⚓️🚢

Coding interviews of technologists who were purged from government under DOGE, and the sense of trauma is really palpable. Compared to the private sector orgs like Amazon, the jobs meant more and the way they were treated was way worse. It "felt like our leadership hated us just for existing."

Taylor’s romp is not merely the result of high D turnout in Madison & Milwaukee. Liberals gained the most in red, rural counties.

If you are a colonial Latin Americanist and don’t know what to do with your digital docs from old projects, please consider donating them to the Iberian Colonial Repository, where MA or PhD student can give these docs a second life in their own research projects! DM me for questions.

I know it's risky to read much into state-level elections, but the difference in these two maps is pretty striking. The left shows county-level votes for Trump and Harris in 2024 in Wisconsin. The right shows the results of yesterday's Supreme Court race, where the Democrat won in a landslide.

Also of note, Iowa paid Chris Rufo—perhaps the leading propagandist for the current assault on higher ed, an unqualified hack and admitted fabulist—$34,000 to speak. It's embarrassing that any higher ed institution would invite him, especially when they are cutting departmental budgets.

What a result: A Democratic-backed candidate has won the mayoral election in Waukesha, the biggest city in the notoriously conservative Waukesha County. Alicia Halvensleben will be the next mayor. She defeated a GOP state lawmaker.

@decisiondeskhq.bsky.social just called the Waukesha mayoral race for Dem Alicia Halvensleben. Apocalyptic for the WI GOP.

Chris Taylor might just win Jefferson County outright. Current numbers show a 20-point swing from the 2024 presidential race and a 10-point swing from last year's state Supreme Court race. No liberal candidate has carried that county in a SCOWIS race in the 21st Century. Wow.

At least some of the Regents' dysfunction is downstream of the Wisconsin state senate effectively holding the Evers-era board hostage www.jsonline.com/story/news/e...

This guy bookshop.org/p/books/brea...

Whether it's for majority control or not, an election for a 10-year term on the state's highest court is enormously consequential: www.therecombobulationarea.news/p/time-to-vo...

Here, it's economical and interesting! It's actually exciting and historical and there are (no) cats!

Look at these moon globes on the right… 🌝🌒🌕

NEW: Time to vote, Wisconsin. Let's recombobulate: www.therecombobulationarea.news/p/time-to-vo...

A reminder that today's Wisconsin SCOWIS election, as with the one in 2024, will be <at least> as important as a bellwether of November and 2028 than the 2025 NYC mayoral election. But it will surely get less than a tenth of the coverage in the National Conversation™️ bsky.app/profile/mcop...

One good thing, my Cultural Sociology of Milwaukee class is currently visiting the amazing American Geographical Society Library.

REMINDER: Wisconsin has same-day voter registration. So, if you haven’t registered or recently moved or anything like that, you can register at your polling place (with ID and proof of residence) TODAY. Every state should do this. It’s great that Wisconsin does this. Go vote.

(202) 224-3121 is the capitol switchboard for connecting to any senate or house office; even if you've never called; even though the lot of them are useless. no abominable war crimes, no war, no.

At the world’s most beautiful polling place. #Wisconsin! Go vote! Support @christaylorwi.bsky.social !!

Folks, we are hosting a LIVE PODCAST next week at Anodyne Coffee in Walker's Point as we celebrate our favorite holiday of the year, MILWAUKEE DAY! We'll have giveaways for Brewers tickets, Milwaukee Film passes, and more. And it's FREE! BE THERE! www.therecombobulationarea.news/p/event-anno...

Can't believe Artemis hasn't posted a photo of me yet.

Historian here join us for this great event tomorrow evening on zoom hosted by the Library of America on voices from the Jim Crow era. www.eventbrite.com/e/voices-fro...

The DOGE team was acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time,” former SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek said. (Published Sept. 2025)

Someone with the handle @velocity69.bsky.social is sharing a video with the caption: "The highest quality video of the moon was just released… so beautiful * Artemis II" It's gone viral, but it's not from Artemis II. If you've shared it, you might want to un-share.

Almost there

Whenever I see someone bemoaning a show/event they missed because they "didn't hear anything about it," 9 times out of 10 it was in that week's Record Recommended. Check it out!

The NASA live stream is terrific but low on visuals for the mo (nearly 600k ppl watching and the audio is fab). So great to see this brief image of an iphone picture of the moon taken by one of the astronauts.

Whew it really did come back to life! 🥖🍞

Thank you my friend 🙏🏾 bsky.app/profile/audr...

www.silmanjamespress.com/shop/costume... I have a sequel but it's still in the works, unfortunately!

Btw my press funded a small study into best-practices for alt text for illustrations, especially of illustrations of art. The resulting guide is short and clear and available free to download.

Hey historians 🗃️ : what's your favorite microhistory, and why?

🍺👻📚

My book cover is now officially on the @uchicagopress.bsky.social website, coming out on October 20! Planning some cool events involving beer, fiddlers, and lantern light. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

🐝🚨

Let high school Honors teachers teach what they know and love rather than strapping advanced high school courses to an outside company that harvests $1 billion a year in testing fees to grade students with AI

Here's the link to the free pdf of my new book The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet. Access is so important and I'm grateful that the press is platforming it as one file that is easy to download. www.upress.umn.edu/978081669906...

SOLICITING BOOKSKY RECS I'm working on an article for my condo's quarterly magazine about beach reads and I want to give folks something besides just like, whatever books coming out right now they will be seeing in magazine listicles. would love to open the floodgates for the following suggestions:

One good thing…I abandoned my homemade sourdough starter in the back of the fridge for four or five months while I finished my book, and it bounced right back after feeding yesterday. Thank you ambient Milwaukee yeasts. 🫧🍞

Jared makes a great point here about the NSF SBE budget request 👇🏼

Arson: “At an internal all-hands meeting on Friday, NSF leaders announced that they would dissolve the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate based on the budget request, according to two NSF staff members who shared information anonymously in order to speak freely”

Wisconsin, 160 years ago today “On this date African-Americans voted for the first time in Wisconsin, after Ezekiel Gillespie successfully sued for the right to vote, an important point in  the mid-19th century struggle of Milwaukee Black citizens for suffrage.” — Wisconsin Historical Society

"The Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 Budget proposes to eliminate the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and provides $38 million to conduct an orderly shutdown of the Agency." bit.ly/41M4pvK

A super mild European-style classic heirloom bean, known for its pairing with lamb but excellent as a pot bean and with roasted tomatoes. www.ranchogordo.com/products/fla...

U of Minnesota has named a new School of Nursing scholarship after Alex Pretti.

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”