stephen.daedalus

The Politics of Resentment: Shopkeeper Protest in Nineteenth-Century Paris

i love my french shopkeepers, irrespective of regions; also, this is a fascinating book!

history.princeton.edu/about/public...

A student just said he grew up on NSync, because it was his parents music.

I'll be walked out into the corn and lying down to allow death to take me.

i am (a) spinning this this a.m. and (b) trying to track down a nm lp to augment my digital copy! i am quite grateful for musical prompts and prods whenever i get them. thanks to you and @rickmclaughlin.com for this, among others!

love this record!

love this! thank you.

re: chagall -- sharing this to express myself, not with any expectation of influencing you! -- as an 11-year-old taking in a chagall exhibit at the philadelphia museum of art (~1985), i was captivated and transformed: his art fired my imagination and has haunted me ever since.

Philz Coffee close to closing deal to sell to private equity firm for $145 million Employee stocks will be canceled as part of the deal; former employees point to culture change across Philz Coffee.

Philz Coffee sells out to private equity and screws over its employees. missionlocal.org/2025/07/phil...

i love this record and have ... wow, half a dozen different cd and lp pressings of it. nobody walks in la!

i have just been conducting experiments:

1) auditing the code produced by an llm: claude code;
2) using another llm (gpt o3) to review claude code's work;
3) asking claude code to audit _its own_ work.

and the results both confirm and epitomize your analogy. this is not going to end well.

Bari’s key insight as an entrepreneur is that there is a bottomless demand for rich people to have their existing opinions sold back to them as forbidden knowledge

i believe this first shipped (under the auspices of msft) with the windows 95 plus! pack!

Saint Bernard de Menthon et le diable (Titivillus) Tours BM – ms. 2104, fol-149. Book of Hours, Use of Rome. France, c. 1510. Temptation of St. Bernard.

I was not aware that 1) there is a demon of typos called Titivillus or that 2) typos are held against scribes in heaven. Truly thought this was a drawing of me resisting the urge to send reels (I’m old) to my besties instead of writing that book review. medievalstudies.princeton.edu/event/the-de...

Once, ever, NYT should (a) disclose who writes these headlines, and (b) have him or her answer questions about why.

The Right Way To Rebuild A followup.

Same question goes for de-Trumpifying the FBI. And the judiciary. Dems need an agenda designed to break the perception that they can be pushed around. Any party-building exercise that isn’t concerned with these kinds of questions is worth rooting against.

Piece on this is finally coming this week but this is a big part of why I think the "we need to moderate on immigration/treat it as a distraction" stuff is a mistake—you need to be in position to be the party that's gonna fix things in 2028

just ordered the hardcover edition of this fwiw!

this was is and ever shall be a desert-island record for me. even, especially, in an era when the desert-island record (as such) has been all but obviated.

i forgot all about this. i read bergson many years ago when i was consumed with t.s. eliot! i have been meaning to get back to him. but i've so many others to read for the first time -- or eacquaint myself with. if we all of us aren't concentrated into a camp, hopefully i'll get around to it.

A lot of the weirdness of press coverage of the current Democratic party, its goals, its abilities and its future get resolved if you have a clear set of definitions about who and what the Democratic party actually is. More primaries the better. Basically every poll you see with the public standing of the Democratic party at an historic low is based on Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who are fed up with the party because they see it as ineffective and weak. That is about the elected leadership. And that anger and realization is a good thing not a bad thing because it shows that voters aren’t satisfied with the current party, the current elected leadership. They are, as they say, looking to go in another direction. And that’s great.

i feel seen

and vice versa, the republican court believes that anything a democratic president does is presumptively unconstitutional, even if it past precedent would say otherwise

i also think that it is only a matter of time before this court rewrites section 1 of the 14th to effectively end birthright citizenship. the 14th amendment is the chief obstacle to a legal regime of tiered citizenship and subordinate castes, and they will not let it stand.

You know, I’m starting to think that wealth and intelligence might not be correlated after all

One of the most honest things a super PAC donor has ever said

i have never been so mortified by anything in my entire life

Dear @kenwhite.bsky.social

IT'S. NOT. A. BITTER. DISPUTE.

It's a one-sided authoritarian assault on a private institution. What are we doing here, and what is journalism, anyway?

For the sake of comparison, 9% of Americans approve of the Black Plague.

Have a national “Dress Like ICE” day where everyone wears a skull gaiter, an ill-fitting tactical vest with an Etsy POLICE sticker on it, Shein camouflage cargo pants, and the douchiest Oakleys available.

If anyone gets upset and starts claiming to be “real ICE” everyone laugh and say “sure buddy.”

what. the. actual. fuck.

feels like it could double as an epitaph too