We’re in the period of craziness before an election where everyone is arguing about polls and each partisan side is panicking that it hasn’t done enough or isn’t in a good place. I know, we have been for awhile already. This week this all reached a fever pitch on social media and in the news […]
Digital Humanities Tools: Comprehensive Exams
Comps are nuts. Bonkers. Silliness. They are an outdated hazing ritual that history departments continue to force PhD students to participate in. And we still have to do them. I am going to share how I have chosen to handle comps from a workflow and tools perspective with the hope that others will use similar […]
James Burnham, Congress, and the Modern Bureaucracy
If anything characterizes the current moment in American political history, it’s not words like crisis or chaos or socialist or fascist. It’s powerlessness. Impotence. Whether it’s gun control or spending reduction, tax reform, or environmental policy, the overwhelming sense one feels, regardless of ideological position, is a sense of acute impotence. The big things seem […]
Elon’s plan
What if Elon’s cozying up to extremists and un-virtue signaling to Republicans is really about expanding the right’s acceptance of electric cars? Bear with me here. No question, this story is part crazy-bored-billionaire-without-self-control plus egomaniac douchebag. But Elon isn’t dumb. In looking at his destructive and crazy actions since buying Twitter, we should contemplate what […]
Data analysis is damaging my two favorite things: politics and baseball.
Baseball is in crisis. And major contributing factors are the data and internet revolutions. Analytics and data analysis have completely changed how the game is managed and played. It has meant fewer balls in play and longer game times. And a crisis of both demographics and viewership is already underway as a result. Politics has […]
The coming Democratic majority
The recent Dobbs decision is, without doubt, the greatest civil rights tragedy of my lifetime. Tens of thousands of women will be forced into motherhood against their will. They will be forced to have their bodies changed against their will. They will be forced into the unknowable psychological strain of parenthood without regard to their […]
Shame on me.
As a young person, I remember wondering how my father could be so backward. A progressive intellectual type, my dad was one of the people I most looked up to. (He still is, by the way.) But when I was about 16, so around 1999, Dad and I were in a knock-down drag out fight […]
It’s gross, but Biden needs to sell-out on immigration.
I know this isn’t going to be a popular opinion. But this needs to be said. Joe Biden should sell-out on immigration. Yes, he was already the more moderate of the options previously available to Democrats. But he needs to do more to neutralize the President’s coming onslaught on the topic. The 2020 election will […]
The re-ruralization of the West
COVID-19 is going to have a great many long-term implications that we can’t begin to predict. But one that needs to be considered is a likely big demographic change. Perhaps one of the most important of the coming century. People are going to begin leaving cities. A storm of demographics, economics, and technology are going […]