Brenden W. Rensink 📚🏃‍♂️⛰

Made a deliciously rich and deeply complex no-bean chili for our neighborhood church Halloween party and, of course, did not win the cook off. The bean bias persists but I’m a man of of principles and historical accuracy. Beans are great for your spicy bean stew, but keep them out of my chili! 😉

PAWS?!?!

So…an academic conference (at least, for those of us with face/name memory issues). 😭🙋‍♂️

YouTube video by Northwest Public Broadcasting Shipwrecks and the clash of Northwest coastal cultures

If you haven’t gotten your hands on Coll Thrush’s wonderful new book, Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific, here’s a short little docmentary film that NWPB did on it. Also check out my Writing Westward Podcast interview with Coll about the book.

youtu.be/cwoMXisb_SI?...

It seems like social media & tech companies have been introducing AI services/features as a way to attract users. But for me, the (often forcefully and unsolicited) integration of AI is a deterrent & makes me LESS likely to use their platform/service/product. An AI "disable" feature is what I want.

Cosign. 100%

a man with a mustache and curly hair says it 's fan-tas-tic ALT: a man with a mustache and curly hair says it 's fan-tas-tic

Returning to office on Monday after a week of out of state archival research and a conference is...rough. Setting that "out of office" automatic reply before you leave is heavenly, but dealing with the backlog of emails and tasks it leaves in its wake is most definitely not.

Is Duolingo ok? These seem like…odd sentences.

Western History Association in ABQ was so great. Saw old friends (sad I didn’t see many others who I heard were there), talked with prospective authors for my UNM series, had a nice roundtable with other centers people, ate good food, & tried to stand up for democracy at the #NoKings march. #WHA2025

I found said rooms to be whatever the opposite of “enchanting” is.

Hit the UNM special collections this morning and now ready to get my WHA on! This will be my 20th in a row. That is hard to believe. Say hi in the halls! #WHA2025

I spent the day at some archives in Sante Fe today. You know how your fingers and hands start to get a specific dry feeling to them after spending hours leading through old collections? Yeah, love that feeling.

At NMSU Special Collections in Las Cruces today. Feels good to be digging through dusty boxes and folders again.

Patty Limerick gave me the heads up on this letter to the editor she just sent in regarding the anti-Mormon chants at the BYU-CU game. Indeed, what a world this would be if everyone had better historical thinking skills and historical perspective.

www.dailycamera.com/2025/10/07/i...

Constitutional rights and democracy, good. Dictatorships and power-hungry autocrats, bad. There I said it. Look at me being so edgy and controversial. 😞

Not ok. What happened to the party that is supposedly the champion of the constitution and the rights it enshrines?

Tour | Fire in Intermountain National Parks and Monuments | Intermountain Histories In 1963, the Advisory Board on Wildlife Management, chaired by A. Starker Leopold, published the Leopold report. It argued that controlling natural fires could be an effective forest management resour...

www.intermountainhistories.org/tours/show/78

Tour | Historic Roadside Attractions Along U.S. Highway 89 | Intermountain Histories The U.S. Bureau of Public Roads established a numbered highway system between Utah and Arizona in 1925, formally establishing Highway 89. Otherwise known as the nation’s “most scenic road trip,” this ...

www.intermountainhistories.org/tours/show/77

Tour | Let’s Go for a Ride: Mountain Bike Trails on the Colorado Plateau | Intermountain Histories When mountain bikes made their way out of Marin County, CA and into the rural west in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, few could have predicted the impact the machines and their riders would have on ...

www.intermountainhistories.org/tours/show/76

Tour | Googie and Space-Age Architecture in the Intermountain West | Intermountain Histories When driving though the area encompassed by the boundaries of the Intermountain West, along decrepit highways and down thoroughfares, you might notice an interesting genre of architecture. Old motels,...

www.intermountainhistories.org/tours/show/75

Tour | Prohibition in the Intermountain West | Intermountain Histories This virtual tour explores Prohibition across the Intermountain West through five key sites. The Mint Bar in Sheridan, Wyoming, embodied cowboy defiance. Kemmerer, Wyoming’s immigrant-fueled mining so...

www.intermountainhistories.org/tours/show/74

Tour | Cruising the West: Boat Tourism on America’s Public Lakes | Intermountain Histories Water has always been a scarce but integral part of the Intermountain West’s identity. Glacial lakes and reservoirs in places like Yellowstone, Glacier, and Lake Powell offer unique “experience-based”...

www.intermountainhistories.org/tours/show/73

Stories in Intermountain Histories is a free website and mobile app that curates histories of the Intermountain West regions of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Explore...

New on my Intermountain Histories project: 6 tours (35 stories!) on Boating, Prohibition, Googie Architecture, Mountain Biking, Roadside Attractions, & Wildfires from NAU Public History students of Prof. Michael Amundson. Publishing student research never gets old.
Tour links in the comments below ⬇️

Maybe some strategically applied temporary tattoos would help

“There is artificial intelligence, and then there’s actual intelligence.”

A+ no notes ⬇️⬇️⬇️

I really enjoyed this doing this interview with Ernesto. Just when you think you have a handle on a certain topic, you find out it is infinitely more complicated than you thought.

a woman is sitting in a chair in a courtroom wearing a black sweater and white collar . ALT: a woman is sitting in a chair in a courtroom wearing a black sweater and white collar .

And the award for most inarticulate world leader in modern history goes to…

Today my FB memories feed again gave me just what I needed to face some heavy times. 10+years ago today my then 5-year old daughter watched The Empire Strikes Back & in response to the Darth Vader as Luke's father reveal screamed, "He is not Luke's dad! He is a bad guy! I will not like him ever!!!"😍

You don't have to be even remotely familiar with new scholarship on Wounded Knee to know that this move is not only absurdly misinformed but offensive to the very concepts of human dignity and justice that our nation's founding idealized & that we've been (haltingly) striving for ever since. Shame.

And maybe shame on the news crews setting up cameras to record these teenagers at their darkest hour. Let them grieve in peace.