con questi nuovi ritmi americani (she/her) 🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸🏳

“There’s Always a Tweet” is having a career year.

When we talk about Baby Boomers not getting off the stage: In 1997, the US president was born in 1946.

In 2007, the US president was born in 1946.

In 2017, the US president was born in 1946.

And next year in 2027? The US president will have been born in 1946.

Thread.

Back in the Iraq war, a running joke was the confusion that pro-war advocates could not distinguish between Shia and Sunnis, which seems like a degree of unbelievable sophistication now.

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

James Baldwin

I do struggle to understand Shabana Mahmood: if this was what she came into politics to do, why was it the Labour Party that attracted her? Throughout most of the last 20 years, the Conservatives would've been a much more obvious fit.

If it's not, why's she doing it so zealously?

Thanks I’m sure that as historians of colonization and empire @sandraduffy.bsky.social and I have not read Hannah Arendt, nor do we have the capacity to understand complexity while also thinking violent US imperial action is never a good idea
What would do without men to explain things to us

To be fair (and I am in the UK) it wasn’t immediately clear what he was referring to.

It seems that some people are shocked and amazed that someone might feel a bit of solidarity instead of “f#ck it, I got mine, pull up the ladder”, which is clearly how the Braverman sort operate

Kind of incredible to see this covered in the Guardian.

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

At least 40 students killed so far at a school in Minab according to AlJazeera

I’m not convinced that its covid policies are what landed them the victory, mainly given that much of the public seems to have forgotten about it in line with the media narrative that it’s over, but the fact that the Greens are the only party to have such policies is important,&shouldn’t be ignored.

It's a hopeful moment, but we need to brace ourselves, writes Owen Jones. ✏️

From the 'Project Fear' Scots are so familiar with, to the brutal demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn, modern history shows us the tactics the establishment will use against Zack Polanski and the Greens

At this point you have to start wondering if cabinet ministers are spread betting on precisely how many council seats Labour is going to lose in May.

Because that would be the sanest explanation for:

Zack Polanski, "Keir Starmer is never going to appease the right by slowly moving to the right"

"They just get worse and they drag the government with them"

"I wouldn't be bothered except they're the government of this country and they're dragging us all down with them"

👇👇👇👇”To put it another way, Reform and Conservative seem to have decided they don't want to bother with British Muslims. They cannot be surprised when they decide they don't wish to bother with them.”

So the women’s hockey team got fresh pasta at a swanky restaurant in Milan with Stanley Tucci and the men’s team got cold McDonalds in a room blaring Toby Keith where the President didn’t even eat with them. Y’all idk if you’ve noticed but the patriarchy sucks FOR YOU.

My first instinct when I read this was to ask my husband if the @greenparty.org.uk in Denton got 1.7 billion votes. In case you wanted to know what’s dominated my day. 😆

I tried so hard

And got so far

But in the end

No one fucking likes me

I joined Reform

To deport you all

But in the end

No one fucking likes me

It's actually really impressive how well @zackpolanski.bsky.social handled the assertion that the greens are playing into "Sectarian Politics". Like, just plainly saying, "no I don't think it's bad that we campaign to different demographics in different ways."

YES YES YES.

Hope Beats Hate: Green Party Defeats Reform and Labour in Huge Gorton and Denton By-Election Victory A concerted political and media campaign to scare voters about a “Green Menace” winning this by-election failed, reports Adam Bienkov

Gorton and Denton was 127th on the list of Green Party target seats.

To win by such a margin there suggests there is much bigger potential for Green gains in May's local elections than most people expect

bylinetimes.com/2026/02/27/h...

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I'm not going to address the base level mendacity in his piece about graduate admissions and hiring. Some of the things he says happened never happened. I can't say more without breaking the law, but it's just false. I hope he's just lost it to the point that he believes it rather than just lying.

The days when every department had a Renaissance historian are long gone. But the field is still there. And I'd rather that when people hear the term Renaissance that they think of the good stuff that's going on. Instead, he's making it seem like it's the last refuge of reactionaries.

If it is going to survive at all, it will have to move on from what those of us who are in it today are doing. The fact that he can't accept that is a personal failing. And his turn to reactionary politics is terrible to watch. But it's also doing tremendous damage to the field he supposedly loves.

Every field of historical inquiry fades eventually. And it sucks to be the old guy in the room when it happens to yours. But if you take the longer view (and we are historians after all), concerns that seem dead do come back eventually. Or you can decide that everything is shit now. It's a choice.

But he went from being mad at the rest of us in the field for abandoning the concerns that animated it fifty years ago, to blaming non-western fields for the death of ours. He's got it backwards. Hiring is a zero-sum game, and our field failed to change in ways that might it easy to drop us.

I've learned that a lot of guys visualize our social environment like this: [image of a graph with two points] good men / crazed evil men but it's actually closer to this: [image of a graph that is a spectrum with the following points] heroic men who will intervene well-meaning men who underestimate the issue men who think predation is an unfortunate fact of life men who think certain women deserve it( but aren't active predators ) men who passively enjoy/consume/encourage predation textbook predators we're all aware of monsters so cruel we can't even fathom them

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