Hey, agricultural history hivemind, a student was looking for good recommendations on Florida, greenhouses, non-native plant cultivation, vertical agricultural, and hydroponics. This is for an undergraduate and would prefer your best articles.

I thought this point Eric made about how libraries are early introductions to a social contract was really interesting, too:

I will never ever give Metro LA any credit for improving public transit when they're still trying to bulldoze my neighborhood. la.streetsblog.org/2026/04/20/m...

if you are a left wing media figure and the new york times opinion page wants to publish you i strongly suggest reconsidering your opinion because its probably fucking stupid. or at least hoe-scaring.

the joy of a heist has nothing to do with the loot, it's about the *craft* of a good heist. the loot is ancillary and frankly only there for the form of it. we applaud a good heist as we applaud a well executed ballet

our park's little meadow seems to have a healthy population of hognose snakes, which the state is concerned about because they are in decline. that's on top of all the rare plants. finding your meadow isn't too hard. go find yours.

I'm convinced that midsized cities are pits of political depravity, that the reason australia is doing comparitively well is because we don't *have* midsized cities, and that integrating the social structures of midsize-city belts [yorkshire, midwest, rhine &c] will fix the politics of those areas.

really just need america's midsized cities to polarize the way atlanta et al have, but you really need young and educated new blood to churn the electorate and mobile and memphis are unlikely to achieve that soon

and yes it's a conversation yada yada this is why it's interesting because talking is not the medium it's the method, the platform is the medium

this is the difference between posting and writing, that's a 10/10 tweet and a 0/10 response

I thought it was commonly understood that in cases of people lifting shit from the grocery store or evading transit fares the right thing to do is absolutely pretend nothing happened and mind your own business and not make a New York Times package like a snitch

this is dumb bullshit to put in The Times but objectively speaking we absolutely do go wild for a good heist on the internet, everyone had a field day with the louvre thing for weeks

We are basically just like the Zapatistas, a people’s movement famously not built from political outreach where villages went to other villages to explain how they needed to work together via a system of deliberative democracy via elected councils, not a shadow network of 10 people doing mutual aid.

Thank you McDonalds for hiring those facing federal job losses. Every family deserves to earn a living and that’s why we raised our minimum wage in Virginia to $15 an hour.

Community organizing is fun because you will find out that one part of the defense network, the region with possibly the highest density of immigrants, is under control of an inner circle of activists who are ultras that don’t believe in admitting anyone who doesn’t show up to the right meetings.

it is devastating to notice how few benches there are in the world and how some benches have been replaced by weird "leaning" things. the world is incredibly cruel to disabled, elderly, poor, pregnant, tired, homeless, and all people. there should be benches fucking everywhere for everyone

HR also doesn't even make the decisions people hate most of the time, they just delivering the news management is too chicken shit too

a successful left-wing project should keep Matt Stoller far away from power as possible, if only because of his pro-small-holder brain

This is basically why juries are hesitant to enable sufficient punitive damages on commercial wrongdoing in plaintiff-side class action suits. No matter how much they find the trial attorneys' case persuasive, they still don't want them making too much money from their portion of damages.

living in australia really helps elucidate the difference between "liberalism" and "social democracy" because the two major parties are literally the liberals (right wing) and labor (left wing)

We also have good evidence of unions as one of the very very few social institutions that push white adults towards less racist attitudes

One likely effect of this will be that the generous grace that judges historically extend to pro se litigants will evaporate. More sanctions, fewer redos, etc.

Every system that was regulated, either explicitly or implicitly, by the fact that they were effortful for humans (letters of recommendation, government filings, essays, or, as this paper finds, lawsuits) will break under a wave of AI.

well-put crystallization of where many of the AI worries arise, at least for me. also applies to the “my coworker now emails exclusively through ChatGPT” case

yes! but i think the tragedy of class politics in the US is that people genuinely assume class politics is only for like, manufacturing workers exclusively

One effect of the housing crisis - and the lack of condos - in California is that we now have a new sort of class politics, this one's around being a renter, rather than type of job.

Going back in time to 1926 and confusing everyone by saying that the Democrats have gerrymandered Virginia and that this is really good news for civil rights. www.politico.com/news/2026/04...

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from 26 years in higher ed, it’s that having faculty governance and tenure is basically having a fake union. They are exploitable systems based on squishy policies that favor the admin, rather than legally-binding rules that represent the many & favor the workers.

The lack of full-time staff (or even, like, a dedicated printer) means small administrative things take way longer than they should. Tiny cohort sizes amplify social drama, and can cause a seminar / lecture series can to die because no one stepped up to take over organizing it.

Gotta think SEIU instead of UAW, I am always saying this (and have been since I helped organize an SEIU union, in full disclosure)

Good morning! It is April 22nd in the United Socialist States of America. Today we commemorate Earth Day. We must sustain the planet that gives us life! We celebrate the pineapple, ananas comosus. Charles Mingus was born today in 1922; Ansel Adams died on this day in 1984.

Happy 80th Birthday to the Pope of Trash, & a man who made queerness & drag important staples of the Baltimore film scene, John Waters. I’m still desperate to meet him one day!

Cutting down trees is functionally an irreparable harm in many senses given the time scale required to fully replace them and doing it knowingly on PUBLIC land and then pleading Who Cares, I Have Money, I Still Come Out Ahead If Caught is the one kind of instance where deterrence IS a valid use case

Oh you gotta throw guys like this [the guy who cut all the trees down not the amazingly named arborist] in prison for a real big boy sentence This is antisocial behavior in the most fundamental "i believe i can do what i want despite the public harm and can weasel out of consequence" sense

i think there are a lot reasons for this and many of them are structural but one of them is that the media has trained itself to treat trump’s psyche or emotional state as a guidepost for coverage so if trump doesn’t seem to care or know he’s less popular than rabies they don’t focus on it as much

We know how to get rid of congestion, and it requires you to do the exact opposite of this.

too many people On Here are addicted to feeling superior via repeating ad nauseum that Better Things Aren’t Possible frankly, it’s a dangerous affliction because it does little more than spread apathy & circle the wagons around the Only True Libs who uphold the waning sanctity of the Dem Party

really really hate that Bluesky Lib Schtick where people circle-shit (i.e. inverse of circle-jerk) on Bernie & other leftists/progressives who have tried to expand the bounds of political possibility as hapless idiots who were always doomed my dudes, a better world is not possible until it is

more than anything i suspect if half the funding that went into paying for long-shot election campaigns in red states went into unionization drives, the latter would pay off a lot more than the former

this book should be mandatory reading, imo

okay "when they go low, we hit hard" fucking rips

(Apologies for the qt) I’m trying to remember but someone had a whole thing about 2010 hospital closure threats fucking up the Dems in WVa?

A democracy that does not defend itself against fascists by whatever means necessary, including its own temporary suspension, is a democracy that dies.

And, tbh, I am more sympathetic to this, because Zionism is noxiously and somewhat violently hegemonic within the U.S. Jewish community.

The number of Republicans crashing out about getting nakedly gerrymandered is, unironically, a sign that we need to do more of it. You guys are correct! This shit sucks! Welcome to the party, pals! We can all stop doing it any time you like!

DC statehood yesterday

New England has become a mecca for enormous grid storage batteries

My redistricting take is that we have an incredibly narrow path back towards something like a constitutional republic, and it runs through Dems fighting pretty dirty in the short term. I think war is a pretty good metaphor. All options are bad, we can't win and keep our hands completely clean.