Yes it's obviously a bad-faith critique coming from the Free Beacon and, no, it's not really relevant at all to the campus protest stuff or whether she should keep her job, but as someone who just finished a dissertation seeing this stuff is so aggravating Part of why original academic work is so painstakingly slow is people go to great lengths to develop notetaking techniques that avoid doing stuff like this. Imagine what it's like to find out other people are just...not doing that.

the thing I cannot emphasize enough about being a historian is, if 1% of the documents you see in the archive are useful, you're having a good day there are probably fields for which this is not true but...not postwar US political history

Environmentalism enjoyed a nice run being associated with the left of center but I wonder how much longer that's going to last now that its most famous adherent is the king of England long to rain(barrel) over us

I know @sam_d_1995 attracts a lot of strange dunk attempts but "Rather than complaining about Upper West Side rent why don't you just go gentrify a cheaper neighborhood?" might be the strangest do these people not understand that their "advice" is literally describing how the present housing crisis works

Insisting against all evidence that there is not an oversupply of humanities PhDs accomplishes something very crucial, which is it allows scholars to avoid the question of whether it is immoral to continue training graduate students "There is a good job on the other end of this pipeline, we just haven't willed it into existence yet with the proper degree of militancy"

The straightforward explanation is people are working from a set of priors that are now over 50 years old and fundamentally don't reflect the major problems in cities today or their causes, a problem that has been exacerbated by a lot of half-baked writing about urban change

https://twitter.com/hamiltonnolan/status/1637061740172136455

To read a lot of writing about cities, the gentrification era that began in the '80s is really just an extension of the Master Builder era of the '20s-'60s. Rather than what it really was, which was a rejection of that era...

I've never been terribly impressed by the "we have to let babies sit on laps or babies will die in car crashes" rationale, which is true but is also an incentive that we pretty obviously don't apply to any other aspect of transportation policy

https://twitter.com/PTBwrites/status/1636739747031703552

like, the FAA could also reduce maintenance standards to lower ticket costs and *probably* the slightly higher number of plane crashes would still save lives on net by discouraging driving, but we don't do that because it's not the FAA's job to game alternate realities

I'd like to bike more but the fact is if you live in a place where you need a car, having a car obviates the need to use a bike more than people who are really into bikes would have you believe

https://twitter.com/_johnsonator/status/1636522240417120258

Like, I would love it from a policy perspective if Harvard Square parking were scarce and expensive, but it isn't, so I drive to Harvard Square a lot more than I'd like because the value proposition is undeniable.

What do I know but I really think this new wing of the GOP that's like "Trumpy vibes but bog standard Republican policies" is not a recipe for any kind of electoral success Yes MAGA people like Trump's chaotic aura but people underestimate how much of his appeal in 2016 was that he did not seem to be pushing the same old Heritage Foundation crap

I think this is much less true than when Matt lived here, but to the extent that it is true, I suspect a lot of it is that the cost of opening and running a restaurant here discourages experimentation. If Italian food gets people in the door, why do something else?

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1611344950410575875

The other thing I will say is the Boston MSA is not that large, but punches above its weight in the cultural imagination because of the industries that are here and its location within the NE Corridor. Is Boston's food scene really that much worse than Phoenix? Minneapolis?

So it turns out the "all those apartments are actually empty" thing is true, but for social housing washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/… Obviously I am being flip, but I do think this underlines how housing policy really does require one to appreciate what the government and the housing market are and are not good at, or at least that what one is implicitly asking for a lot of the time is a more competent state

IMO this, more than centrism, is Obama's worst legacy—the politics of "all our supporters already exist, we just need to find them" when in hindsight, we know that Obama was actually winning by appealing to a lot of people outside of the base!

https://twitter.com/opinonhaver/status/1531022460346216448

The weird thing is how Bernie sort of picked up this idea rhetorically, when in 2016 he was actually doing what Obama had been doing all along—talking about issues in ways that appealed to cross-pressured voters

I see people say this *all the time* but academia is one of the less heritable of the major white-collar professions

As an oldest child I firmly endorse these findings, but I also bet that younger children have more variance, i.e. by virtue of having more freedom, more of them are unsuccessful but more of them are also extraordinarily successful

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1530245544743952384

"The oldest child grows up to run the family business" theory

Who is going to write the piece that says the new gun politics doesn't work for Democrats because the main impetus behind the old, more successful gun politics—preventing the intrusion of "urban" gun violence on the suburban middle class—has already been achieved Obviously "urban" is in quotes for a reason there...I don't think I have to explain that part by now.

The CDC website is uniquely terrible at explaining what the current vaccine policy is The page called "COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Shots" doesn't even mention the second booster

Ice skating, where you are by yourself doing weird tricks before a panel assigning you arbitrary numbers, is definitely the PhD program of the Olympics Alpine skiing, full of bros who live fast, look cool, and die young, is business school

I'm sorry what

https://twitter.com/BostonGlobe/status/1491129740442361863

You lift the mask mandate, not the vaccine mandate jesus christ

"Rebels" is a little ungenerous given that everyone from the FDA down to Pandemic Advice M.D. Twitter botched the messaging on boosters until December

https://twitter.com/paulmromer/status/1490814358590476290

Like, this was sort of a reasonable take given what we knew at the time but what we also knew was the booster posed virtually no risk, efficacy was waning, and variants with evasive potential were almost certainly going to pop up. Perpetual inability to think ahead of the curve.

My thought on this is while I don't like everything YIMBY twitter does (dunking on a course description? really?), there is some question-begging here as to whether being aggressive on Twitter is, in fact, a poor political choice, and I'm not sure it is thedailybeast.com/yimbys-could-s… Some of the power of YIMBYism clearly derives from its willingness to assert that certain dogmatic postsixties liberal ideas about land use and development are completely wrong. I'm not sure that idea becomes more popular if it is approached dialectically with NIMBYs instead.

If I were a Getty I would simply get married at the Getty actually tho