A book dedicated to an outstanding scholar and colleague... and the other editor deserves more credit than I do...

Icon of youth, for stickball and stoop ball

A better way of interpreting this portrait is as a species of Florentine propaganda intended to appropriate and domesticate the Englishman as a dutiful Florentine captain post mortem--despite the fact he worked most of career for others, spent last ones preparing to return to England

He partied all the time, and I took my classes at Bryn Mawr, so we had relatively minimal contact. But he lost his mom just when I met him, I'd lost my father, so we had a bond, always polite and friendly to each other--a million years ago.

My assigned roommate at Haverford College in Spring 1982. Hard to match that guy with this guy, makes you wonder about the effects of a world of privilege... a decent guy in college, so far as I could tell.

SEN. OSSOFF: “.. why are roving gangs of masked men — who look like they couldn’t pass the Army physical exam — dressed up like pretend Delta Force operators, on our streets, demanding papers, dragging people from their cars, and shooting people to death?”

@acyn.bsky.social

About time... without electricity for whole week, 13 degrees F today and very cold the whole time. O'Connell has lost our vote.

4 days with no power, extreme cold, no crews in sight... this is how a red state operates! Help! Our poor cats! below 30 degrees inside.

‘This is what fascism looks like’: terror in Minneapolis reminiscent of civil war Alex Pretti’s death could be a moment of reckoning for Democrats to call time on Trump waging war on his people

This is what fascism looks like.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Trump’s America is not the America I know and love  • Wisconsin Examiner A country led by an authoritarian leader who thumbs his nose at the rule of law is not the America I know. And it certainly isn’t great.

Democrats should not base their opposition on "affordability," but on the central unifying issue that Trump stands only for Trump, an unhinged narcissist and grifter, scorns his so-called base, etc...

wisconsinexaminer.com/2025/06/02/t...

The Fight of Our Lives Reflections on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the continuing struggle for a better America

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it,” MLK wrote. “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

www.americaamerica.news/p/the-fight-...

Big Budget Act Creates a “Deportation-Industrial Complex” The result will be a lopsided, enforcement-only machine that will be hard to dismantle.

A Deportation Industrial Complex, or where tax money is going instead of health care and investment in human capital
www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ana....

👏Kudos to Netpa for organizing a big NET Cancer Day 2025 event in Denmark.
👏Netpa AGM selected new Netpa President – congrats to Ingeline Bonde.
✅Find out more: incalliance.org/netpa-net-ca...
#LetsTalkAboutNETs

Look around, fellow Americans, is this the country your forbears envisioned, that you wish to live in?

It is deeply disturbing, and a sign of the degree to which America has devolved (gun violence normalized), that ANYONE can view the new ICE video from Minnesota and think that the killing was justified. It is that simple.

Public officials should be pointing out to the American public how much of their tax money (via BB bill) is going to funding ICE rather than basic social programs that help citizens.

👏Kudos to NET Italy and Itanet for organizing a really international NET Cancer Day 2025 event.
✅Find out more and watch the event recording: incalliance.org/net-cancer-d...
#LetsTalkAboutNETs

Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods 404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work. Webloc can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or t...

New: we've obtained material explaining how an ICE surveillance system, called Webloc, works. Draw shape on a map, see all phones available there, follow them home. All without warrant

“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency.” www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

The ICE Murder and the Broader Battle - The American Prospect Wednesday’s murder by an ICE agent of a peaceful legal observer brings America one step closer to a civil war as cities defending their citizens.

*Wednesday’s cold-blooded murder of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent brings America one step closer to a civil war between cities and states defending their citizens and a Trump administration using fascist-style tactics to provoke violence*

by Robert Kuttner

prospect.org/2026/01/08/i...

NOW: Crowd continues to grow in Minneapolis at a vigil where a federal agent shot and killed Renee Good this morning.

“SAY HER NAME!”
“RENEE GOOD!”

Front pages of American newspapers after Jan. 6, 2021, with headlines like "Capitol Chaos," "Assault on Democracy," "Pro-Trump mob storms Capitol."

Five years ago.

Econ Hist poem

Open fields and lord’s domains,
Venice loses, Antwerp gains.
Gold and silver that were Spain’s,
Factories, slums, and smelly drains.
Secular trends, depression pains.
Westward movements cross the plains,
Marx, Max Weber, Sombart, Keynes,
That’s what economic historians are made of.

Indeed

Ufficiali di Castella

My older sister tells me I once ate here, Lundy's, a landmark restaurant in Sheepshead bay, as a small child. It was cavernous, an emblem of a much gentler, egalitarian, safer and prosperous USA--ie. before Trump (whose father was then a slum lord in that region)

A memory of home from the very distant past at the start of a new year

Time to stop using words like "childish" and "petty" to describe Trump's behavior... normalizes it, when the stakes are much higher, the actions narcissistic, delusional and very, very scary for the immediate future of the country

New book, with a nice international mix of scholars, bridging history, literature and art history. Worked with wonderful colleagues.