TIL that a number of Presbyterian churches celebrated yesterday as “Neighborly Sunday” in memory of Fred Rogers, whose birthday is March 20.

2/ false claims of the President of the United States that there's a totally new plan and things are about to become awesome again. Whatever the intent, it's practically an ATM machine now for market gaming.

As time has gone on I've realized there is a still quite small but now non-trivial chance that the entire Iran War is simply an insider trading operation, creating repeated black swan moments and relying on markets continued willingness to gyrate wildly in the face of absurd and predictably ...

Once upon a time, you'd go to give a talk at another university and a nice administrator would hand you a W-9 to sign and they'd send you a check in the mail for the honorarium. Now you have to spend a half hour entering data on a Special Contractor Website that was designed in a lab by sadists.

The 70s was America's best decade and it's not even close

business journalism and business news outlets are going to be the most useful sources of information during the current cascading sh*tshow — Financial Times, WSJ, etc. for radio or video, Bloomberg TV is pretty good. consensus today seems to be that the market aint ready for the shock still coming

Looking up movie anniversaries for possible articles and art-house screenings. Geez, 1986 was crazy for genre flicks. Look at this list.

people need to leave this man alone!

saw Project Hail Mary good movie to see in IMAX, which we did

periodic reminder: as fuel prices go up we're seeing more hot takes about growing food and I'm here as a redneck ag kid AND a historian to tell you the real facts: It has been an EXTREMELY long time since people have subsisted on locally produced food and you personally CANNOT

this is a fatuous, silly rule that contributes to disinfo/low info. there are plenty of well-sourced & well-reported stories published every day by legacy or “mainstream” media outlets, and plenty of thinly-reported, tendentious stories published by independent outlets be judicious, not judgmental

tankies gonna tankie

The Hotel New Hampshire either I read it too early, or at just the right time

OH FFS!!! Wordle 1,737 5/6* 🟨⬜🟨🟨⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

“But my priest/pastor said astrology is bad.” Your priest/pastor isn’t a Hellenistic bishop living in North Africa, Turkey or Rome in the mid to late 300s CE.

I think sometimes people see a Christian tradition that *feels* pagan to them and assume Christians must have taken it from paganism, when really what they’re sensing is just a tradition that’s pre-modern.

This is so bleak

back in the day we just called this getting blackout drunk

Absolutely not. If you are using AI to write you should 100% be ashamed. Shame is one of the last bulwarks against a total slop apocalypse. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/b...

my bedtime is no later than 8 pm. tonight it’s 5:53 pm.

those four mugs are also not coincidentally the greatest argument for phrenology. lobes of criminality protruding all over the place.

Circa 1987, I remember pulling an all-nighter churning out an essay (typewritten on an electric typewriter) on WWII for one of my college writing classes (probably Comp I) in one night. Come morning, I was sick as a dog from stress, but I finished the essay, and got an A on it!

Approaching three quarters of K12 educators are women, and yet the EdTech, testing, and "reform" commentariat is...

a thrill to see our students in @ucmerced.bsky.social's Ballet Folklorico perform at the inaugural State of the County meeting

shout out to whoever is practicing the bagpipes at 9:45 in the morning in downtown Merced

Thiel: the Antichrist is here! Catholics: Let him cook

March 20th is Fred Rogers' birthday. Be a beautiful neighbor, or maybe even just spend some time figuring out how and planning to be the best neighbor you can.

Bari Weiss is doing *precisely* what she was hired to do: systematically destroy a once-reliable source of news in order to deliberately erode the ability of the public to make informed decisions this is her mission; this makes her paymasters happy; she will be richly rewarded

That line drives me absolutely BONKERS. It’s up there with the canard that “racism isn’t profitable!” Money is a consolation prize for not having total power. It is actually very rational to pursue that power at the expense of profit.

Lace up and join us for the Toloma 5K on March 21. Celebrate Native heritage, community and connection to the land at this annual campus and community event. Register today to secure your spot and T-shirt. Learn more and register here 🔗 ucm.edu/baq5fu

not at all the main point, but you can "relish" something or you can "revel in" something, but you really shouldn't "relish in" something sorry, it just pains me when those of us who use words for a living try for something fancy and mess it up better to just stick with "enjoy"

That’s what I tell my students. My brain will be fine. I studied, got my PhD, got tenure. They are the ones whose brains will be at a disadvantage because they chose not to develop them.

Too many students are convinced by their own universities, by some of their teachers and professors, and by the AI companies themselves that ‘using ai to study is getting ahead of the game’ But the process they seek to get ahead of is the point.

my coping mechanism lately has been cooking pinto beans i make a pot every 10 days or so. it’s a lot of beans.

Shout out to all the guys with charts who told me there was no way we were undercounting while I watched nursing homes and hospitals refuse to test and send my friends’ elderly relatives home to die of “respiratory illness” to keep their official numbers down.

AI stole the em dash from my blog posts

FWIW, out of my entire Roth IRA portfolio of 20-ish stocks, exactly one (1) company saw its share price increase (ever so slightly) today: Seneca Foods, the world’s largest processor of canned vegetables I bought it earlier this year ’cause I felt like we were headed for a canned-beans economy

You’re going to want to log off right now.

just shattered thinking of Dolores Huerta, at 96, sobbing and wailing in grief talking to a NYT reporter about what happened to her and others horrific

I know I am biased. I’m a huge consumer of this genre. But I think this is the exact right lane for that character. He’s basically Jessica Fletcher.

you can just put this on and let it play

and there’s always YouTube with ads. lots of docs there, though it’s wearying to clear the ads that pop up

watching Ken Burns's series on World War II

I am thinking of adding a documentary streaming service to my panoply of subscriptions. anyone have a favorite streaming platform for these? looking for paid subscription — I know what my free options are.

my new artificial hip joint has popped a few times today this was not in the brochure

another very pinnable sentiment

topped off my tank today wheeeee!

This whole thing isn’t going well.

I spent two years in graduate school focused on metacognition, by the way. It’s an interest. And yeah there’s no mechanism for it in these platformed lessons and assignments. A smart teacher *can* augment but they need time and support. Two things we don’t encourage. We are ruining the kids.

Blood all over this guy's hands. An awful, opportunistic, demonstrably flawed neo-Malthusian take that fueled generations of Polite Eugenics because "There are too many people!" is an argument inseparable from a follow-up conversation about *which* people are too numerous.