"Senator from South Carolina" is not, historically speaking, a good Sort Of Person to be

To be a historian is to speak ill of the dead and the rest of you should take more history classes and join us.

As a straight man it is my inalienable right to wear shorts so long they might as well be pants

Pick a Bond villain from pictures you have on your phone

How dare you attempt to educate me

Bob and Carol and Ted and Kermit

What a bunch of nerds

One of my favorite writers!

I am supposed to be a 'words' guy, yet I find that I lack the words to fully express the sense of rage and betrayal that I feel, having been raised to believe in the beauty of the United States as an - imperfect - pluralistic republic, to see these quislings try to turn it into a boring ethnostate.

you there boy, what bullshit is this

very weird feeling watching a seemingly coked out president yell at you for 20 minutes straight

“I don’t need this course” motherfucker you take your laundry home for your mom to do it. Shut the fuck up.

wish i could be cool and mysterious but unfortunately i can't shut the fuck up

Really important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.

I think any story about Trump's autocracy should be mostly about the people and institutions who failed to stop it. This guy isn't a political genius, everything else just happens to be rotten. 'Toddler Consolidates Power In Household' is a story about incompetent parents, not shrewd maneuvering

I am never more in my element than when talking about something absolutely nobody cares about.

You never heard of this fucking guy six weeks ago. Six weeks! Just get another Guy!! Look around. There's a Guy. Over there, another Guy. Now turn around...Guys. What do you think is around that corner? You guessed it: More Guys.

“I’m strong and I want to have like fifty kids and a farm” of course you do. You’re twelve. “I don’t want to eat vegetables I think steak and French fries is the only meal” hell yeah homie you’re twelve. “Maybe if there’s crime we should just send the army” bless your heart my twelve year old buddy

[at my second rodeo] listen up you ignorant sack of shit

we are in the Age of Enlightenment but for absolute dimwits

A grim reminder: these people will never be satisfied. There’s no point at which they will say “we’ve won, let’s enjoy life.” They will always be looking for someone else to punish, to revile, to dehumanize. They’re empty without that.

i would prefer to not live in uppercase H History

It's simple: we monetize crying

Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people’s medicine for fuel.

making college free as a means to harness educational polarization

The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good

What a burden to be old enough to know who Dean Cain is

ME, TENTING FINGERS ACROSS TBE TABLE: I am going to build a “Cracker Barrel of the mind” MARC ANDREESSEN: Here is $50,000,000,000

“I gave my life to Christ in the Cracker Barrel parking lot!”

“The poor, they’re always with us, with their lackluster LinkedIns”

Homesteading proceeds as expected

[writing the constitution] Benjamin Franklin: Write down "no dumb fucks as president" Alexander Hamilton: Stop saying that Benjamin Franklin: I'm tellin' you. You're gonna regret not writing that down

whether this would work i don’t know but what’s more important is that it would make me personally feel good

the thing everyone is going to have to accept is that the post-trump period, whenever it comes, will not and cannot be a project of national unity, it must be a project of partisan project of renewal, in the same way that reconstruction and the new deal were partisan projects of renewal.

Now is the time of dipshits

The old world is dying, and the new world is so fucking stupid dude

As end-of-empire scenarios go it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70s doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones.

The American research university is without peer in producing two things: scientific research and goddamned cowards

President of Amherst College in the 1930s

The EPA included this in its daily propaganda briefing today and it’s incredible how much of the politics of this movement is just the inchoate annoyances of Boomer dads whose greatest hardship in life is dealing with the minor consequences of basic environmental regulations.

Captain D’s in Lynchburg recognizes that life is meaningless and that we should all drive our cars straight into the ocean

My brother’s shoe stuck in the escalator of his subway station in East Harlem

All of which is to say, the folks longing for the return of old birth-hierarchies are both morally damaged - slavery and the society it sustained were bad - but also grown-ass adults basically running into the public square shouting, "I want to be a pretty pink prince/princess!" Sure you do.

the past is a different country and it fuckin sucked

you know you do have to admit a leather-bound book of letters collected from your friends and loved ones is a hell of a good 50th birthday gift