Garrett Dash Nelson

a planning diagram for Boston's Central Artery

collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commo...

Wikipedia article for Daniel Gookin

Telling my children this is Danny Go’s full name

Vito thought intensifies

bsky.app/profile/en-d...

screenshot of aerial images of round waterbodies in Massachusetts

For #30DayMapChallenge 3: Polygons, I'm re-sharing an old favorite: the 200 roundest waterbodies in Massachusetts. (Because technically a circle isn't a polygon ... except in GIS.)

glitch.leventhal.center/birds-eye-ca...

Screenshot of an Observable notebook with a line graph showing the home values of neighborhoods traversed by the MBTA Fitchburg Line

For #30DayMapChallenge 2: Lines, I've visualized the @mbta.com @mbta-cr.bsky.social Commuter Rail lines as they traverse geographies of very different home values outside of Boston.

observablehq.com/@garrettdash...

cc @masshousing.bsky.social

There’s always precedent, and it is very often specifically Andy Woodruff precedent

A pointy-headed, pointless exercise for #30DayMapChallenge 1: Points.

All of the official “Point” names in Massachusetts, with ortho imagery from @massgis.bsky.social

me in 2009: I probably can't go into politics, I have a few mildly left-of-center social media posts and a handful of vaguely cringe facebook photos

politics in 2025: would the nazi tattoo guy be an effective opponent to the diarrhea video president?

Web banner reading "The author has never been in Boston. All the information has been extracted from sketches posted in Wikimedia Commons, and from pictures and videos posted in the internet as well."

The most impressive part of all this:

Vito Marcantonio

Ghosts of unwritten books / in the land of undone things / unsung songs [W. E. B. Du Bois, ca. 1900] credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mu...

2. Dolores Hayden, "Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space," in "The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History"

3. William Cronon, "Kennecott Journey: The Paths out of Town," in "Under and Open Sky"

There are many good possible answers to this question, but my three go-tos for introducing this theme at the undergrad level are:

1. Donald Meinig, "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene, in "The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes"

Turns out the right wing’s critique of wokeness was not “this is bad” but rather “we are the ones who should be doing this, and with the power of the state behind us”

Newspaper article from 1938 with headline "W.P.A. Is Almost a Separate Social System"

Now *this* is Abundance

A kid's worksheet titled "meet the digital citizens" with illustrated characters colored in by a child

The reverse side of the previous image, with demonic tracings of the front side

My daughter's reverse-side embellishment of this "digital citizens" handout makes me think she was working on commission for a magazine looking to illustrate a "dark side of the internet" longform essay this week

Adding Value | Phenomenal World Mortgage insurance has traditionally been the method the federal government has used to induce investment in owner-occupied housing. But for multifamily rentals, the history of mortgage-insurance prog...

Mike Glass and I argue for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social that we’ve tried the #abundance incentive-based approach to housing crises before. But lack of oversight + incentives produced fraud, profiteering, and inflated rents -- and the Trump family fortune.
www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/add...

Age of Asymmetries

A tweet from me on Sept 15, 2020 reading "A hallmark quality of centrism is the inability to distinguish between things that are annoying and things that are bad"

I originally posted this in semi-jest, but in retrospect I think it really explains a lot about what went wrong over the past 5 years.

Text screenshot reading: (c) "Classical architecture" means the architectural tradition derived from the forms, principles, and vocabulary of the architecture of Greek and Roman antiquity, and as later developed and expanded upon by such Renaissance architects as Alberti, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Palladio; such Enlightenment masters as Robert Adam, John Soane, and Christopher Wren; such 19th-century architects as Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Robert Mills, and Thomas U. Walter; and such 20th-century practitioners as Julian Abele, Daniel Burnham, Rafael Carmoega, Charles F. McKim, John Russell Pope, Julia Morgan, and the firm of Delano and Aldrich. Classical architecture encompasses such styles as Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco.

Will be talking every day in my office, located in a Charles F. McKim-designed building, about how the people who wrote this are big dumb babies

Hard to believe, but apparently nobody has yet published an article examining the question of consciousness in LLMs entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Chat”?

21st century urban challenges, 17th century political geography commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/deba...

a chatgpt prompt asking for an image of "the historian Leopold von Ranke taking a long and exhausted drag on a cigarette," and the generated image

Text from Hobbes's Leviathan: "Another infirmity of a commonwealth is the immoderate. greatness of a town, when it is able to furnish out of its own circuit the number and expense of a great army: as also the great number of corporations ; which are as it were many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of anatural man. To which may be added the liberty of disputing against absolute power, by pretenders to political prudence ; which though bred for the most part in the lees of the people, yet-animated by false doctrines. are perpetually meddling with the fundamental laws, to the molestation of the commonwealth; like the little worms, which phy- sicians call ascarides."

Most of us are familiar with the visual metaphor from "Leviathan" of a giant body politic made up of a mass of people. But Hobbes also offers another vivid organic reference: political sub-units like towns and corporations are akin to roundworms in poop.

A map of the world on an equidistant azimuthal projection centered on Boston, with cities labeled at 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 miles distances.

The world as seen from The Hub: equidistant radii around Boston.

Thunder Bay, St. John's, and Jacksonville are all about 1,000 miles away.

Accra, Ankara, Magadan, and Florianópolis are 5,000 miles away.

Newcastle and Surabaya are 10,000 miles away.

A web search modal with "Date of publication" followed by a seemingly random list of dates and date ranges

On my niche nemesis list: the person who decided this was a useful way to filter a historical collections search by date of publication

The goo-goos were right all along…

"Therefore"

Amazingly useful. Do you have a single geometry file for all cities available somewhere, or are these only available city-by-city from the Dataverse repository?

Somebody should tell Trump that it would absolutely own Musk if all of the federal grants that DOGE cut were not only reinstated, but actually had their grant awards doubled.