Sam Herrmann

Huh an awful lot of rhetoric shifted from Old Testament to New Testament over the past few hours

Opinion | Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way

I feel like I am taking crazy pills. Charlie Kirk’s ultimate goal, which he said time and time again, would have been the suppression, through threat of violence and the use of state power, of the rights of those he disagreed with, including freedom of expression.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/o...

Probably time for us all to revisit Sara Ahmed's analysis of white supremacists again... The "we do this out of love for our own, not hate of others" is a bit too on the nose here.

Corporate investors now own 30% of the single-family rental homes in the Atlanta area.

My initial reaction is that while it certainly seems likely that electing Leo XIV sends a signal about American politics, it’s maybe a bit ethnocentric for Americans to think that this consideration was the guiding light of the conclave.

scorsese’s makes a biopic about the new pope 100%

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

Robert Prevost and JB Pritzker

THE AMERICAN CENTURY IS OVER

THE ILLINOIS CENTURY IS JUST BEGINNING

Catholics respecting the midwest... you love to see it.

Israel plans to occupy and flatten all of Gaza if no deal by Trump's trip Trump has effectively given Netanyahu a green light to do as he sees fit, Israeli officials say.

"Trump...has effectively given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a green light to do as he sees fit, Israeli officials say...The return to full-fledged war would come after Israel already cut off all supplies of food, water and medicine"

this era is so bleak

www.axios.com/2025/05/05/i...

Why Protests Should Be Promises Modern movements that aim to advance racial equity should withhold and promise, rather than perform, writes Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

happy may day, get in formation to get the goods

"decentralized, social media-based approaches were effective in harnessing attention+organizing street demonstrations. But they couldn't steer the response of the system because there was no organizational support."

time.com/collections/...

I've been thinking about this show a lot since I watched it. I've also read quite a few takes on it, and this is hands down my favorite. Worth a read!

Oh man, couldn't agree more! And this kind of anxiety isn't new. I'm researching adolescence in the 40s right now and parents were doing the same kind of thing then as well! Which is ironic given how Haidt and others lionize the midcentury as the golden age for adolescents.

Plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle feel threatened by rising class consciousness.

The colonnaded Widener Library looks out over Tercentenary Theatre at the heart of Harvard’s campus.

Harvard will not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding, the university president announced www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

nvm

Couldn't agree more. But would also love to read your thoughts on the series as it stands sometime!

my favorite part of the Haidt interview is when him and Klein have a nostalgia session about when childhood was good in the 1950s. i study childhood in that period and EVERYONE was wishing then that childhood was as it “had been” 70 years before then too!

between watching the show Adolescence and listening to Jonathan Haidt’s interview on Ezra Klein, i am losing hope that we have actually changed anything about our imaginations of how we help humans grow up since the 1940s.

more takes like this please!

being a grad student in 2025 is just texting your friends at other institutions comparing institutional budget cuts.

a delightful day for a show of political will!

what booker is doing right now is an example of what i mean when i say things like “we need more ambition right now.” there is room in american politics right now for people with ambition to take big stands and reap the rewards. he’s doing it!

didn’t get to make it to the home opener last night, but the skyline was fun to see on the walk home

how can you be at the helm of the world’s most powerful educational institution and render a letter so stupid and cowardly?

cannot say i'm surprised that the natalists are now calling bullets "freedom seeds."

a worthy bit of advice for my fellow historians. combined with the question of what our “this is not new” retorts have given us over the past 10 years? does a history lesson in itself elicit change? is information enough?

i love people who write well about the midwest. this excerpt from toni morrison about the Great Lakes is particularly profound.