The moment that Amazon MGM paid $40M for the Melania movie was the moment its performance on opening week ceased to matter.

Lately, every time I read Benjamin's Theses and his language of the weak messianic obligation of the present to redeem the suffering in the past, I think of Harry Dean Stanton in Red Dawn. (The first PG-13 movie, which I saw at age 12 and thought I got away with something). AVENGE ME!

Oh, damn. RIP Catherine O'Hara.

What are the chances someone I. The White House bought Embraer stock right before this post went out?

Doing my part in my classes tomorrow.

For most all of my life, I never would have believed that it would be the GOP that chose to intentionally destroy American global hegemony. It is still almost unbelievable that they would do it for zero compelling reasons. Just an act of national self-immolation.

Yes! Let's also revive the days when public service was so valued that public buildings made a statement of the pride a locality took in it. That wouldn't mean reviving classical architecture, as much as re-infusing beauty in our public spaces.

Delete your account and fire your comms team, man. This is pathetic, not disciplined.

And then shut off their airspace to US airlines.

Nobel and FIFA both need to shutdown until we can all figure out what's going on with the peace awards.

Starting my classes this semester with a day dedicated to being a luddite curmudgeon.

Kant on why charity is not welfare: "Having the resources to practice such beneficence as depends upon the goods of fortune is... the result of human beings being favored through the injustice of government, which introduces an inequality of wealth that makes others need their beneficence."

new york city is Real America. los angeles is Real America. chicago is Real America. minneapolis is Real America. seattle, portland, detroit etc etc. sick of this framing that it's otherwise. shut the fuck up

really wish the “opposition” party had not spent years upon years trying to outdo the GOP in lavishing money arms and deference on state security forces

Ingmar Bergman on moviemaking: "Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours there are maybe ten or twelve minutes, if you're lucky, of real creation." Could be a description of historical work, except it yields one footnote instead of 3min of film.

1/10 🧵 The U.S. just captured a sitting head of state in a military operation—and Trump says the U.S. will "run" Venezuela “for now.” Whatever you think of Maduro, this is the most consequential unilateral move in the hemisphere since Panama (1989).

The thing is, even when the LLM does a very good job of summarizing an article, we're still stuck in the 'give a person a fish' vs 'teach a person to fish' conundrum. Students and future historians will be bad at history by trying to skip the skill development phase (not what's being suggested here)

We lost some of this with the decline of browsing the stacks. Go to the library to find one book, accidentally find important new directions in its nearby neighbors!

Yes, this is exactly what old guy with power in decline looks like.

I'll believe Jacob Savage is a real writer when he can write something new and different.

😳

I struggled for years with plantar fasciitis. Did everything expensive and cheap short of surgery- OTC inserts, custom inserts, different shoes, shockwave therapy, massage, PT, fascia scraping, cortisone injections, stretching, etc. The thing that finally worked... barefoot kettlebell workouts.

Learned from a student's paper today, that I apparently published a book with Duke in 2020 on colonial Mexico. 😂 I guess I can finally go up for Full Professor.

The LLM and the AI boom is an expression of capital's desire to free itself from its dependence on labor, from the impossibility of fully subsuming the reproduction of labor power.

It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.

I don’t use bookmarks or fold down pages. But I do write and highlight all over the books I read. Never seems to be hard to find where I left off.

The four corners ain't playing with turbulence at 34,000 ft tonight!

Most of the YouTube review of my year was completely off, neglected all the subscriptions I watch, and clearly slop. But I'll give it this... I do have perfect travel bags (as a transcontinental commuter) and I do have films to recommend for most occasions.

However the rest of the film aged, Harry Connick Jr's soundtrack to When Harry Met Sally is still fantastic.

The new modern workplace: people using AI to "write" email responses to AI summaries of emails their colleagues "wrote" with AI.

"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."

As an air-road warrior, commuting between California and Tennessee weekly, the selfish part of me wishes we had the reverse— free underseat bag, charge of overhead bin space, free checked bags.

The happiness whenever a friend decides to read Stoner.

On my first flight today, my seatmate spent half the flight writing an email with chatGPT. Prompt, read the result, re-write the prompt, read the result, re-write the prompt, and on and on. Like, dude, just write the email. High level HR manager or some such.

It's interesting to me that del Toro essentially removed the class panic from Frankenstein and replaced it with a thoroughly oedipal interpretation.

The one thing the new Frankenstein is really missing is a catchy rendition of Putting on the Ritz.

I would send separate emails for every single point in every lecture in any way tangentially related to the topics, and when a point doesn’t get cleared, put CENSORED on the slide and show all of them to class.

So much of this is solved by returning to a 90% top marginal tax rate on all types of income. Just remove the wealth that breeds immunity and buys protection.

Yes, I did exit a plane at 9:15 at gate B14 in Charlotte and sit down on a plane at 9:21p at gate E15, that pushed back 9min later. Maybe a new personal record run.

American Airlines is such an operational disaster. When the FAA/shutdown causes cancelations, you can be assured that AA will add its own delays on top of it. Flight canceled this morning for the shutdown, and delayed now because of AA.

So, so many of our social/political problems could be mitigated if not outright fixed by legitimate progressive taxation on corporate revenues, income, and capital gains.

If you're curious about the impact of staffing shortages on ground delays, the FAA maintains a very useful website on the current state of the national airspace. You'll see numerous airports where departure and arrival delays are described as "other", almost always staffing. nasstatus.faa.gov

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

As much as anything, Andrews' answer betrays enormous ignorance about the discipline of history. But that's fine, I guess, when everything exists as caricature for rhetorical ends. A little truth seeking about historical method and practice might be in order.

What's that, am I even more anxious now that American Airline's operational disasters are to be compounded by FAA-mandated flight cancellations at the airports I fly through and to weekly? Yes, yes I am. Bi-coastal commuting has its problems.

Horror is my favorite film genre to think through the trauma of subjectivation, of becoming the psychoanalytic subject. It engages viscerally the confusions of historical time, of the rift torn asunder by the compulsion of signification, of the sociality and extimacy of the unconscious, etc.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness

So OpenAI is going to make a social network… or a pornbot … or a browser…. Seems like a really focused company with a good sense of its place in the market and not a meme-like bubble stock for sure.

This chapter in The Red Years and Nagasaki’s Phenomenology of Politics serve as a good reminder of the importance of collective action in the formation of new political possibilities. The movement is made in the streets.

Finally, East Tennessee has hit the part of the year with my favorite temperature band -- mid 40s at night, and mid 60s in the day. I'm probably not exaggerating when I say part of the reason I feel in love with and became a historian of Quito is that same set of temperatures.