Robert Paulett
@robertpaulett.bsky.social
Historian of early America and bits of Britain. Apostate southerner. Yells about maps, St. Louis, and higher ed.
People have got to stop learning their history from memes.
Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 4h agoNo, the term is not actually a racist reference to indigenous people per all expert sources I’ve seen - creeks rising when you’re dealing with dirt roads was just a very real issue in the 1800s: www.worldwidewords.org/qa-god1.htmllo
Meanwhile St. Louis keeps going right to appease its billionaires and the population is absolutely cratering.
Oliver Willis@owillis.bsky.social · 7h ago"if new york goes left, all the business money will move away" reality: business people like living in nyc and dont actually want to live in red states or podunk www.wsj.com/us-news/mamd...
Missouri voters save themselves from Republican supermajority once again, but maybe should stop voting for Republican supermajorities in the first place.
Missouri Independent@missouriindependent.com · 20h agoMissouri voters reject income tax phaseout, initiative petition changes #moleg #mogov
Historians might need to more actively debunk the idea that 60s Civil Rights caused 70s stagflation, because people seem to think it did.
Sending out emails like MRIs, scanning for the parts of the university that still function.
Meanwhile, its fellow aging river town St. Louis is planning to print up an arch-sized banner that reads “Go away! Data centers only!”
Harvey J. Miller@mobileharv.bsky.social · 3d agoCincinnati has developed a Climate Migration Readiness Plan to absorb as many as 525,000 newcomers by 2050. It calls for building much denser housing, expanding public transit and decreasing the city’s reliance on fossil fuels.
The US should normalize letting shitty presidents quit and go home.
YouGov@yougov.co.uk · 5d agoWhich political party is currently doing the most to set the political agenda? Labour: 33% (+19 from 28-29 Aug 2025) Reform UK: 16% (-28) Conservative: 7% (+4) Greens: 4% (+3) Lib Dems: 1% (=) yougov.com/en-gb/daily-...
For the record, I want more Odyssey discourse. I want more legions uncurling themselves from their years-long fetal crouch and yelling passionately because THIS SHIT MATTERS!
There’s also just the brass-tacks issue that these people are stealing our time as well as our energy and money.
Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 5d agolooking at the headlines and reflecting once again on how all the smart, hard-working, honest people I know feel like they’re going at least a little insane in our era of total Stupid Immoral Asshole ascendancy
They are also working to discredit the idea of public hearings in general prior to the next Congress.
Don Moynihan@donmoyn.bsky.social · 6d agoNew, from me: It is fine to disagree with aspects of the pandemic response. But what we saw at Fauci's hearing was something different: a show trial where cranks tried to threaten and shift blame to an public servant. Here is why this is bad for all of us.🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/watching-t...
I mean my grandparents were barely teenagers at that point but either a) good student about to give up and go live in poverty on his parent’s dirt farm or b) bipolar depressive on his way to being a lifetime alcoholic ne’er-do-well.
Revan@revan.eurosky.social · 7d agoEnough “what would you do on the commune questions” If you got sent back 100 years and were given your grandparent’s job, what are you doing?
Evangelicals are, after all, a bunch of people forgiving each other for the heinous sh*t they do.
emptywheel@emptywheel.bsky.social · 6d agoParticularly given that Trump has done so much of this or similar, I'm a bit sad they didn't include "defraud MAGAts at scale." The support numbers would still be sky-high. But it would be a useful demonstrative. www.politico.com/news/2026/07...
Was just thinking the other day how insane it will seem even for this insane age that there was briefly this wildly popular thing where corpses were turned into plastic and displayed at, like, the mall. What a ghoul.
The New York Times@nytimes.com · 7d agoGunther von Hagens, the scientist behind the popular and polarizing traveling exhibitions of human corpses, has died at 81.
PLEASE SHARE THIS To the young person (longish dark hair, patterned waistcoat, chinos & DM boots) who left this scroll of papers on the Piccadilly Line train at South Kensington station at about 4.25pm today, I’ve handed it to the station staff at Hammersmith.
“Students have been unenrolled because they were inconvenient to our student support services” really sums up the current tail-wags-dog approach to higher ed decision making.
It would be truly beautiful to see a major studio go bankrupt over a gritty, CGI-heavy adaptation of “The Rape of the Lock.”
Jesse Hawken@jessehawken.bsky.social · last wk.Studio execs are going to want to adapt more poems for the big screen now
Jesus Christ, how many giant busts of Warren G Harding does one country need?
Presidents Park - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
The Baffler@thebaffler.com · last wk.For our latest issue, Andrew Norman Wilson photographs the two-ton, eighteen-to-twenty-foot presidential busts of sculptor David Adickes. thebaffler.com/odds-and-end...
My “No, we are not trying to censor the student newspaper” email has raised a lot of questions answered by the email.
Goodnight to all of you blissfully unaware of what “corn sweat” is.
Media coverage of higher ed makes more sense though if you think of it as “shrinking industry tries to eliminate nearest competitor in Explainer Economy” rather than “reporting.”
Mark Copelovitch@mcopelov.bsky.social · last wk.I look forward to all the reports & coverage about all of the internal problems & mistakes of all of these other institutions, in the same way that universities are constantly blamed (& blaming themselves) for “declining trust.” “Compared to what?” news.gallup.com/poll/712436/...
I’m not joking when I say DC operates more like a palace court than the seat of a republic and has for some time.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2w agoTrump jokes about serving a third term — and gets laughs at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Functionally, the core purpose of Heritage, FedSoc, AEI, etc. is to financially incentivize people to not learn anything about law, history, basic science, etc. while still moving them to credentials. Fill a whole admin with people like that and you get the dumbest regime money could buy.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2w agoTrump: "I think we'll put a major tariffs on Texas-- on Mexico because of the lettuce. And we'll put a big tariff on Canada because of the smoke."
Cara Spencer and Donald Trump reading from same script again.
Spencer: Data center criticism is valid, but St. Louis shouldn’t be ‘NIMBY city’
Mayor Cara Spencer said that data center opponents have valid concerns about the developments, but that newly proposed zoning rules would help protect St. Louisans while weighing economic growth.
stlpr.org
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2w agoTrump on data centers: "You have to convince your communities how great these things are. You can't fight it. You have to go with it."
Imagine a better world where she could have just told him directly to his face that he was a repulsive creep.
Joshua Erlich@joshuaerlich.bsky.social · 2w agothis post is the entire intellectual framework of the American right
These colors don’t run. Except for the border.
jen ramos-eisen@jenramose.online · 2w agoif this flag offends you i'll help you pack
Called it. Now that the informal media campaign for receivership has begun I give it less than a year.
Detroit had a big renaissance. Could St. Louis do the same?
St. Louis leaders say unity can lead the city in the same direction as Detroit, a city that turned around declining population, mass vacancy and the largest municipal bankruptcy ever filed.
stlpr.org
Probably one reason the banks are putting so much pressure on unis to cut deferred salary majors like English and history in favor of immediate earners like engineering and nursing.
Chicago Tribune@chicagotribune.com · 2w agoToday, around 9.5 million people — 1 in 5 federal student loan borrowers — are in default, meaning they are more than nine months behind on their payments.
