All of this exactly. I would only add that the individualization and privatization of public health has also reversed the direction of duty between the body and the state. Building on eugenicist ideas, the individual has a duty to to the state build a strong and economically powerful "well" body.

Proposing analog to,”racism can explain every weird thing in America” is, “women are busy working for money is the secret reason everything we miss about a society is now dying.”

Jess Calarco@jessicacalarco.com · 2d ago

This article offers half a dozen reasons why people have stopped having friends and family over, but it ignores the fact that the women who planned parties and kept homes tidy enough for unplanned guests are now working for pay full-time (usually more than 9-5). www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

I was raised by a nurse with an associates degree and a steel mill electrician. I am not denigrating the value and dignity of blue collar work when I ask how many elite national media staffers are raising future bricklayers themselves. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...

Time to Consider Becoming a Bricklayer

College degrees hold less value, while jobs in the trades are booming.

theatlantic.com

Evergreen

Meghan K. Roberts@meghankroberts.bsky.social · 2w ago

Wow, that Olise goal was beautiful

This is *the* piece. Kate Manne, professor of philosophy at Cornell, speaks truth to the totality of failures at the university — and why students protesting the war in Gaza have faced far harsher consequences than any of the Cornell 7: www.thecut.com/article/what...

What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now

As a professor at the Ivy League school, Kate Manne has known many, many victims. There’s a palpable feeling on campus, she writes, that this is big.

thecut.com

I could watch Désiré Doué play football all day long

As the scandal over Susan Collins’ relationship with Hawaii defense contractor Navatek became the central issue in her hotly contested senate campaign, she and her top aides mustered a defense with a series of incorrect and misleading claims, @ProPublica.org reports.

ProPublica debunks Susan Collins' claims about FBI anti-corruption probe • Maine Morning Star

As the scandal over Susan Collins’ relationship with Hawaii defense contractor Navatek became the central issue in her hotly contested senate campaign, she and her top aides mustered a defense with a…

mainemorningstar.com

I hope you're sitting down, ma'am, because I have some shocking news about your royal family

Adam Bienkov@adambienkov.bsky.social · 3w ago

The British right has now descended to the point where 'the England team are not English' is becoming the consensus position

Family history and genealogy, media juicing up controversy and fawning over science while failing to get that yes the historical analysis was conclusive. I couldn't not write about this! Shorter: just read @agordonreed.bsky.social. karinwulf.com/trove/the-fa...

The Family History of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, and the Politics of Genealogy. - Karin Wulf

[The cover image is a page from Jefferson’s “Farm Book” at the Massachusetts Historical Society where he listed enslaved recipients of “Bread” at Monticello in 1810 –including Sally Hemings and four o...

karinwulf.com

So many people switching to analog course materials, always with the caveat that students w/ accommodations can use devices. But I’m curious, how many people are looking up what it takes to get said accommodations? As a special ed mom, let me tell you that it is WILDLY expensive and time-consuming.

Mountain lions are making American roads safer by frightening away deer. On Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where cougars were most active, deer-vehicle collisions fell 76%. Deer kill up to 440 Americans a year; cougars have killed 29 Americans since 1868. buff.ly/9bDfEKZ #ShareGoodNewsToo

Cougars cut deadly vehicle-deer collisions in the US by up to 76%, study shows

If you’re a black-tailed deer on the Olympic Peninsula in the U.S. state of Washington, you’re always surrounded by friends and family. You are free-range, with abundant food to forage in familiar…

news.mongabay.com

Why did medicine and moral philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment give rise to a global and colonial science of race? Find out here! @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and me in History of Science, Volume 64 Issue 3, September 2026. Out now, open access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.....

true crime and mystery skies! Come to my book launch September 15 at the NYPL with true crime and mystery 👑@sarahweinman.com events.leapevents.com/event/mcdoug... We still have some seats and plenty more room on the livestream 🫣

Sara McDougall@sarannmcd.bsky.social · last mo.

@bookriot.bsky.social gets me! In which my cunning plan of trying to write something my students might read by choice and for fun is perpetuated…

I wrote about Dolly Parton in my latest @nytopinion.nytimes.com column. Thank you. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/o...

Opinion | The Greatest Story Dolly Parton Ever Wrote Was Herself (Gift Article)

She didn’t see herself as a saint; she identified as something we needed even more: a writer.

nytimes.com

So being pro-labor, pro-education for the poorest, pro-vaccine, and pro-LGBTQIA is a “neutral” position🤔

CNN@cnn.com · 2mo ago

"At a time when no American celebrity seems immune from the country’s many divisions, Dolly Parton was a crossover icon who stayed neutral in the culture wars while still speaking her mind," writes Zachary B. Wolf. | Analysis

Last week, @jackiantonovich.bsky.social asked for my thoughts on the new smallpox aDNA study that had just come out. I said I'd need a little more time to sort thru it. bsky.app/profile/moni.... I've now had time to go thru my files, so here's a quick summary on where we are in the history of VARV.

Monica H Green@monicamedhist.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Thanks for the query @jackiantonovich.bsky.social. I already knew this study on the Chilean genomes was coming out, but I need some time to assess its historical significance. Here's a link to the last smallpox aDNA pub'd earlier this year. Not included in the present study: bsky.app/profile/moni...

A tl;dr summary of the following 🧵: the recovery of smallpox aDNA from an early modern Chilean site is a VERY IMPORTANT milestone in the history of this global disease--still the only human disease to be completely eradicated. My reservation is whether claims of a European source are supported.

I don’t know if anyone else listened to the Culture Study pod on the Odyssey, but I was surprised to hear Sarah Mesle (PhD, English) come down so hard on Wilson’s review (she just seemed mad, she got lots of money, etc). Agree or disagree, I feel like scholars should respect her right to critique.

'Ô muse, dis moi l' homme aux mille tours' is the first line of the first translation of the Odyssey by a woman, Anne Dacier in 1716. She had previously translated the Iliad in 1699. And she got involved in a controversy, much like the current Nolan vs Wilson one #QuerelleD'Homer

We're back! @brettrushforth.bsky.social and Chris Hodson joined me to talk about two decades of collaborating on BEYOND THE OCEAN, using visual and material culture to tell a different story, and more. Plus a cameo by Eminem! Listen here: player.captivate.fm/episode/f2ca... 🗃️

Episode 107: Chris Hodson and Brett Rushforth Upend History in 1.2 Voices

Quickly and easily listen to Drafting the Past for free!

player.captivate.fm

Call For Proposals: Conference on Families in Early American and Atlantic Worlds April 15-17, 2027 Hosted by the John Carter Brown Library (Co-chairs Julie Hardwick and Karin Wulf) Details at: forms.gle/QWcB23XGbwu6...

The latest HLQ is here, with articles in art history, literature, disability studies, and the blue humanities. There are pastors, captives, painters, healers, actors, sailors, poets, liars, polar bears, and parrots. It's big-tent #earlymodern studies, and it's #nuntastic. muse.jhu.edu/issue/57325

And the reason people socially construct brute facts is that those constructions allow us to coordinate action. If we don't have units of measure, we can't easily give each other directions. If we don't have labels for symptom clusters like ADHD, we can't easily develop treatments or policies.

Stephen Wild@stephenjwild.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Something can be both a brute fact and a social construct. The distance between points A and B? Brute fact. Unit of measurement to describe the distance (cm, inches, rods, parsecs)? Social construction. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

As I've said before: What high-paying long-term jobs do they pretend exist here? A data center isn't a place where execs come and do Big Deals. Go to the server room at your workplace; are there lots of rich people in there spending money?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2mo ago

Hassett: "Data centers are very good for towns bc they create so many jobs & bring people in with high incomes that can buy houses & stuff like that. So if you take a sleepy town that hasn't seen much in the last 30 years & put a data center there, there are gonna be a bunch of happy residents."

your apartment, the sport of basketball, and the Republic of Korea are all social constructs. mere recognition of this fact does not actually make the question of whether you are standing in your own apartment, playing basketball, or a Korean national up in the air until settled by op ed editors

there are a lot of philosophical concepts that get egregiously misused out of the seminar room (and in the seminar room, to be fair). but in terms of sheer pernicious misuse "social construct" has gotta be top 5 somewhere and it's not number 5

Scott Bryan@scottygb.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Channel 4 has announced documentary “The Great ADHD Myth?” It “seeks to determine whether ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder, or a social construct.”

No professional accomplishment has ever made me happier than this. theonion.com/translator-o...

Translator Of Original ‘Minions’ Epic Poem Slams ‘Sexless, Bloodless’ Film Adaptation

PHILADELPHIA—In a 4,500-word essay published in Harper’s Magazine, Emily Wilson, known for her popular translation of the Minions epic poem, blasted the latest film Thursday as a “sexless, bloodless” ...

theonion.com

I seem to have become a Crying Baby Charmer and I am drunk on this power.

My latest is about the stunning evidentiary weakness of the White House’s anti-woke report on the National Museum of American History. If it had blue sealant it would peel. The shoddy workmanship in Trump’s 250 commemorations never stops! newrepublic.com/article/2128...

I Fact-Checked Trump’s Anti-Woke Report on the American History Museum

The document is notably short on evidence—and at odds with what I witnessed during a visit to the museum this week.

newrepublic.com