Bryan E Norwood

Why MAGA Wants You to Think Slavery Wasn’t That Bad Both the left and the right try to co-opt it, but the real story of American slavery doesn’t serve any one faction. By Thomas Chatterton Williams

Sanitizing slavery has become a core objective of the reactionary right under Donald Trump—a malignant response to the progressive left’s oversimplification of American history for their own present-day ends.

Physically incapable of analyzing politics outside of this insipid frame.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Hard to overstate how big a deal a Rehmet win would be. Tarrant County is the epicenter of Christian nationalism in Texas, an incubator for far-right policies, and nexus of billionaire Tim Dunn's network, which is riding hard for Wambsganss. Rehmet almost entirely funded by donations of $100 or less

A screenshot of the Texas Monthly subscription page showing that for $25 we will send you 12 magazines a year and give you full access to our website.

Anyways, did you know that for $25 a year - yes, a year - Texas Monthly will send 12 print issues anywhere in the country, and give you full access to our daily digital content + 50 years of archives?

Truly, we are the best deal in journalism. subscription.texasmonthly.com/pubs/TZ/TXP/...

More than 400 years of history and a decade of advocacy were torn down Thursday afternoon when National Park Service employees removed every single display at the President’s House.

🔗 What's next? We explain: www.inquirer.com/politics/nat...

Newly unsealed evidence makes it even clearer that Rubio and Noem knew they were targeting students based solely on their political speech and that they knew this policy was unconstitutional. They just didn’t care. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/u...

Cover of Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty by Delia Duong Ba Wendel. The cover features a bluish-tinted photograph of Rwandans gathered in a rural field. Some of the people are standing, while others are seated on the ground. One woman leans against a metal barrel. There is a thicket of trees in the background of the photo.

Save 50% on #NewBook "Rwanda's Genocide Heritage," by Delia Duong Ba Wendel, which contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory such as those that followed the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. #AfricanStudies buff.ly/ofrhNdL

The classicists are starting to realize that the ballroom is going to be a very bad, clumsy, overscaled building, columns or not. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/a...

The good news? College tuition has been going down. The bad news? It’s about to rise again College students nationwide are facing increases in tuition this fall of as much as 10 percent, along with new fees and rising costs for dorms and dining plans, after a stretch when tuition had been f...

Nobody has wanted to acknowledge this but since 2018 tuition in real US$ has been falling. Plus, available aid has been increasing.

Trump is ending that streak.

Cuts in research and foreign students are gouging budgets, putting the burden on US students.

hechingerreport.org/after-years-...

ICE Opens Immigrant Detention Center in Notorious Louisiana Prison

Angola prison used to be a plantation owned by one of the most notorious slave traders in US history.
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...

NEW: Last week, oil literally rained down on a Black town in rural Louisiana where 60% of folks live in poverty.

The company isn’t taking responsibility & the federal + state governments are saying residents have to clean it up themselves. capitalbnews.org/louisiana-oi...

2 bits of data from new Economist/YouGov poll.....

13% support for cutting research funding to universities. 24% among Republicans. Polling on this continues to be catastrophic for the Rs, suggests Dems should be learning far harder into standing up for science and our universities. 1/

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

You may have already come across this one, but if not it’s a recent and growing resource: blackcraftspeople.org

Bishir’s older article Black Builders in Antebellum North Carolina is also really good www.jstor.org/stable/23518...

Crafting Lives | Catherine W. Bishir | University of North Carolina Press From the colonial period onward, black artisans in southern cities--thousands of free and enslaved carpenters, coopers, dressmakers, blacksmiths, saddlers, s...

And Catherine Bishir’s Crafting Lives uncpress.org/book/9781469...

Building Antebellum New Orleans 2024 Spiro Kostof Book Award, Society of Architectural Historians2022 PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Planning2022 Summerlee Book Prize in Nonfiction, ...

Tara Dudley’s Building Antebellum New Orleans utpress.utexas.edu/9781477328552/

Why Did a 75-Year-Old Man in Poor Health Just Die in ICE Custody? Isidro Perez came to the United States from Cuba nearly 60 years ago. This is who Stephen Miller is going after now?

Just awful: A 75-year-old man just died in ICE custody, ICE has revealed in a notice to Congress.

But here's the rub: This man, a Cuban national, was first paroled into the US in 1966—nearly 60 years ago! They were set to deport him anyway.

Details in my new piece:
newrepublic.com/article/1974...

Another study backs my argument last night that Cruz and Cornyn are voting to raise electricity prices for Texans with their attack on clean energy.

It’s Not Just a Constitutional Crisis in the Trump Era. It’s Constitutional Failure | Washington Monthly While Trump defies constitutional norms, Congress remains conspicuously silent and the Supreme Court has abdicated its responsibility.

This is a subject I have been brooding about for some time. I am grateful to the Washington Monthly for posting this piece.

washingtonmonthly.com/2025/06/27/i...

Iranian immigrant who has lived in New Orleans nearly 50 years arrested outside Lakeview home Federal agents arrested an Iranian woman who has lived in the United States for more than four decades outside her Lakeview home Sunday.

We have seriously lost our way as a country. www.nola.com/news/politic...

Children Beg for Father’s Release After ICE Detains Jackson Man Activists are calling on immigration officials to release Kerlin Moreno-Orellana from ICE custody after his arrest for illegal dumping.

Two brothers, ages 8 and 10, stared nervously into news cameras, speaking with quiet determination to a group of onlookers much older than themselves.

“We need our dad back home,” the 8-year-old said.

ICE took custody of their father, Kerlin Moreno-Orellana, that morning.

Masked men in U.S. Border Patrol vests take Santa Ana father after repeatedly hitting him In a graphic video that has since gone viral on social media, about seven or more masked men wearing U.S. Border Patrol vests are seen violently detaining a Santa Ana father before forcing him into…

KTLA - Narciso Barranco, a father to three sons who are all US Marines, pepper-sprayed and punched in the face by alleged federal immigration officers while he was working as a landscaper at an IHOP. He was then forced into the back of an unmarked car in Santa Ana.

If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he's engendered. Musk's sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character - a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty, and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he's seen for the rest of his public life

Phenomenal piece by @michellegoldberg.bsky.social here.

(Gift link)

I’ve told the story many times. Now @katemasur.bsky.social and I have filed it in federal court: Free Black Americans were first to recognize BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP in the US. When denied it, they fought to secure it. They show us what the 14th Amendment meant and what it meant to live without it.

During the pandemic, the US implemented the most effective social welfare policies in our history -- programs that worked because they were big enough, simple, and universal. And then we withdrew them. This remains imo the central economic-policy story of our times. davisvanguard.org/2025/05/3hou...