Tom Waits jukebox musical when?

The lesson tech finance learned from 2008 was you never have to face the crash so long as you can keep moving the money from rapidly deflating assets into rapidly inflating assets. Like Wile E. Coyote, you’ll be fine so long as you never look down.

This is true and also gets at the core of the conservative project though: any approach that (factually) portrays conservative belief as human, fallible, contingent, subject to criticism is “left-leaning” and must be banned.

White Gen Xers entering the workforce were told every day of the 1980s and 1990s we were going to be worse off than our parents and that it was because of unions and civil rights. And a lot of us believed it in the face of all evidence.

They are also fundamental to the research process itself. It’s like telling a cellular biologist they can’t use their centrifuge because it looks bad to the general public.

St. Louis leadership: always desperate to be the last people to do the wrong thing.

It irritates me to no end when I review fellowships how the apps from the same schools are consistently (but not universally!) stronger, at least according to the rubrics I’m given.

My most committed take is Toyota needs to re-release all their 80s trucks and vans (complete with the burnt rainbow styling) as EVs.

We’ve just been asked to close down a concentration because it only enrolled about 19 students.

History’s most pessimistic insight is that humans are capable of just about anything. This is balanced by its most optimistic insight that humans are capable of just about anything.

Spamming the “sad” button in the Newark Airport bathroom until this whole rotten society fixes itself.

What I love about history conferences is you’ll get this room full of incredibly educated people who possess enormous amounts of very specific and specialized knowledge and then they will ask each other questions like “What is the ocean, really?”

History’s most pessimistic insight is that humans are capable of just about anything. This is balanced by its most optimistic insight that humans are capable of just about anything.

The humanities have gotta be at least a little more useful than this.

Hot take but I’ve never been to a city that I didn’t love because cities, as a category, are awesome.

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Reminds me of the time in college when some friends and I crashed a Sysco trade show being held on campus. The only one who enjoyed the food was the one friend old enough to take advantage of the free Natty Light on tap for attendees and that was how we all learned about marketing.

At some point we really need to reckon with how incredibly fucking stupid our political press is.

Anyone inclined to believe that STEM faculty are the true geniuses on campus should spend one (1) hour with them in a “How to Use Acrobat” session.

Ope, finally located the border of the Midwest.

Work meetings should not be three hours long.

No longer taking points off for misspelled words because at least they are markers of authentic authorship.

Quietly grateful to Jimmie Johnson for being so successful yet so utterly boring and unmemorable that everyone had to give up on this project.

Is it just me or does No Kings feel more Second Great Awakening than First Continental Congress?

Guess the Powerpoint’s gone out. Look for this idea in your local inbox in the next 9-12 months.

Oh, you think it’s my responsibility to wash the dishes? Sorry, guess I just don’t subscribe to your Great Man Theory of History.

Our president is a needy sad sack desperate for big boy paychecks. Obviously letting him loose in a region of amoral petro-billionaires would result in the world’s most devastating game of pinball as they bounced him and the US military from pet grievance to pet grievance.

I mean I’m literally a historian of Revolutionary American and I am not doing shit this year.

It’s been the mission of the court since Scalia to make white men’s imaginations admissible as evidence.

Our system of government is just one giant table of retirees at a local Panera.

Need blue state voters to take their ol’ checklist down to the local university and see how many of the programs behind these statements got cut in the last six years.

Universities have been turning discretionary spending over to people with mostly Events backgrounds to enhance “student experience” and now that choice has inevitably come for the curriculum.

And, for balance, the next 6 hours in St. Louis:

Appropriate that this little memory turned up on time for today’s discourse.

10 years ago today, the RRS Boaty McBoatface sailed into all our lives.

“The minors being eliminated include women’s and gender studies, LGBTQ studies, Mexican American studies, Africana studies, Asian studies as well as dance, geology and special education.” Exactly how many international students were enrolling in these programs, if you don’t mind my asking?

Cori Bush - Wesley Bell 2

For all the talk about the Chicago machine, the true center of power in this state is the western Chicago suburbs, a placeless space with no clear identity and no clear politics.

@chip.bsky.social Looks like they’re gonna need a new wapo dot com.

White House of the Confederacy. (At least they’d stopped doing the Philip Morris tours by the time I was in elementary school)

Seriously go back and watch the Theranos documentary from 2019. It is *wild* how many of these elite jackasses who still want us to take them seriously fell hook, line, and sinker for the magic blood machine.

Crap historiography is the root of all fascism.

Nothing local media hates more than a Black woman with discretionary budgeting authority.

Why does the Pilgrim dude look like Lenin?

St. Louis is neither the hottest nor the coldest place but it for sure has the most brutal middles I’ve ever experienced.

Welp, there goes the summer travel budget. Thanks Trump.

Bro, if I could generate water and (enough) electricity with my brain I WOULD NOT PAY FOR THOSE!!

These people are going to bring this exact same ineptitude for long-range planning and strategy to the 2026 midterms that they brought to the Iran War. Don’t know if that’s comforting or terrifying but we should plan for it anyway.

What does time look like in the historian’s office?