Michael Rooney
@mr00ney.bsky.social
Philosopher by training. Co-author, with Richard L. Epstein, of Critical Thinking (5e). Eight-time winner on Jeopardy. Southern Californian. Sansei.
I'm a huge fan of archaeological photos where we get our first peek at objects in the field. Here, a 1st c. CE marble monopodium (table base) in the form of a naked boy holding a goose appears out of the lapilli in #Pompeii in 1952. 🏺 #ancientbluesky 1/ 📸 left, me; right, see ALT
“We abandon the body and what it learns by being in the world—the physical world—at our peril. By touching, looking, listening, smelling, and even tasting … we don’t just gather ‘data’, that soulless word that flattens everything that can’t be described in numbers.”
Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 14h agoIf you’d like a wonderful antidote to those proclaiming that automated facts-mashing is historical practice I urge you to read this 2025 essay from @drsurekhadavies.bsky.social buttondown.com/surekhadavie...
The sea mouse is not a mouse. It's a chunky marine worm covered in felt-like hair that diffracts light into shifting reds, blues, and golds, some of the best natural photonics we know of. A brown lump on the seafloor that turns into a rainbow when the light hits right. #WormWednesday #marinelife
I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.
“…this dependence on a formula for safety, for that is what it was, signaled a desperate moral abdication. People went to the shrink in order to find justification for the empty lives they led and the meaningless work they did.” Late Baldwin is diffuse but still bracing. Happy 102nd, Jimmy.
In this example, Achilles and Ajax are both named & calling out their scores, with words coming out of their mouths. In every example like this, Achilles is winning In this sense, ancient Greek art is like a modern comic book. With labels and the characters even speaking words /11
The fetishistic allure of the exotic, perfectly represented in Willem Kalf's amazing global still-life paintings, here from 1662. Today is his day.
Most rural areas have a ruling class. And they want cheap unfree workers & to pass their fiefdoms on tax-free forever. It ain't rocket science. The fact that we're scared to talk about THAT, ime, is what's costing us a lot of rural voters!
“Of a sample of more than a million accounts on X, 64% could be bots, a finding that requires no stretch of the imagination, given the sheer inanity of interactions on the site.” www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
How Bots Took Over Our Lives
During the 2016 election, much of the country was introduced to the concept of internet bots for the first time. Now, just a decade later, it feels like they’re everywhere.
newyorker.com
TikTok has incredible moderation team. Our InfoWars video about Multiple Horse Theory — the idea that there are many horses in the world and not just one — has been fully deemed misinformation and lost the formal appeals process. Confirmed by Larry Ellison: There is only one horse on Earth.
this sounds elitist but our recovery from the present moment will depend in part on being able to once again effectively malign, ostracize, and refuse a platform to cranks
[Christopher M. Federico]@chrispps.bsky.social · last wk.I don't stan Fauci in any mawkish resistlib way but I do not blame him for not wanting to play along on television with a gaggle of conspiracy-addled degenerates who are objectively beneath him in terms of intellect, culture, and values
Important corollary: people are LESS likely to support authoritarian leaders if people around them don't. This is where "social proof" comes in. Be vocal and visible to social circles and neighbors about your resistance against authoritarians AND your support of pro-democracy candidates and causes
emptywheel@emptywheel.bsky.social · last wk.People are more likely to support authoritarian leaders if people around them do. www.psypost.org/anti-democra...
The thing is, I think you could actually teach something significant that way: have the player spend 15 minutes having their unit torn up by unseen airpower, then stop and ask, "was their morale broken, or do they *really* want to go fuck up that air base in the next mission?"
Part of the interior of Taversoe Tuick Chambered Cairn on Rousay - one of the Orkney islands. The cairn dates to the Neolithic, and is a wonderful example of a two-storey cairn with chambers on top of each other. 📸 My own. #TombTuesday #Rousay #Prehistory #Archaeology #Orkney
WOW, I crossed 20k followers! Huge thanks to each one of you for your interest in archaeology. To celebrate this milestone, here's a highlight of our collections,an #IceAge masterpiece: The so-called Venus of Hohle Fels (a cave on the Swabian Jura) was carved in mammoth ivory some 40,000 years..🧵1/2
Opinion | A reporter’s work on unsafe jails shows why California shouldn’t weaken its public records law Giving agencies more time to fill records requests would likely delay families getting details on how their loved ones died in custody.
Opinion | A reporter’s work on unsafe jails shows why California shouldn’t weaken its public records law
Giving agencies more time to fill records requests would likely delay families getting details on how their loved ones died in custody.
cal.news
An amazing quote from Lindsey Graham in this Atlantic story. It really captures an essential truth about politics that too few people ever really come to terms with. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Happy #CtenophoreCtuesday! For your moment of zen, enjoy this majestic comb jelly (Aulacoctena sp.), discovered 1.4 miles below the ocean's surface during the #NazcaHighSeas Expedition off the coast of Chile (2024) 🔊🪼 #ctenophore #scicomm #MarineLife #MarineBiodiversity 📽️: @schmidtocean.bsky.social
Thomas Pynchon Nicholson Baker John McPhee Michael Moorcock Daniel Mendelsohn
Noah Berlatsky@nberlat.bsky.social · 4w agofive living writers that you've read five books by each Rita Dove Tasha Suri Courtney Milan Grant Morrison Tom Perrotta
Some Florida students put on a short, silent, completely nonviolent protest during a panel featuring the college president, and now, in the Free Republic of DeSantisLand, they’re being ordered to do Stalin-era confessions
Look if you think it’s fine for Trump to corruptly get a red card revoked (or “suspended”) bc FIFA is already corrupt, maybe you understand the MAGA mindset better than you think. “All politicians are corrupt so it’s ok for Trump to be corrupt” is a very common maga rationalization
🐘 check out our newest paper from Liang Bua! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Did H. floresiensis hunt Stegodon? 🔪 Did they also had control use of fire? 🔥 We tested these early claims of complex behavior using taphonomy, experimental archaeology, and zooarchaeology of the Stegodon assemblage.
doi.org
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is as far from us now as the film was from the time it was set in (1936).
William Daniell, Remains of the Earls Palace, Kirkwall, 1814 https://botfrens.com/collections/14375/contents/1125198
"Alabama Community News LLC is not a real corporation, and 1819 News never funded any roll-up of Alabama weeklies. It’s all fake." (But why?) www.niemanlab.org/2026/07/now-...
Now we’re getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news
Did 47 Alabama newspapers die on a single day and no one noticed? (Hint: No, they didn't.)
niemanlab.org
