this is literally never not accurate

www.theresaganz.com The thesis of my book Grand Illusion is that excesses of gold in architecture are a direct indication of despotism. As the White House festoons itself with golden doodads and proposes a gilded new ballroom, I think the thesis holds. Link in bio. 💛⚜️💛

This is adjacent to the fact that, as a history teacher, I must gird my loins for parent conferences where I have to chat about the submarines of WWII with my students' dads...

Read about a guy who busted up a famous scam, made pioneering geographic discoveries, became a leading nature writer, and led a secret life as a black man. 🗃️ worldhistory.substack.com/p/the-making...

oh so these people do pay attention to who politicians follow on social media, they just don’t care that the vice president follows a bunch of actual neo-nazis

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

It has been my duty as a historian to record how smelly Che Guevara was. Honestly one of the stinkiest dudes in history. He was immensely proud of this & once showed off a pair of underpants he’d been wearing for two months. They were so filthy, he won a bet that they could stand up by themselves.

Grateful to spend two days on the Klamath watching chinook, liberated by dam removal, return to streams from which they’d been precluded since the Titanic sank. Fish are everywhere, in numbers that stagger the mind & locations that biologists figured would take years to repopulate. Too beautiful.

"Speaker Johnson, it looks as though the president is currently stabbing you with a knife. Do you have any comment?" "Well, look, this is the first I'm hearing about it. As you know, I've been really busy not doing my job, so I just don't know enough about this alleged stabbing to make a comment."

Mike Johnson: ‘My Christian Faith Is More About Not Jacking Off Than Feeding The Poor’

O'DONNELL: Why did you pardon Changpeng Zhao? TRUMP: Are you ready? I don't know who he is O'DONNELL: His crypto exchange Binance helped facilitate a $2b purchase of World Liberty Financial's stablecoin. And they you pardoned him. TRUMP: Here's the thing -- I know nothing about it

Watched "House of Dynamite" and what struck me was how infrequently the Secretary of Defense (played by Jared Harris) failed to function because of his unwillingness to shove large tires around

Hate to break it but if you think mitigation of climate change is doomed inevitably to eternal failure due to social, economic and political limits.. ..I have some v v bad news about the social, economic and political requirements for CDR to work at scale, or for geoengineering to work at scale

Measured by traditional standards, Alfonso X of Spain was kind of a crappy king. He wasn’t all that good at wars, and he squabbled with his son. But one senses that he didn’t care all that much about traditional kingly stuff like wars and politics. 🗃️🧵

Much like Alcibiades. (This account from Plutarch's Lives.)

We all need to channel this Chicago man’s utter contempt

Yum, goblin style

We used to live in a society

What happens when an insufferable jerk with an improbable name makes up a fake country to scam people out of their money? Nothing good, as it turns out. 🗃️https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/gregor-macgregors-paper-kingdom

COATES: “Trump’s saying, ‘Y’all, I’m just gonna kill people.’ And the Greatest Deliberative Body has nothing to say about it. Y’all are punk, y’all are cowards.”

The technology wasn’t great, and creating one was time-consuming and expensive. But the archaeological record shows that neither of these things stopped ancient people from trying to see themselves in the mirror. 🧵🗃️

"normies do not care about this thing and so it is no use raising a stink" is imho just an excuse for not doing politics, which is the job of making normies care about something

A fun byproduct of unitary executive theory—if the president controls everyone under him, he can demand they transfer hundreds of millions in tax dollars into his bank account

Three bad arguments for AI in K-12 in 2 sentences. For "teachers to stay relevant and help students use the technology wisely, teachers unions have forged an unlikely partnership with the world’s largest technology companies. The[y]...share a common goal: training the future workforce of America."

Guys, I don’t mean to sound like this but there is a felon down the street making AI videos of himself as a king shitting on Americans and the American flag and he is literally tearing down the White House as we speak

people playing music/videos on their phone speakers in public is more than just mildly annoying and is instead a leading indicator of the decline of community and empath

Here it is, my 246th #ScholarSunday thread of great public scholarly writing & work, podcast episodes, new & forthcoming books from the last week. Add more in comments, share as widely as possible, & enjoy, all! 🗃️ blackwhiteandread.com/scholarsunda...

Before they could see the planets as anything other than little dots of light in the night sky, how did people imagine them? More often than not, medieval Europeans turned the planets into neat little guys. 🧵🗃️

What I saw at No Kings: A huge crowd American flags Funny signs Goofy costumes Parents and kids Lots of dogs Old friends running into each other Very different types of people being kind to one another

Suffering from scurvy is really, really unpleasant. Even though people stumbled on a cure several times, it continued to kill countless sailors well into the 1800s. Why? 🗃️🧵 worldhistory.substack.com/p/a-preventa...

Young Republicans group chat.

To everyone who says, "But this won't matter": *MAKE IT MATTER.* You have that power! This is not inside baseball and your friends and neighbors will likely be appalled. And if they're *not* appalled, don't be cynical yourself. Take the lead, give the cue.

It’s nice to get a pleasant welcome when you visit someplace new. But when medieval royals visited a city for the first time, they got the deluxe treatment. 🗃️🧵

Especially for @joshgabbatiss.bsky.social ❤️🐸❤️

I understand that they gave somebody 150 million to be the new boss of CBS. I just want to say, if these people are ever looking to do more novel things with their money, for 150 million dollars I will write an album every day for a year. I'll do it, too. try me

The thoughts of an economic depression are depressing

Video taken one hour ago outside the Portland ICE facility of the violent insurrectionists in question

Nobody cares and nothing will happen but this is classically, paradigmatically fascist language. Comparing opponents to vermin and pests is straight out of the textbook.

In the late 1100s, European Christians received a message from an impossibly powerful king in a faraway land. This king ruled over a kingdom that encompassed the Garden of Eden, Cyclopes, and salamanders that lived in fire. 🗃️🧵

I get (irrationally) annoyed around Halloween when there are so many guillotine decorations, a form of execution created specifically to try to be the most humane and pain free version of capital punishment (which I’m inalterably against)

What the fuck do you mean I got a longer prison sentence than Diddy

The entire Republican negotiating stance here is "give us money to run over your dog or we're going to run over your dog"

Brb, just planning a course based on this paragraph. Part 1: “They want to like chop my head off, right?”: The ‘Other’ in the American Imagination Part 2: “They got a fucking Chili’s over here!”: Capitalism & Civilisation in American Culture We’ll be reading a lot of Edward Said

the president of the united states wants to use the american military to kill american citizens on american soil. that's the whole story!

William Walker, a doctor from Tennessee, was sort of a DIY imperialist in the mid-19th century. He carried out several cockamamie plans to make himself the ruler of a Central American nation and, improbably, succeeded in conquering Nicaragua for a short time. 🗃️ 1/2

The most fascinating thing about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in 1937 is that Donald Trump and his Republican Party are doing everything possible to avoid the full and unabridged release of the Epstein files in 2025 and to make you think about anyfuckingthing else.

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/e...