I thought the @benyt profile of Heather Cox Richardson was quite good; I think her success (and prominence of many academics on Twitter) evidences a twinned liberal skepticism of journalistic process / embrace of academic authority
@benyt Like Ben, I rarely open the newsletter, but I also recognize that I'm not the audience. When I talked to Ben about it he described it as "PBS Newshour, but online" and that feels right. Descriptive, authoritative, historically rooted, and most importantly, once a fucking day
The audience reminds me of some older liberals I've encountered recently: not MSNBC boomers; they've reached their limit. They want something very clear and then the comments section that is not their toxic Facebook account
And, like my favorite Substacks, also has the freedom to do whatever the fuck it wants. Tonight's post was not on the president, or the veto over-rule, on what could've happened at Wounded Knee:
Also worth wondering: could a non-tenured academic do this? Devote this much time to this? How would this popularity affect the tenure review process (explicitly and implicitly)?
A FB group I'm part of dislikes this piece, in part because they thought it too media/business angle focused, not expansive enough in its understanding of why so many are drawn to her writing — I, too, would love to read something that goes a lot more in depth
These people were also annoyed by the focus on all of the other Substack writers, which felt outside the point. (Which makes total sense — the Substack Writers is something that the Substack discourse (on here?) is obsessed with, but most readers, not so much)
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Off Twitter all day but I heard the North Idaho siren and must answer the call: there are many parts of North Idaho that are not what my family would call "in the toolies" but this company is IN THE TOOLIES
Look at this website. The copyright was last updated in 2008. The design is straight out of.....2002? They are the people you call when you live in the woods and no other company will get you internet. Based in Priest River, serving Priest Lake.
I used to go to church camp in this area and it's the sort of place where you'd be out hiking and find an RV in the middle of nowhere and shut the fuck up v quickly and back away. It's prime American Redoubt real estate.
I hope you'll spend some time with these stories — filled with joy, deep loneliness, epiphany and mourning — of people navigating the pandemic while living alone:
"I didn't take advantages of opportunities to enjoy life in the past, and after a year locked in my house thinking about the people I loved who died — well, I've stared into that abyss enough."
I talked to @Patrick_Wyman about Bro Culture + Joe Rogan + Yakima, WA + Local Gentry + Empire in Decline + Going from a PhD to doing public history on a podcast & a newsletter. A real fucking delight:
@Patrick_Wyman "The militarization of the police and the ideology of the Thin Blue Line are archetypal products of this extended Bro Universe, because most police are archetypal Bro subjects."
I wrote about what's actually going on when your day is filled with meeting after meeting after meeting and no one's paying attention and then you have to schedule another meeting:
When I started looking at this graph it took me awhile to realize that the big jump about 2/3 of the way into the year coincided almost perfectly when kids went back to school — people started scheduling *even more* meetings
To me, this gets to the heart of constant-meeting-culture: scheduling meetings feels like a way to assuage concerns about productivity (and precarity); in practice, more meetings almost always just makes you feel less productive, more like shit
Unmanageable traffic, neglected public transit, no parking downtown, roomy homes with backyards a solid 45 minutes away in traffic, untenable extended summers, you know, the dream
I loved my old picture palace in Lewiston, Idaho growing up, I loved the cinder block multiplex with 4 screens that's now a doggy daycare, I love shiny new mall 20-plexes with 17 escalators and I really love tiny indie houses figuring out how to make it work
I love my weird rituals (no one touches the popcorn until the credits roll), I love previews, I love the weird AMC quasi-commercials, I love shushing the person behind me, I especially love going to the movies by myself