"What radicalized you?" Realizing people could work as service labor for a community where they couldn't afford to live. A small but profound insight at a young age about the fundamental reality of exploitation in a capitalist society

Incredible!

Today's classroom takeaway, via Willa Cather's My Antonia: ChatGPT can't read literature allusively. After asking it to identify the influence of WWI, the Russian Revolution, and the Homestead Act on the novel's themes, it couldn't provide any passages that weren't direct historical references.

things were better when the computer lived in its own specific room and you only went in there sometimes

a place to start go.bsky.app/2Fq4P6e

It's an honor to be included!

"Who most clearly saw the real crux of the conflict, most definitely knew his own convictions and was readiest at the crisis for decisive action, was a man whose leadership lay not in his office, wealth, or influence, but in the white flame of his utter devotion to an ideal." Du Bois on John Brown

This Juneteenth, I'm reading W.E.B. Du Bois's excellent biography of John Brown. ✊

"In truth always thinkers who do not work have tried to unite workers who do not think. Only working thinkers can unite thinking workers." –W.E.B. Du Bois, "Dark Princess" (1929)

If anyone tells you that the US isn't a class society/class conscious society, advise them to try to get approved for an apartment in a big city. This is brutal

"The cultural production of radical left-wing movements ultimately should struggle not over space on the terrain, but over the authority of the marketplace in people’s cultural and political lives." Jacqui Germain in @journalspectre.bsky.social spectrejournal.com/on-this-land...

Incredibly proud and awed by the talent of my wife, @madisonjblanc.bsky.social, who dropped a killer EP last week. If diaristic alt-pop is your jam, I recommend this open.spotify.com/album/1HqiX5...

Hard to tell if the centrist profiles following me lately are bots or if neoliberal consensus thinking just has a bot-like quality to it

"[A] democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." - FDR (1938)

👎👎

Katy Perry going to space--while Trump is disappearing people and throwing the country into economic collapse--is the "Whitey on the Moon" of our times.

Curtailing people’s ability to read widely and carefully, to locate, assess, and compare different sources for themselves, and to write in their own voice about what they find and what it means, is arguably more effective than censorship. It is also one of the most obvious effects of generative AI.

Whole thread is spot on

On Monday, March 31, 2025 we learned that DOGE is targeting the NEH with the aim of substantially reducing its staff, cutting the agency’s grant programs, and rescinding grants that have already been awarded. Learn what steps you can take here: nhalliance.org/federal-fund...

Thrilled that my favorite article so far is up on @jacobinmag.bsky.social today. Place and region matter when talking to people about socialism, and Missouri’s Anvil magazine spoke to rural/Midwestern workers eloquently and intimately in the 1930s. jacobin.com/2025/02/anvi...

Nancy Fraser, "Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do about It."

Was thrilled to participate in a record-breaking #douglassday! "If there is no struggle, there is no progress"

So excited to participate here in STL! #douglassday

Amidst all the strife in the world, I had the best day of my life last Saturday. I love you @madisonjblanc.bsky.social

If you're doing public humanities in STL/MO/IL, we want to know about your project! call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/01/...

second this! Shaping up to be the most pertinent history for the moment, unfortunately

When I bought this copy of an Oscar Micheaux novel on Amazon, I was put off but intrigued by its hostile design. I wrote about what these mysterious print on demand books mean for the preservation of Black literary and publishing history for Chicago Review: www.chicagoreview.org/profit-margi...

"America is more our country, than it is the whites—we have enriched it with our blood and tears. The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears. The Americans have got so fat on our blood and groans, that they have almost forgotten the God of armies." David Walker, 1830