the woods.
What’s become clear is that we’re looking at the point where a myth (“humanities are expensive wastes”) becomes material (“you must cut humanities to secure the reputation/credit you need in order to finance your build-outs”). And now it’s doubly impervious to evidence.
Same. And the upper levels are all over the place depending on who got them on the books when. A major reason we have to offer both a BS and a BA (along with the whole language thing).
Definite third thing. Our classes are split between them. I tell my students it’s because to really understand change you have to be able to model the typical (soc sci) with an eye to the full range of human possibility (humanities) so we do both.
Truman is the model of how most of these cuts happen: don’t replace lines when people retire, cut their 75-80 enrollments each semester out of the department’s totals, use those “reduced” enrollments to justify not hiring, repeat until one day the program’s just gone.
Equally as devastating when we lose programs, maybe even more, since our students just go home rather than go to Wash U.
Really not loving all the “well of course *regional publics* should be cutting humanities programs” language this news is bringing out.
Once we turned every human endeavor into a real estate scam, we opened the door wide for the destroyer to take this particular form.
One explanation for the rapid capitulation of universities, corporations, municipal governments, etc. to Trump’s fascism is because their leadership loves this exact type of shitty property developer.
Outright surrender of sovereignty did sometimes happen, but negotiated borders was far more frequent.
Native Americans were “conquered”
The online dude need to obsessively rank cities.
Smokey Robinson and the Coincidences.
Legally yes but with the # of Stephen Douglasses currently in Dem leadership I’m skeptical that they wouldn’t crumble at the first David Brooks op ed talking about “fairness in our new state lines” and we’re back to a Missouri Compromise situation.
Ds would also have to muster the will to deny existing red-state petitions (southern IL, eastern OR, northern CA) and wear the cries of “hypocrite” proudly.
We used to have a good answer for what the alternative looks like…
So nice to see all these faces again.
If we want to be inclusive of downstate the official drink of Illinois is “water under a boil order”
Just look at all the French theorists who did time in Nazi prison camps.
Wow, look at the thumbnail in that thumbnail! Elliott Gorn would approve.
Weirdly stuff like this triggers my teacher’s sympathy that the bot is trying its best and just needs some help but then I remember that it does not care and correcting it involves correcting 20 billion inputs and so my teacher’s indifference kicks in. D- Let the fucker’s future boss deal with it.
I mean if you want to give me a team of twelve professionals to likewise ensure my students are using Ai in a competent and ethical manner, go ahead but I don’t think it’s going to create the budget savings you’re hoping for.
“I use Ai at my job and it’s fine.” i.e., you, a trained professional working with multiple levels of *human* oversight & accountability, can delegate specific parts of the job you already know how to do to Ai. Huzzah. Do you also see how that is very much *not* the classroom environment?
A wealthy society obsessed with apocalypse, death, murder, and suicide stabbed itself in the face until it collapsed? Historians move slow, granted, but I think they’ll put those pieces together pretty easily.
Hilarious to be called Marxists when so much of faculty politics is about getting paid a fair wage for our work so we can buy our way into a bourgeois lifestyle.
Very true! That’s clearly the play at my uni: using well publicized cuts to create space for the option of reorganizing Arts and Sciences into more “manageable” subject area units and easier to move or eliminate as wanted.
There’s also an element of hazing, too, cutting humanities as a way for admins to prove their loyalty to the legislature and the board.
Onder Law, a "you tripped let's get you 10k" law firm in St Louis, made a video entirely with AI showcasing neighborhoods around the region, and they do look like them if you have been there. There are thousands of actors and filmmakers in STL who could've knocked this commercial out of the park.
Everyone seems so happy in this completely segregated community where no one can correctly pronounce the word “winning.”
And if my competitors are also investing in it…
Like, I know a guy next town over who also has a machine that can create visual approximations of things that have value and investing in his technology sure would streamline some of my workflows..
Is there any argument for Ai that isn’t also an argument for counterfeit money?
Can’t 3D print a cardboard shoebox can you Chad?
Trying to Ai-proof an online course and fuck it, I’m going back to dioramas. They can mail them to me.