@tnlacy
Loves/affinities: History, HigherEd, Writing, Humor, Great Books, Liberal Arts, Books, Bulls, Cubs, LOTR, etc. History PhD & p-t instructor (US, intellectual/cultural/edu). Minimal political discussion here (sorry!). Opinions are mine alone. (he/him)
The DNC is suing the Trump administration for refusing to answer a simple question, “are you planning to put armed agents or military at polling places?” They submitted 11 FOIA requests and have gotten zero answers.
In Andor, Perrin laments "Why must everything be boring and sad!"
I was recalling this the other day, but for some reason my memory stylized it as "Why must everything be so dreary and sad!"
I don't know what this says about me.
Billionaires’ % share of federal election spending in:
2008: 0.3%
2024: 19%
@nytimes.com #GildedAge
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/u...
Roberts Courts legacy is to make it harder for ordinary people to engage in the most basic form of participation (voting), for that participation to matter (letting gerrymandering stand), while removing any constraints from billionaire influence on politics
Datacenter expansion cuts to core of many critical issues. environmental degradation/excess GHG and neutered climate emergency response; political corruption in land use by exploiting weak governance; exacerbating gross concentration of wealth in hands of tech oligarchs
We do not our politicians to make engaging content; we want them to govern.
But “we” are not the elite political press.
We want a functioning democracy.
They want content.
Annie Abrams is doing some of the best commentary on ongoing efforts to make k-12 teaching increasingly rigid and unimaginative, with teachers themselves enjoined to be little more than automatons. Strong pressure to use teaching scripts — scripts that encourage children to memorize but not think.
Difficult to emphasize just how much a generation of kids has been taught that being dishonest, superficial, and narcissistic is the pathway to attention and therefore success
A cartoon by Ron Cobb (1975), showing a shadow of US B-52 bomber above cratered landscape. Two people who look like Vietnamese peasants look up; one says “they’re having problems with their economy again.”
This is from 1975.
Coffee pot/mug
AP tests are also a great way of undermining university labor.
I appreciate that AP tests are cheaper than college, but that's just an argument for making college cheaper, not for confining our dreams to the size of an AP Course.
in a lot of ways we're just learning over and over that people who seem to be very good at one thing may be devastatingly incompetent at everything else, and our functional concept of expertise -- appearing on screen -- cannot accommodate that
Huge NYT article on the back story of those two weeks in March/April 2025 when DOGE illegally terminated hundreds of NEH grants. Gift link!!
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...
Did @nytpitchbot.bsky.social write this?
The Pentagon is hanging the White House out to dry.
www.cnn.com/world/live-n...
The notion that Democrats must now help Republicans cut a blank check for ICE because Trump started a war with Iran that no one asked for is as cynical & absurd as it gets.
Democrats want to protect America's national security AND protect Americans from an out-of-control DHS.
"The Peace President."
According to the preeminent expert on the use of air power in warfare, Robert A. Pape, from WW2 to the present the use of air power alone has never achieved regime change. Not once.
BOMBING TO WIN Air Power and Coercion in War Robert A. Pape
Pape is out in media noting that aerial bombing campaigns have never (not once) produced regime change in favor of the side doing the bombing
As Arkansas weighs a prison book ban, formerly incarcerated readers share how books reshaped their lives arktimes.com/arkansas-blo...
1/9. In 2020 Iran did try to interfere with the presidential election.
Under a new policy released Thursday, the Trump Administration will test conversion therapy on trans people in prisons. It explicitly states that it aims to help trans people “recover,” all the while forcibly detransitioning them both medically and socially.
transitics.substack.com/p/the-trump-...
Michael Sean Winters hopes that all Catholics will take a moment and hear what Pope Leo is highlighting for us. These short catechetical reflections invite us to become a part of the renewal to which Vatican II pointed.
I walk by this park regularly. I am glad for the change.
I'm leaning Biss.
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
James Baldwin
Oh btw ICE activity today at Whipple was fucking nuts. Large convoys of masked agents leaving every so often with a constant stream of single ICE vehicles in between.
This 'drawdown' was clearly just a brief hiatus to pacify liberals and get bourgeois media/politicians to completely lose interest.
Iranian authorities and Red Crescent Society officials report that more than 100 people, most of them girls, were killed at a primary school during joint U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran.
Let’s be clear: Slaughtering children in a school is an atrocity and a war crime.
www.ft.com/content/055d...