Matt Henry

Glad Ryan Zinke is retiring. Fake-ass Montanan to the core. I remember the time he was in an ad claiming he would do right by Montana's hunters and anglers holding a fly rod upside down, rigged backwards.

It’s hilarious to me, in a dark kind of way, that I saw like 5 DOE social posts boasting about gas prices under Trump as an obvious reason to vote GOP in the midterms and now gas is gonna be $10/gallon if the oil can make it around, like, the Cape of Good Hope.

Fuck your think pieces, it’s not more complicated than this.

A pretty simple litmus test: any Dem who isn’t clearly and vehemently opposing an illegal war with Iran is not sincerely opposed to Trump and fascism and does not deserve to be elected.

If Mamdani is such a Trump whisperer why doesn’t he make IT happen

There’s still time to apply for this Energy Policy Analyst role to work with me at Gridworks! Role is focused in the non-coastal western U.S. feel free to reach out with questions.

Might soon have some exciting work funded on interstate transmission permitting, Tribal transmission work, and capacity building in red state/rural contexts. I've been grinding the past six months, but hopefully soon we can get cooking on this work!

A reworked Monkeywrench Gang but the target is data centers instead of billboards and bulldozers.

Years after the initiative I had students in class that had participated in the initiative (and won awards) while in high school. They all left for the Front Range and beyond because they felt like they weren’t part of the state’s plans for the future. I don’t blame them at all. But it’s also sad.

Aside from a handful of Dem legislators and community organizers, it was ignored. The stories were so rich. Young people imagined a future with renewable energy, clean skies and rivers, access to healthcare, art and community - a future fundamentally at odds with the state’s ties to fossil fuels.

I learned this by launching a project of my own when I was a postdoc. We used funding from WY Humanities Council for a speculative storytelling contest asking young people to express their hopes for the state in 2030, published a digital and print anthology, and distributed it widely.

When I was in Wyoming, I learned that every 5-10 years, someone looks around and wonders why young people are leaving Wyoming for opportunities elsewhere and starts and initiative or public discussion to address the problem. Governors and legislators deride or ignore it, and things get worse.

I am only just starting to understand, two years after leaving higher ed, the physical and mental health ramifications of living under those circumstances.

Which makes the productivity of many junior scholars these days all the more remarkable - it’s all done under the extreme duress of intensively auditioning for other roles!

Saw someone published a review of my book today, three years after it was published. It had nice things to say and fair critiques. I had figured it was forgotten, buried beneath so much else that came after it in the publishing arms race of academia. I went back and read a little. Still proud of it.

Wonder if any western states will follow suit?

I’m not sure how else to say it but Talarico has Lego man hair. There’s def a little yellow bump underneath there.

Maybe someone should write an article on how the imperative to become a “public” intellectual and focus on personal branding over serious and responsible inquiry is one result of there being no funding for the humanities.

Maybe someone should write an article on how the imperative to become a “public” intellectual and focus on personal branding over serious and responsible inquiry is one result of there being no funding for the humanities.

It’d be an annoying article in less dire times but right now it’s just dangerous, at best accomplishes nothing, but much more likely will have material, long-lasting consequences for higher ed and research funding more generally. Bro got his clicks, though, so congrats to him.

The thing that gets me about the TAH Mellon Foundation article is that it’s really not the time to air that kind of (mistaken) critique on main when the fascist regime is looking for any pretext to defund most forms of critical inquiry and capture institutions that could challenge its legitimacy.

Hi yes I volunteer to be AOC’s 2028 presidential campaign rural/red state just transition advisor thx

Reading this and I can’t get the image out of my head of my my NREL colleagues who did international renewable energy work funded by USAID sitting dejectedly around a brewery table last February, wondering what to do after their funding got pulled by DOGE. Fuck these cretins.

This will devastate the burgeoning coal oil industry, I’m afraid.

“More traditional humanities scholarship” you mean the kind done why white dudes for white dudes while they all try to bang their students and gatekeep what counts as expertise?

There's not enough funding to go around, but also (in my limited experience) there's not enough recognition of the profession's labor crisis to distribute those funds equitably. That should be the article, rather than "the humanities are too woke and it's their fault there's no money."

The problem with Mellon isn't that it funds too many social justice-focused projects, it's that the same well-heeled, well-resourced, mid- and late-career Ivy League academics keep winning Mellon awards while many junior scholars, adjuncts, and non-Ivy folks getting locked out. Same issue with NEH.

Gonna just ignore AI and hope it goes away

Hearing 134 people. Lots of comms folks.

(I have no inside info but LinkedIn posts are popping up)