Rebecca Spang

The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics

“Billionaires made 19 percent of all reported federal campaign contributions in 2024” 🎁🔗

Mike Baker, Steven Rich for @nytimes.com

2,000-year-old Phoenician coin was used as bus fare in England, but 'how it got there will always be a mystery' The ancient coin was probably minted in what is now Spain in the first century B.C., but no one knows why it was used to pay a 1950s transport fare.

2,000-year-old Phoenician coin was used as bus fare in England, but 'how it got there will always be a mystery' | Live Science
www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

Guest room!

The Baltic Crusades: A Photo Gallery - Yale University Press London Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, crusading armies unleashed a relentless holy war against the last pagan societies in northern Europe. In the Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, c...

Between the 12th and 15th centuries, crusading armies unleashed a relentless holy war against the last pagan societies in northern Europe. Aleksander Pluskowski, author of The Black Cross: A History of the Baltic Crusades, shares some photographs from the region.

yalebooks.co.uk/the-baltic-c...

Pete Hegseth Blew Billions on Fruit Basket Stands, Chairs, and Crab The Defense Department went on a $93 billion spending spree in 2025.

As millions of Americans were losing their SNAP benefits the Pentagon spent:

🔹️$6.9 million worth of lobster tails🦞
🔹️$15.1 million for ribeye steak 🥩
🔹️$2 million for Alaskan king crab 🦀
🔹️ and even $98,329 on a Steinway & Sons grand piano

✏️ by @newrepublic.com

Historian of French Revolution here to say that in periods like this, squeamish compromisers do as much to drive radicalization as do ideologues. If you keep making excuses for the unfit king, eventually folks come for you and him.

I pay more for health insurance per year than I pay for my housing. More than I pay for food. More than I pay for electricity. I pay more for health insurance per year than I earned annually at jobs in my first decade of work.

The hidden history of blackface in America Podcast Episode · Fresh Air · March 9 · 45m

Highly recommend. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f...

We are missing the International Owl Festival in Houston, Minnesota this weekend. But by a stroke of luck or twist of fate, the Airbnb we booked in Pflugerville, Texas has an owl theme going on. It’s like an Easter egg hunt finding them all.

Your regular reminder that normal, mainstream, pro-democracy political parties do not make restricting suffrage the central pillar of their policy platform

"Jews don't belong in American society."

Imagine a sitting member of Congress tweeting that. You can't. Thankfully, it'd never happen. And *if* it did, it'd be the end of their career and the biggest story in America.

But Ogles can say this about Muslims without any censure.

Over five million people protested against the regime in June.

More than seven million people took to the streets in October.

March 28 will be even bigger, with nearly 3,000 events already on the No Kings Day map. Be part of the largest protest in American history: www.nokings.org?SQF_SOURCE=i...

Ohio State University president resigns over ‘inappropriate relationship’ Walter ‘Ted’ Carter Jr says he ‘made a mistake in allowing inappropriate access to Ohio State leadership’

Never a dull day in US higher ed right now... www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Indiana law rounds pennies out of cash transactions Businesses are being told to round down to the nearest nickel.

Imagining possible long-term consequences of this move, such as a population no more able to count between 0 and 5 (and 5 and 10) than we are to calculate in shillings and pence!
www.ipm.org/news/2026-03...

Is the plan now to leave Iran with the nuclear material and an extremist hardliner driven mad with grief… hellbent on rushing to finish the nukes… and within striking distance of Milan. Hjälp. Well, at least Helsinki is out of range.

Tweet from Aaron Rupar quoting a CNN interview where Jake Tapper says voting against $50 billion for Iran war funding would be framed as voting against the troops, and Senator Chris Murphy responds that supporting the troops means voting against the war to keep them out of harm’s way. A screenshot shows Murphy speaking on CNN’s State of the Union.

Indeed!

Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper

Now in #paperback, Post-Imperial Possibilities by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper is a history of three transnational political projects designed to overcome the inequities of imperialism.

Enjoy 30% off with code PUP30: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

#History

White hellebore flowers

Some daffodils in bloom. I don’t remember the variety name

Today in south central Indiana

Accessibility score for: evalsp26_01-exam_answers 100% Accessibility score: 100 percent arrow_drop_up Perfect! This PDF has a perfect accessibility score, although further improvements may still be possible. Keep up the good work!

If you use #QuartoPub for any PDF documents for teaching and you need to meet impending PDF accessibility rules, upgrade to v1.9, add format: typst: pdf-standard: ua-1 to the YAML front matter, and it'll work!

It took a policeman to come ask the garbage truck driver to back up 5 feet, so that the pickup truck that was already on Indiana, **in the right hand lane,** could get by and the traffic can now clear.

The Alibi of Capital Today, extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from nowhere. The trick of conjuring this unearned wealth is, in fact, the key to understanding capital­ism’s origins and a clue to why the catastrophe of c...

Timothy Mitchell, The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow - @versobooks.bsky.social, March 2026
www.versobooks.com/products/345...

#OtD 9 Mar 1910 the Westmoreland County Coal Strike began in PA, where 15,000 miners, mostly Slovak migrants, shut down 65 mines for over a year. Police violence & hardship eventually forced them to give in stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/1092...

Trump Jr.-Backed Company Receives $620 Million Pentagon Loan

This comes weeks after another startup, in which Trump Jr. has held a $4 million stake, received a US Army contract.

truthout.org/articles/tru...

The Right Expands Its Campaign to Censor College Professors PEN America called 2025 ‘a year of catastrophe for higher education,’ but professors are fighting back against censorship.

“Our vision for a fully-funded public education, where a professor can write and teach freely, and can challenge every vapid, cruel argument federal and state governments make, sustains us. It’s what we’re fighting for.” 

—Todd Wolfson, AAUP President

Damn.
Really that is just it.
And a lot of ruthlessness.

Un Día Sin Nosotras: The Mexican Women’s Strike On this day, 9 March 2020, tens of thousands of women across Mexico went on strike in protest at gender-based violence which kills thousands of women each year in the country. Transport, banking, education and retail were amongst the industries affected by women either staying at home or taking to the streets, under the slogan "Un Día Sin Nosotras" ("A Day without Us"). One worker, Isaura Miranda, a biologist, told the New York Times why she took part: “I just realised I had to do something… I can’t carry on with this feeling of rage and impotence over so many deaths that are cruel, without dignity… Also, I don’t want my daughter to go out one day and never come back again." Support for the action was so widespread that many large corporations and government departments were pressured into agreeing not to discipline women who took part in the action. Mexico's left-wing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, blamed "past neoliberal policies" for endemic violence against women, 10 of whom are murdered each day, and accused right-wing opponents of helping organise the strike. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10925/mexico-women's-strike

📣 New Podcast! "Un Día Sin Nosotras: The Mexican Women’s Strike" on @Spreaker #2020_latin #2020_mexican #2020_un #9_gender #america #dia #feminist #march #mexico #mexico_feminist #movement #nosotras #protest_women #protests #protests_women #sin #strike #violence #women #women_s

Please read this discussion of how ordinary Germans became Nazis.

Generally speaking, I don’t like this comparison (US now and Nazis). It’s lazy button-pushing that simplifies the present.

But the dynamics here…

Read.

Half of this book is about the French bread police

www.amazon.com/Illusion-Fre...

this dude was literally a mercenary for hire, forgive me if i don' t give a fuck about his opinions right now

the problem isn't the "quagmire," it's the murder of innocent people, including kids. the reason not to kill people in other countries isn't "Americans are bad at exit strategies" you ghoul

In case someone doesn’t know abbreviation: this is the Korean stock exchange