John Tobin

They fell backwards, but sadly the banana peel the slipped on was not preserve.

However, scholars have reconstructed that there must’ve been a shwuup noise as their front foot went comically high into the air

There was a lot of exchange programs with Iowa, Wisconsin, and other midwestern universities - especially for agricultural expertise.

A lot of this goes back to pre1949, but theres another big wave in the 1980s I think. UW Madison has some interesting research on it!

btw the article at the top is always a funny reminder that xi jinping lived in iowa for a while and still has a bunch of random old white people as personal friends there en.people.cn/n3/2026/0218...

Considering that Gondor looks like a medieval polity, structurally - maybe 10th- or 11th-century France would be a reasonable comparison - Aragorn doesn't have the state capacity to have a very granular tax policy. Very likely he would have to have decentralised tax collection - i.e., tax farming.

“If you want to read Toni Morrison go to a private college” Indiana governor Mitch Daniels once said.

It’s just called “privatization” — and there was nothing accidental about destroying public universities

Z: Learning the Way is the joy of undergrads

H: You are not an undergrad, so how do you know what their joy is?

Z: You are not me, how do you know I don’t know?

H: Okay pal, from where did you know it?

Z: I knew it at the blackboard (when they laughed at my joke for once)

“All things are in some ways Zhuangzi vs Confucius” is the premise of ever class I’ve ever TAed, including “Into to Global Military History“ and “Weimar Republic and the Rise of Naziism“

I remember were talking with some donors who said he would love to hire people like us for his business after we finish

I asked him if we would have a salary/position higher than a 22yo fresh college grad. He says “of course not, you can’t act like you’re better than others.”

I appreciate how hard my department’s admin works to put together alt-ac talks, but these are coping strategies for the fact what we are trained for is vanishing at an increasing rate

History PhD programs are designed for one specific thing: research

We have one of the longest degrees and it makes no sense to get it unless you intend to work as a professor. Almost none of us will (likely including me)

I cannot emphasize enough the depth of the contempt I have for almost all press coverage of university education for my entire lifetime.

Absolute clown show of the least serious people alive

“Viewpoint diversity“ is the state telling you what to teach.

Luckily the press is laser focused on the real problem, undergrads protesting invited speakers

Genuinely funny if you are actually a member of the College of Cardinals

Poster of a Mongolian man pointing at the reader, asking them "Do you know how to write?" in Latin script Mongolian.

Giving a guest talk today for a comparative world history grad course called "Why Don’t All Mongolian Studies Scholars Study Mongolian?" In it, I make the case that if you study a people and region, you should learn the local language(s).

Muppet Christmas Carol!

DAMNIT

Muppet Treasure Island

…wait damn uh give me a minute

Obama reading this, absolutely devastated

Has to be in the top five precedents you do not want to hear the judge make at your trial as a former head of state

You absolutely love to see it

Many Catholics just ignore this rule and will take the Host despite having not gone to confession for mortal sins

Communion is the most important regular part of Catholic practice and Donegan is being particularly principled to not take it, especially since (imo) the Church isn’t exactly right here

You can’t if you have done a mortal sin that you haven’t wiped clean through confession and penance

Donegan presumably does not regret doing some things the Church deems sinful (ie her marriage to a woman), and so does not go through the Sacrament of Reconciliation for them

good thing so many schools over-complied in advance🙃

Just realized that ”Bluesky” is exactly what Chinggis Khan would name a social media website

Has someone done this joke yet

Saw the first one bc friends wanted to, was reluctant bc I thought it’d just be transformers. But I was wrong! It rules!

The theme song goes unbelievably hard too

Also saw it in China (in 3D lol), brought my buddy and my now-wife. They hadn’t seen the first one, but I spent the whole trip to the theater talking it up

Neither of them were impressed

One hell of a bird

One positive thing I’ll say about Zhao, he’s a great litmus test for if someone is actually knowledgeable about intellectual discourse in China.

Not the most important guy around, but someone you’ve encountered if you’ve put any actual effort in, even just in English

Hey look, two of my most hated guys, Samuel Huntington and Zhao Tingyang. Really don’t like either of these two guys

I think the actual solution to this is if you're a streamer and you want to go to China you have to spend a year as a migrant worker, we'll even get you a good migrant worker job and you can work at one of the Foxconn plants or some shit! You're an American you're

Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

In 2016 both US and China had so much “has democracy gone too far?”

Brookings was hosting events on ending primaries. Most CCP supporters I met took Trump as proof democracy was bad (but also liked him for being racist to Muslims)

Trump 2, more than anything else, has shown how wrong this was