Sam Ulmschneider

Putting someone who will speak unvarnished reality to argue at the Court feels exactly as positive and cathartic - and exactly as much of a fantasy - as Mr Smith Goes to Washington did about the Senate of the 1930s.

Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society In this speech, Lincoln defended free labor from attacks made by those in favor of slavery

Lincoln's address to the Wisconsin State Ag society (teachingamericanhistory.org/document/add...) and Marx's attitude towards the Union in the Civil War are a great little microcosm for how mashed-together and weird 19thc political economy approaches were compared to our post Cold War moment.

I love a good thorough explanation of the idea of alienated labor, or of excess value capture by capital owners. They remain among the very few elements of classical Marx which can resonate emotionally or socially/economically with contemporary young audiences. Also, Marx would've been a Poster.

The worst part is that it benefits the kids in the absolute college-admissions sense. Students who will have taken PSAT and SAT 3-6 times do improve their scores, and colleges do care about that stuff. So it’s very hard to oppose this particular conscription of our public resources for private gain.

Yes, the College Board has so suborned modern high schools that we willingly knuckle under & sacrifice a whole school day every year so that some combination of 9/10/11th graders can repeatedly take PSATs for 'practice,' and to better integrate them into the College Board's data collection system.

YouTube video by Moshcam Black Mountain - Tyrants | Live in Sydney | Moshcam

anyhow, here's a really great music video and song that hit home in some important ways back in the 2000s during the Arab Spring and the economic collapse, and I've somehow stumbled back across again in the last few weeks:

We're starting our unit on Hobbes next week in my political philosophy class, and I really don't want my unit on the political and social background of 17th century English political and social upheavals to feel quite so aggravatingly relevant.

Doing two years in a row teaching new classes where I had to generate the whole curriculum - from strategic goals and yearlong timelines to individual assignments, chunked-up reading and long term activities - is one the most exhausting professional decisions I ever made.

A message announcing 'AP Business and Personal Finance'

A Message Announcing 'AP Career Kickstart' with endorsements from 'industry credentials' and 'hiring managers.'

College Board's AP Program rly needs to stop pretending it has even a spark of interest in anything other than advancing its brand name and revenue at this point. Maybe once, long ago, it had a purpose of providing opportunities for intellectual curiosity and special engagement but...look at this.

I really want a sociologist to write an article about Francine and the broader phenomenon of internet-beloved-animal-drama because I have no idea what to make of it myself other than "seems much more wholesome than most of what we use the internet for?"

@kangaroopete.bsky.social the responses to this are precisely the sort of thing that will make your day

cheap-ass gas station orange slice candy - not good gourmet ones that taste like real orange, oh no - the ones that taste like orange flavoring and you can buy in pound+ generic flavor bags in Lizard Lick, NC. God I love them, and God are they objectively indefensible.

Attempted to explain Anthony Kennedy as a justice in less than three minutes to one of my classes today, since someone asked who he was in the context of teaching Citizens United in AP government - I don't know that I've ever recently felt more like I fumbled an important pass than that doofy 3 min.

Yes, absolutely. The Democratic and Republican coalitions during and immediately after the Cold War could agree on aggressively neoliberal trade agreements because the combination of the farm crisis and global population boom allowed agribusiness to thrive w/o much protectionist manipulation.

for real though the Democratic party no longer being the party of the rural agricultural industrial system scrambles the old pre-1940s lines enormously. Pre-1940s free traders were in that position because we were the world's breadbasket (still are!). But the modern GOP owns that coalition now.

Thank god this issue about tariffs doesn't ultimately center around the interests of a major agricultural-industry staple like sugar, wheat, corn or [sound of me being crushed by 1,000 copies of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat]

As important as other things are I have to think that 30+ years from now, it'll be concievable for someone to write a comprehensive history of US politics 2002-2032 as 'the era of health insurance politics' of something. It's the one issue that everything since Part D gravitationally falls back to.

I love Lower Decks for many reasons but one thing it's not is an ambitious show with interesting things to say via satire and comedy about the broader world and its ailments. I would hope a Star Wars themed workplace comedy/class satire would do better and be a little less of a running in-joke.

would absolutely watch Clerks/Office Space/Waiting... or some other version of a workplace satire/comedy but in a Star Wars setting. Fun opportunities to use sci-fi to comment on class, corporations, capital, or social norms rather than war, imperialism, government, penal systems, propaganda etc.

October Eclectic 2025 Mix

When I was much younger, I took great pleasure in mixtapes and mix CDs, inspired by very young exposure to KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic. Now, I try to give myself a (somewhat) eclectic playlist to riff off of all month, with some thematic messages as a fun side project. Here's this month:

I really like and admire a huge amount of Danielle Allen’s work too! Her books are great and far reaching, engagement projects excellent etc. but importantly there are moments where the unique dynamics of Harvard seem to overcome her, like they do other people there for more than a decade or so.

Allen (and others) are good evidence that smart, good-faith people can have so many of their most important thinking skills degraded by spending decades in the hermetically sealed hothouse of an Ivy League campus, out of contact with most higher ed experiences.

I agree on principle about hecklers vetoes, but doesn't that come back to motivation? If the mayor is avoiding disruption, it is a (bad, unconstitutional) heckler's veto, but if they mayor is issuing neutral time-place-manner considerations it's not? But then, how can we tell at this point?

While I agree that the message underlying this isn't the best, a 'daylight hours only' protest requirement maybe meets good neutral time/place/manner and adequate venue for expression requirements, and is motivated by a desire to avoid confrontations made more unpredictable/dangerous in the dark?

I do my level best to not engage in the arms race and push back against it, which is why it drives me so nuts: I feel like it puts my courses at a perpetual prioritization disadvantage vis-a-vis other courses that use the arms race effect to their advantage.

One of the things that drives me most absolutely mad is the arms-race effect among students taking multiple demanding courses. If a students has 4-7 APs and Dual Enrollments, the only way to ensure they prioritize yours is with more vicious deadlines and harsher workloads than the other class has.

Yeah, I often wonder if some kind of medium-term political destabilization campaign to try and make Taiwan into a story more like the story of Hong Kong seems more palatable from Beijing's perspective, given just how apocalyptic the costs of failure would be to them among relevant domestic publics.

Yeah, agree. Noah Smith at this point seems to be content with doing what so much of silicon valley enjoys doing, which is smashing together plastic action figures with the names of ideas together and pretending it's deep insight. Yglesias, for all his flaws, still is grounded in specific policy.

Red Fang's 'Wires' probably remains, subjectively, my favorite music video of all time. There's no defending it on anything but personal tastes, but it seems relevant given that Portland, OR, and its unique self-conception and culture is enormously in the news again...and that's a Portland video.

I sort of agree, but also that's what a basic two volume casebook or something is for. Now granted my perspective is crabbed - I'm concerned almost entirely with con law and teaching it to advanced high schoolers who often see a future in law/policy - so that may account for my preferences.