Marc Blanc

Oh and also the realization that the most socially beneficial jobs are often the least compensated while totally useless and even harmful jobs are the most well compensated. A child can understand that a society that allocates value this way is sick

"What radicalized you?"
Realizing people could work as service labor for a community where they couldn't afford to live. A small but profound insight at a young age about the fundamental reality of exploitation in a capitalist society

Incredible!

Today's classroom takeaway, via Willa Cather's My Antonia: ChatGPT can't read literature allusively. After asking it to identify the influence of WWI, the Russian Revolution, and the Homestead Act on the novel's themes, it couldn't provide any passages that weren't direct historical references.

things were better when the computer lived in its own specific room and you only went in there sometimes

Admittedly I'm a big LeBron fan, but the "Mickey Mouse Ring" thesis has never made sense. Removing home court advantage arguably creates a more even competition, and winning while in isolation took an extraordinary amount of psychological toughness. That chip is legit, and they earned it.

a place to start

go.bsky.app/2Fq4P6e

It's an honor to be included!

"Who most clearly saw the real crux of the conflict, most definitely knew his own convictions and was readiest at the crisis for decisive action, was a man whose leadership lay not in his office, wealth, or influence, but in the white flame of his utter devotion to an ideal." Du Bois on John Brown

This Juneteenth, I'm reading W.E.B. Du Bois's excellent biography of John Brown. ✊

"In truth always thinkers who do not work have tried to unite workers who do not think. Only working thinkers can unite thinking workers." –W.E.B. Du Bois, "Dark Princess" (1929)

If anyone tells you that the US isn't a class society/class conscious society, advise them to try to get approved for an apartment in a big city. This is brutal

Agreed!

On This Land We All Get Fed – Spectre Journal Jacqui Germain reflects on the difficulties and tasks facing the leftist artist in a cultural space geared towards the political right.

"The cultural production of radical left-wing movements ultimately should struggle not over space on the terrain, but over the authority of the marketplace in people’s cultural and political lives." Jacqui Germain in @journalspectre.bsky.social
spectrejournal.com/on-this-land...

All Good Things Maddi Sullivan · EP · 2025 · 4 songs

Incredibly proud and awed by the talent of my wife, @madisonjblanc.bsky.social, who dropped a killer EP last week. If diaristic alt-pop is your jam, I recommend this
open.spotify.com/album/1HqiX5...

Hard to tell if the centrist profiles following me lately are bots or if neoliberal consensus thinking just has a bot-like quality to it

a man stands at a podium with microphones that say wor on them ALT: a man stands at a podium with microphones that say wor on them

"[A] democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." - FDR (1938)

👎👎

Katy Perry going to space--while Trump is disappearing people and throwing the country into economic collapse--is the "Whitey on the Moon" of our times.

Curtailing people’s ability to read widely and carefully, to locate, assess, and compare different sources for themselves, and to write in their own voice about what they find and what it means, is arguably more effective than censorship. It is also one of the most obvious effects of generative AI.

Whole thread is spot on

On Monday, March 31, 2025 we learned that DOGE is targeting the NEH with the aim of substantially reducing its staff, cutting the agency’s grant programs, and rescinding grants that have already been awarded.

Learn what steps you can take here: nhalliance.org/federal-fund...

Anvil, the Forgotten Magazine of Heartland Marxism Printed out of a cattle barn in Missouri, Anvil published some of the biggest leftist writers of the 1930s, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. Its popular vision for a multiracial socialism...

Thrilled that my favorite article so far is up on @jacobinmag.bsky.social today. Place and region matter when talking to people about socialism, and Missouri’s Anvil magazine spoke to rural/Midwestern workers eloquently and intimately in the 1930s. jacobin.com/2025/02/anvi...

Nancy Fraser, "Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do about It."

Was thrilled to participate in a record-breaking #douglassday! "If there is no struggle, there is no progress"

So excited to participate here in STL! #douglassday

Amidst all the strife in the world, I had the best day of my life last Saturday. I love you @madisonjblanc.bsky.social

If you're doing public humanities in STL/MO/IL, we want to know about your project! call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/01/...

second this! Shaping up to be the most pertinent history for the moment, unfortunately