I moved to Minnesota in June 2023 during a day when the air smelled like a campfire. When I’ve asked longtime Minnesotans about the increasingly severe smoke during our summers, they all say it was never a problem until a few years ago. And wow, this graph has got the receipts.

King Louis-Philippe I was conscientious and hard-working. So it's a little unfortunate — but extremely funny — that the defining image of him became a caricature drawing his jowly face as a pear. Find out more in my latest episode! thesiecle.com/episode48/

french wikipedia is the only language that has a "list of bastards" article

This video by @edariad.bsky.social drives home this point, finding that @brennanleemulligan.bsky.social's use of *themes* and philosophy in his GMing sets him above other very good pro DMs: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghf7...

This is a real flight school, teaching people to fly planes!!! Like????

Protoss Gnostics 🤝 Archons rule

happy Partially Muscled Skeleton Stands by the Perimeter Fence and Screams for Thirty Seconds Before Vanishing day

This video by @edariad.bsky.social drives home this point, finding that @brennanleemulligan.bsky.social's use of *themes* and philosophy in his GMing sets him above other very good pro DMs: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghf7...

I think more people should be willing to say "Judge may have had the better season but it's boring and uninteresting for him to win the MVP and it's interesting and fun for Raleigh to so I want Raleigh to win it"

NEW EPISODE: After the July Revolution of 1830, France has a new king. And Louis-Philippe wants everyone to know he's not like a regular king, he's a cool king. thesiecle.com/episode48/

The original pear caricature was published in 1831 by Charles Philipon. It got him put on trial for insulting the king, where his defense was that Louis-Philippe so resembled a pear that an “artist could quite easily have drawn the parallel unintentionally." Then he drew it to demonstrate.

"the US is uniquely bad" and/or "the US is uniquely/inevitably doomed" are also American exceptionalism

The latest episode of my history podcast looks at the complicated personality of an underrated historical leader, and his struggle to define what it meant to be a constitutional monarch of a divided country — both Citizen and King.

Sometimes you run across an old quote that stops you cold. From a Jayson Stark article in January 2000:

Why does Clarissa, the largest Penguin, not simply eat the other Penguins?

It’s the second Wednesday of the month, which means it’s time for Twin Cities Nerd Nite at @blackhartstp.com! First talk of the night is Molly talking about “Ancestry Without Ancestry(dot)com.”

The American penny died on Wednesday in Philadelphia. It was 232. The cause was irrelevance and expensiveness, the Treasury Department said. Nothing could be bought any more with a penny, as the cost to mint the penny had risen to more than 3 cents. nyti.ms/48bFd5K

LOL, an actual modern-day Mechanical Turk

THEY HAVE NAMES?!?

“An American general who slaughtered a goat in front of his army before battle would not reassure his men; a Greek general who failed to do so might well panic them.” — @bretdevereaux.bsky.social

This is pretty wild, Turkey basically just nuked the lower levels of its football pyramid because everyone involved, from the players to the refs to club executives, were betting on matches www.reuters.com/sports/socce...

Coast Guard: Uh, see, uh...D'you think there's any possibility that you could, uh, come about and go back there and, uh, and do any searching? 1/

The latest from YouGov (n ~ 4.3k) Who do you blame for the shutdown: Dems 31, Reps 34 Approve/disapprove of the deal to end the shutdown: approve 37, disapprove 29 Who do you think benefited most from the deal? Dems 9, Reps 38 today.yougov.com/topics/overv...

it's not 'performative' if you're taking pictures of random fucking strangers reading. they're just reading! you're the creepy one!

In the last known image of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, you can see the structural fatigue where she had started sagging in the middle. Freaky!

Editor: You get that frontispiece for Leviathan? Etcher: Sure did boss, real fucking sexy just like you asked.

Here is the Newsweek magazine article that led to the song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," marked up to show key passages that Lightfoot borrowed. Short thread at quoted post. Thanks to @bikeguy.bsky.social for reminding me about this. #EdmundFitzgerald50

Look, at the point when your game of dress-up results in a month-long mystery around a robbery at the Louvre, I think it’s fair to say you’ve made your dream come true

This encapsulates something about the Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. It is author and former St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter Larry Millett, speaking on how far apart the Twin Cities were, psychologically and practically, pre-interstate.

LLMs have tons of accuracy issues but I must note as an expert that 19th Century *human* historians were also very capable of confidently hallucinating “facts,” extrapolating wild nonsense based on a single misunderstanding.

What happened when I dug into some of the key studies and ideas quoted in The Tipping Point and its sequel… kucharski.substack.com/p/the-real-r...

@histphilosophy.bsky.social A friend is looking for books/articles on the role of “European Jews and Jewish philosophy/ethics/etc.” in the Enlightenment — with the addendum, “beyond Spinoza.” Can you recommend anything?

My house in the Wedge got a lot of canvassers. From Fateh's campaign and from multiple pro-Fateh groups. From Chughtai's campaign, whose lit featured Fateh. Some lit did also list Davis & Hampton as part of the "ticket," but no one knocked on my door specifically on behalf of either man.

I made a “how do you do, fellow kids?” joke to someone in their mid 20s who, it turns out, was too young to have heard of that meme. So “how do you do, fellow kids?” is now an example of “how do you do, fellow kids?”

Want cute holiday crafts? My wife has a table at Minnehaha United Methodist Church’s Holiday Bazaar today, 9 am - 2 pm, selling greeting cards, gift tags, prints, napkins, wax seals and more! Plus lots more tables and lunch being served! www.instagram.com/p/DQvJkrLE9E...

DHS confirmed it has stopped automatically storing officials' text messages. Instead, officials are supposed to take a screenshot, send that to their work email, download it onto their work computer and run a text-recognition program on it. Every time. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/u...

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp.... genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

best ending of all time, let's be real

No, officer, I don't know where that sleeve of graham crackers went. And actually, I don't want to say any more on this subject without an attorney present.

The 45% Ceiling remains unbroken.

UPDATE: There are 39,205 ballots that didn't rank Frey or Fateh #1. Minneapolis says if Frey picks up 12,512 votes, he wins outright. If Fateh picks up 27,342 votes, he wins outright. After Round 1, Fateh (46,510 votes) trails Frey (61,340) by 14,830 votes. vote.minneapolismn.gov/results-data...

Four years ago, here's the share of Minneapolis voters who ranked each candidate anywhere on their ballots.

Does anyone know what’s up with the St. Anthony New Brighton school board election and the “SANB Parent Coalition for Teachers and Students” group? Their website is conspicuously light on details about things like who they are.

Why I'm getting less sleep lately: My small, impressively shriek-y kiddo had gone from drinking 11% of her daily milk at night in June to 23% in October, and nearly 30% the past few days.

Oh, I see the mistake, but I’m afraid the AI optimization *I* was referring to when I invited you here stands for “Amontillado Interment Optimization”. Now if you will kindly pass me that spade…

Nothing like opening night at the Minnesota Opera! My first live Mozart opera, “Cosi Fan Tutte.”

If you're in need of positive and rather wholesome news, there's a high school teacher named Bryan who took a ton of freely licensed celebrity headshots at the New York Film Festival last month for Wikipedia, and I truly can't believe how drastic the upgrade is for some articles (thread)

Really fascinating stuff in this YG analysis of online gamblers. Working full time but low-income, significantly more likely to report poor mental health, anxiety, and depression, "deeply cynical about marriage" but "hopeless romantics." "Over-indexes on ADHD." platform.yougov.com/resources

How many remember who was president when Roe v. Wade was overturned, TARP was passed, or the COVID vaccines debuted? We asked Americans about these & 17 other events from the past 25 years. See the full results in @today.yougov.com's free newsletter: yougovamerica.substack.com/p/how-many-a...