A thousand opinion columnists racking their brains about how to reconcile diversity with working class identity politics, and meanwhile this Jeep is just out there driving around

We need to get rid of geographic apportionment and instead create a 100-seat Congress where each member is represented by a single percentile of the wealth distribution. If you have a median net worth, you are now a proud constituent of US-50 along with 1/100th of the population.

Farewell to Habermas, whose essay "Modernity—An Incomplete Project" lies at the very cornerstone of my own thinking. platypus1917.org/wp-content/u...

This came to me in a vision last night and now I’m posting it here for posterity in case a Scarry-Vuitton lawyer drone strike annihilates my underground bunker

Dreaming of a snowy winter? ❄️☃️ Every $15 donation from now until December 31 will make ½ inch of snow “pile up” in our snow tracker. And, instead of having to shovel out afterwards, you’ll receive a gift in the mail as a thank you for supporting our mission! www.leventhalmap.org/donate/decem...

Just finished this and I think it might be my favorite work of fiction by an American author in the past decade www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/steph...

Genuinely wild to me that a company would forcibly inject AI front and center into the user experience, then *utterly hallucinate* a false ability to accomplish a core functionality of the program (in this case, creating a calendar invite).

"If AI can diminish some of the monotony of research, perhaps we can spend more time thinking, writing, playing piano, and taking walks — with other people." @dancohen.org newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

I did a lot of @mbta.com griping on social media ca. 2020-2023. So credit where it’s absolutely due: competent management and the fruits of much-delayed capital investment have made the Orange Line an amazingly functional piece of public infrastructure this year. www.wbur.org/news/2025/11...

Gen Z does not have the drive to run away and join Van Amberg’s Mammoth Circus & Menagerie in order to prep for a future career as a financial buccaneer

In my lifetime since childhood, I have completed a full “watching lots of TV makes you an idiot” => “don’t be elitist and snobby, all forms of media are good and bad in equal measure” => “no, actually, watching lots of TV makes you an idiot” opinion cycle

Reposting this over and over until it stops being relevant

people have been torturing themselves over "regards," "cheers," "very best," and whatever else to sign their emails when "DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT" has just been sitting there

Telling my children this is Danny Go’s full name

Vito thought intensifies bsky.app/profile/en-d...

For #30DayMapChallenge 3: Polygons, I'm re-sharing an old favorite: the 200 roundest waterbodies in Massachusetts. (Because technically a circle isn't a polygon ... except in GIS.) glitch.leventhal.center/birds-eye-ca...

For #30DayMapChallenge 2: Lines, I've visualized the @mbta.com @mbta-cr.bsky.social Commuter Rail lines as they traverse geographies of very different home values outside of Boston. observablehq.com/@garrettdash... cc @masshousing.bsky.social

A pointy-headed, pointless exercise for #30DayMapChallenge 1: Points. All of the official “Point” names in Massachusetts, with ortho imagery from @massgis.bsky.social

me in 2009: I probably can't go into politics, I have a few mildly left-of-center social media posts and a handful of vaguely cringe facebook photos politics in 2025: would the nazi tattoo guy be an effective opponent to the diarrhea video president?

Vito Marcantonio

Ghosts of unwritten books / in the land of undone things / unsung songs [W. E. B. Du Bois, ca. 1900] credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mu...

Turns out the right wing’s critique of wokeness was not “this is bad” but rather “we are the ones who should be doing this, and with the power of the state behind us”

Now *this* is Abundance

My daughter's reverse-side embellishment of this "digital citizens" handout makes me think she was working on commission for a magazine looking to illustrate a "dark side of the internet" longform essay this week

Mike Glass and I argue for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social that we’ve tried the #abundance incentive-based approach to housing crises before. But lack of oversight + incentives produced fraud, profiteering, and inflated rents -- and the Trump family fortune. www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/add...

Age of Asymmetries

I originally posted this in semi-jest, but in retrospect I think it really explains a lot about what went wrong over the past 5 years.

Will be talking every day in my office, located in a Charles F. McKim-designed building, about how the people who wrote this are big dumb babies

Hard to believe, but apparently nobody has yet published an article examining the question of consciousness in LLMs entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Chat”?

21st century urban challenges, 17th century political geography commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/deba...

Most of us are familiar with the visual metaphor from "Leviathan" of a giant body politic made up of a mass of people. But Hobbes also offers another vivid organic reference: political sub-units like towns and corporations are akin to roundworms in poop.

The world as seen from The Hub: equidistant radii around Boston. Thunder Bay, St. John's, and Jacksonville are all about 1,000 miles away. Accra, Ankara, Magadan, and Florianópolis are 5,000 miles away. Newcastle and Surabaya are 10,000 miles away.

On my niche nemesis list: the person who decided this was a useful way to filter a historical collections search by date of publication

"Therefore"

Somebody should tell Trump that it would absolutely own Musk if all of the federal grants that DOGE cut were not only reinstated, but actually had their grant awards doubled.

“Modernity—An Incomplete Project” (following Habermas) has long been one of my slogans for exactly this reason

These two principles alone make up a major part of my ideological position on democracy

Epic Systems, which took in $4.6bn of revenue in 2022, has software that lists every single county in the US in a single dropdown menu.

Whoops on accidentally Venmoing 80% of global annual GDP

The only legitimate royal authority in the US

I originally posted this in semi-jest, but in retrospect I think it really explains a lot about what went wrong over the past 5 years.

GNIS has fallen edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-dom...

all dashes are good

Lord turn me away from the temptation of building an infinite scrolling view of the Domesday Book called “domescrolling”

SAVE THE DATE - InfoPlus brings together visualization designers, researchers, journalists and more. Happening Nov 14-16 in Boston. The theme is ENERGY and that's something we need right now to survive informationplusconference.com/2025/

Maybe this time they’ll finally nail Marlowe and Euripides

Reminder that the 1856 Guano Islands Act, which grants the president the unilateral power to declare uninhabited, unclaimed islands where guano is present as part of US territory, is still technically on the books. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_I...

en_dash on twitter, May 8, 2007–January 24, 2025

Imagine being such an F tier politician that your idiotic, uninformed attempt at commentary ends up turning the county you represent into a synonym for stupid blathering