Voici les sports organisés (et non des activités physiques traditionnelles) qui sont nés à Montréal: hockey sur glace, 3 mars 1875 football canadien, 1869 football américain, avril 1875 (à cause de McGill contre Harvard) crosse, 1856 raquette à neige, 1840

126 years of tennis ending, along with so much else! Rugby! Shockingly to see students so much more disrespected than, evidence seems to suggest, in the last 126 years.

I wrote about the fake account blowup on X this weekend. A genuine post-truth nightmare and proof that these companies have polluted their platforms so thoroughly and traded reality for profit that they've undermined the very idea of what the internet is supposed to be.

"Rules were lax, and the worst that “being in trouble” would get you was a trip to the Assistant Principal’s office or in the most extreme cases, a phone call to your parents." cathoderayzone.com/culture/a-19...

My newest piece for Liberal Currents, and a paean to public health. It needs to be the tip of the spear against fascism and it’s a natural leader in the fight for a better world. Thanks to @gregggonsalves.bsky.social for talking to me as I worked on this.

Fabulous.

Nov. 23, 1925: Herbert Hoover is being called the “economic president of the United States” because of the power he wields over business affairs. The commerce secretary is in charge of radio regulation and has been called upon to tackle new shipping, trade and coal problems. 1/2

If you’re a journalist who’s still on Twitter, from now on in your writing you have to replace “the American people want” with “troll bots in Eastern Europe demand” Being there makes your judgment suspect. I don’t care how savvy you think you are, you’re marinating in a disinformation campaign.

Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait. My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.

I was gutted to learn, a few months ago, that a young friend had been diagnosed with gioblastoma. Six months later, after aggressive treatment, amazing to learn that the tumour is gone for good. Shoutout to the dedicated professionals at the Montreal Neurological Institute. bsky.app/profile/did:...

This is no longer paywalled. cc @mattpolprof.bsky.social dissentmagazine.org/article/coal...

Grizzly attack on 11 kids & teachers in BC. “one teacher jumped in front of the bear to allow the children to get away…he jabbed the bear’s eyes with his fingers and that’s how he was able to… how the bear just left him.” “That teacher was later airlifted from the scene.” Teachers are heroes.

This is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future. In the meantime, it benefits unnamed Russian and American investors, at the expense of everyone else. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

This is on the X account of the UK Home Office. A Labour government. Where is this country going? I would like to remind the British government that among the taxpayers in the UK there are millions of non-British people. #notonationalism #migrantsarenotcriminals

5/6 As households see their purchasing power increase, they spend more on services, which replaces the jobs lost to productivity-enhancing technologies. The problem China has today, as the US had in the 1930s, is that increasing wages is...

Terrifying, maddening and utterly heart-breaking. Truly incredible journalism to expose and document this.

That was fast. A right-wing mayor elected last month, first cycle paths removed in favour of cat parking already. Boom. Une piste cyclable éliminée pour tout l’hiver à Outremont www.ledevoir.com/actualites/t...

Bought and sold

Canada and the real allies of democracy must do more to support Ukraine.

I am very pleased and grateful to share this announcement of our recent award from the @wellcometrust.bsky.social for a project on history of smallpox and measles #histmed #histsci news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-h... The project will be based @exeter.ac.uk @cceh-u24.bsky.social led by ... 1/2

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins on lessons from the twentieth century for the twenty-first. wesleyanargus.com/2025/11/21/l...

"In Anne of Green Gables, I found the kindred spirits and queer prophets I needed".

“Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist who blasted Summers and others for sexism in a widely shared and highly critical 2020 blog post, sounded vindicated. “Okay, so maybe I wasn’t too mean to him…” she said on social media after the emails were made public last week.” www.wsj.com/us-news/larr...

LLMs give people with delusional belief systems a way to organise those beliefs. The model fills in gaps, supplies connective tissue, and wraps the madness in formal language. It doesn't make the claims more credible to us, it just tidies them up.

I am by no means a prominent public intellectual, but my inbox is increasingly filled with messages from people who have been convinced by sycophantic chatbots that they have discovered revolutionary theories that entirely upend our scientific understanding of the universe.

I asked grok who was the better role model for humanity, Jesus Christ or Elon Musk. GUESS WHAT.

Again -- DHS doing a well-worn template. Cf. this 1938 postage stamp from the German Reich with its simple, straightforward message ("The housing shortage is the Jews' fault")

Let's see.... 1. It's noticed that Trump's voice is markedly raspy. 2. Trump begins random calls out for executions. Yes, it would seem that the U.S. has reached the Steiner Rant stage..... www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjPe...

absolutely right!

Andrew's book on the politics of smallpox in the American Revolution is such a great book and his argument below about people articulating inoculation as a *right* of the people is so important! @bachynski.bsky.social

'For academics it is time for a reckoning, as they need to find a way to deal with “fake research” by illiberal mercenaries. Academic ideals mandate engaging with challenging ideas, but what if these ideas are funded by an authoritarian state?'

Deze prachtige draad maakt echt nieuwgierig!

Whenever you hear anyone spouting racism, and spreading misinformation: this what they are desperately trying to deflect attention from. The billionaires are the real problem.

Can’t believe the whole country has to suffer through the return of Dickensian childhood diseases because the worst, most ignorant attention-demanders decided other people’s expertise makes them feel bad

Thrilled to see our latest paper published in @iojournal.bsky.social! 🥳 "Dollar Diminished: The Unmaking of US Financial Hegemony Under Trump" co-authored with Tobias Pforr (@eui-eu.bsky.social) and @fabianpape.bsky.social 🙂 doi.org/10.1017/S002...

Ok BlueSky: what are your favorite history books in terms of sheer page-turning, narrative propulsion? Thinking along the line of Killers of the Flower Moon, etc. Nonfiction chronicles that read like novels or movies.

My book has a webpage! In case you want to pre-order a copy (or, more probably, request that your library does so). global.oup.com/academic/pro...

“Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at.” Northrup Frye (APS 1976) Check back weekly for APS Members' words of wisdom! #usefulknowledge #wordsofwisdom #learning

#ArtHistory 🗃️ 🐡 While Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was creating paintings for a French brothel, he learned that women who support themselves by catering to the sexual wants of men often seek genuine affection from one another. "The Two Friends" (1895) is one of his most beautiful paintings.

My stupid galaxy brain continues to be "a foundational problems with the modern American left is that its luminaries are largely entertainers & academics, two groups who not only don't have to pass policy but actually benefit from continued leftist marginal status by retaining their cool cred."

The @washingtonpost op-ed page on Friday, October 5, 2018

pretty much beyond question that Larry Summers led the charge against Claudine Gay because he is personally a vitriolic misogynist and racist www.thecrimson.com/article/2024...

You can oversee the bloody dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist with a bone saw, and the president of the United States will smile, shake your hand and threaten to pull the license of a news outlet whose reporter asks you a question about it. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/1...

I worked in a very white pub in Brixton in late 1990s. Poor, working-class people who rebelled in being pro-pricey, anti-Black. The new owners didn’t want the old regulars. They hired a Black waitress. She was a very nice person and had them eating out of her hand within a couple of weeks.

Coverage of the refugee proposals demonstrates why we have such a broken political system. Endless focus on left-wing anger and right-wing support. Basically nothing on whether the reforms will work. They will not, which is why we'll still be here having the same debate in three years.

"academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it... The dominant four collectively generated... $12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024."

New book review: Dreshaj on Bessner, Daniel; Brenes, Michael, eds.: _Rethinking U.S. World Power: Domestic Histories of U.S. Foreign Relations_. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. Published by H-War. Read here: networks.h-net.org/node/20132808

Rembrandt’s dramatically-lit group portrait of a slightly raggle-taggle civil militia in noble & dynamic poses ~ The Night Watch (1642) ~ also contains a tiny self-portrait of him, showing just a hint of his bulbous nose, his beret, & one gleaming eye looking out from the shadows

1/2 In my forthcoming book: The Global Casino: How Wall St Gambles with People and the Planet, I write about the risk to pensions.. raised today by the Financial Times: "Would you bet your retirement on a data centre? It’s probably not a question many pension savers have asked,