This is very inspiring. labornotes.org/2026/01/forc...

This Day in Labor History: February 17, 2000. The AFL-CIO officially changed its stance on immigration. No longer would the labor movement in this nation officially oppose immigration. Instead, it moved to become one of the immigrant rights movement’s major allies in this nation!!!!

This Day in Labor History: February 15, 1988. Environmentalists stormed the gate of International Paper in Jay, Maine as part of a solidarity action with workers on strike, attempting to shut it down. Let's talk this key moment of labor-green alliances!

This Day in Labor History: February 13, 1837. The Equal Rights Party, better known as the Loco Focos although that was a pejorative from the city’s Whigs, held a rally in City Hall Park in New York City to protest the high cost of living. That led to the "Flour Riot" over food costs. Let's chat!

KE = ½ mv². Small cars, low speed, lives saved. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

There was a very efficient market for passenger pigeons in American and the USA. They were killed by the millions to and used as animal food or fertilizer. The price didn’t increase as the animals became rare and eventually extinct. This picture is from an Eric Sloane book

Here is what Gemini said to me today when I asked it an unrelated question about AI's lack of fear of punishment

If you learned anything from taking my history classes you learned that this was gonna happen. hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

This Day in Labor History: February 10, 1966. The Senate failed to gain cloture on an attempt to appeal Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, a sign of the limited power of labor unions in American politics, even at the height of their membership and influence in the United States!!!!

This Day in Labor History: February 7, 1894. Gold miners near Cripple Creek, Colorado walked off the job, leading to one of the biggest victories for organized labor in the Gilded Age after the state of Colorado intervened on the side of the workers. The key to victory: the power of the state!

BREAKING: the AAUP and @democracydefendersfund.org filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump admin's “Gold Card” visa program, which unlawfully sells US residency to wealthy individuals while pushing aside scientists, researchers, engineers, and other outstanding professionals. Read more below👇

I know it’s a physical impossibility but if intelligent life does visit earth in my lifetime I hope they bring new and interesting stuff to eat and drink because I’m pretty jaded with the selection here.

Institutional investors bought ~3.5% of single family homes & townhomes in the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia region; about 24,000 units between 2010-2022. These same types of companies were convicted colluding to fix rent prices making rents higher here. Gorback, Caitlin, et al (2025).

Clearly I'm loving the snow that we are getting in Charlotte but the city is pretty unprepared. That is likely because this level of snow fall has be come much rarer in the last 40 to 50 years. Source: www.weather.gov/media/gsp/Cl...

Coal combustion does more than warm the earth. It also deviates local ecosystems like those in the Adirondacks. New research shows that Brook Trout have recovered very well since 1990 Clean Air Act improved air quality in the region. doi.org/10.1086/738871

I have been annoyed by the media's tendency to overanalyze. Isn't it the case that all the major global and domestic issues today are the result of fact that the USA has granted too much power to the executive branch over the last 100 years? That explains everything.

This is an enclosure of public space which will make my neighbor less diverse & interesting. Through economies of agglomeration venders brought more business to the neighborhood & increased the size of the economic pie available to all businesses qcnerve.com/noda-street-...

Ok given the news I feel like I have to pull out this blog post I wrote in 2019 about times and places where people saw cold and snow as a great boon not a curse. We have much to learn from this history. edgeeffects.net/hey-snow-its...

.#ai can be a force for good!

I’ve been thinking more about the problems with the synoptic perspective inherent to macroeconomic thinking. Critics of immigration to the US don’t have a problem with the immigrant qua person but have a problem with the statistics on immigration and the alleged implications of those numbers.

Have Americans accepted that we have had so many constitutional crises in the last year that the term is meaningless or irrelevant? Is The Constitution broken?

A barista today in my neighborhood said she took my class The Invention of Private Property a few years ago. I didn’t recognize her but she said she liked the class and that she thinks about it a lot. For me, there are fewer higher compliments.

LinkedIn is the only sane social media but it is only sane relative to all the others. Giving that it is all about networking it has a type of quaint antiquated insanity.

I’ve been getting tired of the news coverage of the USA today because there is a tendency to over analyze. Much of this news defies analysis not because it’s complex but because the trends are so clear and need no further explanation. Case and point:

Our evironmentally inefficient meat sources are thinking very clearly. Eat less meat

So let’s get this straight, the Trump admin just got done bullying NATO countries into increasing military spending and now the admin is getting belligerent with those same countries?

Historians don’t try to predict. We don’t say “X will happen” instead we say “let’s work towards making sure X won’t happen.”

"Censoring Plato is an academic absurdity and a textbook violation of academic freedom. A university that censors Plato—as well as other significant texts—abandons its obligation to truth, free inquiry, and the public trust." — AAUP President Todd Wolfson

Among the many ominous parts of this market is the fact that it says “Trump” and not “The United States.”

My book _Cutover Capitalism_ was recently reviewed in the December issue of the American Historical Review! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1093/ahr/....

Is sports fandom the OG parasocial relationship?

Is “doomscrolling” really the problem, or a way to individualize what’s actually structural? Even offline, the world feels more unequal, polarized, and precarious than it did in the 1990s. Are screens the real cause of our endemic anxiety?

"you know, the fact that they had a boat land there 500 years ago doesn't mean that they own the land." Donald Trump, 2026

"When any.. activity in the US takes 38k... lives in one year, it becomes a national problem... In the last 50 years... the automobile has killed more people in the United States than we have had fatalities in... all the wars of the United States since its founding 177 years ago." Eisenhower, 1954

It is fine to criticize #AI energy and water use but to do so honestly means acknowledging that many other very common online activities like streaming video also have big energy and water demands. The digital world is actually very tangible.

I’m resonating so much with this Marc Bloch quote right now. “No survey will be made here of those paper wars in which scholars have sometimes engaged. History, not historians, is my concern.” I’m kind of over historiography.

Vote here on the rendering that you like best for the Charlotte labor history mural that I helped to fund and manage! There are a lot of good options. www.instagram.com/p/DTGkikWAbq...

I don’t think I’ll truly be happy until I can cross country ski to work.

When journalist and writers talk about ancient knowledge or folk knowledge they are also talking about working-class and/or worker knowledge but that fact often gets ignored.

Great episode until the end when Luigi falters on American slavery. Its unique evil was the buying & selling of black bodies & defining who could be enslaved: children of enslaved women. This embedded racism into American capitalism long after emancipation www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/the...

A new study suggests that industrialization has created fundamentally unhealthy environments for humans. “A growing body of observational and experimental evidence suggests that industrialisation negatively impacts key biological functions…” doi.org/10.1111/brv....

“AI doesn't do… engineering, it writes chunks of code. You can’t get an LLM to think … about what happened before & what's going to happen and what's happening adjacently. That is geometrically more computationally expensive than… writing one routine.” www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/how...

As somone who has become obsessed with property rights recently, this episode was both amazing and infuriating. I can’t believe I never heard of corner crossing before! 99percentinvisible.org/episode/650-...

Got to keep everyone aware of the hum of the background traffic violence in our nation. www.qcnews.com/charlotte/pe...

China has planted so many trees in the last five decades that it is affecting global water cycles. www.livescience.com/planet-earth...

This is the best podcast to cut through the #AI bullshit machine. It’s also hilarious. In short, we are a long long way off from ai agents replacing humans at even the simplest work tasks. www.iheart.com/podcast/1119...

The fact that you can’t punish or reward #AI agents and that makes them ineffective reveals that the economy runs on worker precariousness.

This Day in Labor History: December 5, 1955. The American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged into the AFL-CIO. It brought labor back together, but that happened mostly because of the anti-communism purges that crushed the left wing of the CIO!