*in* his face!

"He looked like a man cut away from the stake"

Excited about the improvements to this prototype, Rhetoric and Revolution, about the French assembly drafting the revolutionary constitution of 1791. Going to be much more streamlined good for discussion.

Pleased to get to teach Modern France & Empire this coming semester. Here is a list of readings/weeks, lots of which will need to be cut. Also I want a week about the 80s-today. Maybe from Françoise Gaspard's *Small City*? Would love to hear about new scholarship I should teach. 🗃️

Pitch me your ideas—scholarly and otherwise—for a series on Venezuela. I’ve already seen a lot of good discussion on here. Let’s move some of it to a more expanded forum. DM or email with questions.

On Darwinism before Darwin: Hayek on Mandeville and Machiavelli (with some Rawls, Halévy and Spinoza thrown in). open.substack.com/pub/digressi... with shout outs to @neuroyogacara.bsky.social @walterveit.bsky.social

"we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic"

you hear her voice everywhere

Kathe Kollwitz, "The Mothers," 1921-22

Reminded again of this bit from Raymond Williams's Modern Tragedy: 'violence and disorder are institutions as well as acts. When a revolutionary change is lived through, we can usually see this quite clearly. The old institutions, now dead, take on their real quality as systematic violence and

Great are the myths .... I too delight in them,

Grateful for this profound existential reflection by Nomi Lazar on mass death in Mary Shelley’s great plague novel for a symposium on my book ‘The First Last Man’! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"the subtilty of words, arguments, notions, yea of the senses themselves, is but rude and gross in comparison of the subtilty of things"

Here is the table Durkheim gives of all the forms of society, according to Montesquieu. The footnote says that, really, this should also include distinct peoples united in some sort of federation.

Delighted by this histories of reading in library book. This is a 1965 edition of a translation (by Ralph Manheim) into English of Durkheim's *Latin* thesis on Montesquieu. It has annotations in at least two languages.

"Pour une conscience moderne et avertie, ce peut être un devoir que de se spécialiser. Etre le plus homme, aujourd'hui, c'est consentir à être un organe."

blogged again, meant to post this yesterday but forgot. buttondown.com/nateholdren/...

"Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease."

“A [digital video] is soon finished, costs so little and can go so far! Why be surprised that all human thought should flow down that slope? That does not mean that [literature] will not produce here and there a fine monument, an isolated masterpiece.”

"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians."

"You cannot hide the soul"

pri'mo•gen'i•ture

Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs

"Our president's crazy Did you hear what he said? Business and pleasure Lie right to your face"

I have to plow through all 918 pages of EP Thompson's book on William Morris in about two days and I keep finding passages that seem to be about Victorian England but are really about 2025 America.

53 DAYS INTO THE LONGEST NATIONAL ULP STRIKE IN STARBUCKS' HISTORY! 🔥 Remind your friends and family: Don't buy Starbucks for the duration of our strike! bsky.app/profile/sbwo...

hobsbawm on how the moral clarity and passion of marxists resulted in respect from liberals in the lead up to WWII

Critical support to the lady smoking a cigarette behind a car in the parking lot outside the indoor trampoline place.

"This is the world we've created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed."

how your email finds me

Okay, here's my final screening list (I think!). Thanks for all the people who made suggestions on my original post. 1. Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney & Ub Iwerks, 1928) 2. The Sea Horse (Jean Painlevé, 1933) 3. Sigwan (Alanis Obomsawin, 2005) 4. Old Yeller (Robert Stevenson, 1957)

If you want the real deep dive on this long history, earlier today @kirstenweld.bsky.social recommended Brian Loveman's "No Higher Law." As she said, it's comprehensive and judicious, but hardly short uncpress.org/978080787265...

"But somehow I grew merry again"

Mill from Subjection of Women

Finally got to the new Kansas Historical Society Museum. Some good things there. Including these classics, a sword owned by John Brown and one of the pikes he had made and stockpiled for Harper's Ferry.

Lucy Dacus performs "Bread and Roses" - the Labor Anthem - at the Inauguration of Zohran Mamdani.

Mass held in St. Louis cathedral for the 1903 centenary of the Louisiana 'transfer' www.loc.gov/pictures/res...

Anybody up for a bicentennial read-along of Mary Shelley’s THE LAST MAN?

Up with your anchor! shake out your sails! .... steer straight toward Boston bay.

Do people have strong feelings about kugel? What's an interesting (good) thing to put in a kugel?

I always tell students if you ask a good question the article will write itself

!!!

"Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world" my god what a line.

Hair goals www.kansasmemory.gov/item/199

(Review of a) relevant book for day one of a democratic socialist in office in NYC

The snake!