Mark Twain was the Taylor Swift of 1876. He was the most celebrated cultural figure in the US, & his friend William Dean Howells believed a Twain endorsement might swing the election. The problem was, Twain hated all the presumptive candidates. 🧵 Twain had witnessed many of them in action during his brief stint as a DC political correspondent. It wasn’t until the surprise nomination of Rutheford Hayes during the contentious GOP convention that Twain became inclined to get involved.

I followed my curiosity about Walz’s teaching career down a wormhole this morning. This thread just scratches the surface.

But I have two more pressing things to say about what I learned.

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https://twitter.com/measeybold/status/1821185467640885513

1.) Tim Walz taught in the Alliance School District for only 4 years, but somehow in that short time he coached three football teams, men’s & women’s basketball, & middle school girls track. He also launched foreign exchange & summer abroad programs, & a scholarship…

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Maybe we have underrated Coach Walz.

Tag yourself. I'm "quiet girl always reading some book about Queen Elizabeth." Of course I found the yearbook from which the NYT stole that photo.

Mark Twain hated the Fourth of July.

He was often invited to speak at Independence Day festivities. His audiences assumed that his reliably unpatriotic remarks were tongue-in-cheek jests.

But he meant that shit.

1/9 They laughed heartily when he said, in Keokuk in 1886, that the best thing a speaker could do on such an occasion was sit down, which he then did.

They laughed in 1899 when he suggested the holiday was "only sacred" to "the surgeon, the undertaker, & the insurance offices."

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What role can global celebrities play in responding to genocide? Does it matter what Beyonce or Taylor Swift says about Gaza?

In the aftermath of his 1905 world tour, Mark Twain was likely the most famous cultural figure on Earth.

What did he do with it?

1/9 While this was not true for the entirety of his career, from 1905 forward Twain understood celebrity as intrinsically political. What was the point if not to leverage it against other forms of power?

In Jan. of 1906, he wrote, "Czars and Leopolds are my quarry these days."

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A few people have asked me to parse this. Here are the bullet points.

1. It is much more accurate to call this a 'shift' than a 'cliff.' The number of college-eligible graduates is not going to change. The only sharp decline is among white-identified prospective students.

https://twitter.com/MEASeybold/status/1763972107170427301

2. The 'enrollment cliff' is being promoted & literally sold to HigherEd administrators by private consultancies & proprietary data aggregators, all of whom are owned by private equity firms, in most cases KKR, Blackstone, & Vista.

The crisis in the humanities is the crisismongering of the humanities.

This is what happens when strategic decision-makers in admin are uniformly recruited from places (business schools, econ depts, executive suites, etc.) where economic rationality reigns without rival.

1/5 Ignorant of their reflexive relationship to market forecasts, when they see a forecast, they never think

1.) Is this accurate?
2.) Can it be prevented?
3.) What needs to be protected from random whims of the market?

Instead, they rush to "get out front" of the forecast.

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Today in Twain Studies, I learned that Square, the gamed developer that created the Final Fantasy franchise also, concurrently, created a Tom Sawyer video game for Nintendo.

1/5 The same designers, programmers, & artists worked on Square's Tom Sawyer & Final Fantasy I-II, all of which were completed in 1987-1988, although Sawyer's release was delayed until '89. There are, as such, tremendous similarities in gameplay & visuals.

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The Job Market: A One-Act 🧵 Non-Academic: Hey, Nathaniel.

Recent PhD: Hey, Brett.

Non-Acad: Last time we talked you were applying for jobs. Where'd you land?

Recent PhD: Nowhere.

Non-Acad: You've been unemployed all this time!?!?!

Recent PhD: No, no. I still teach at PhD U. There's infinite demand...

Elon is a creative accountant who rebranded himself as an engineer. Like any fintech grifter, he lives in perpetual fear of liquidity crises, like the one he now faces.

Most prognosticators I'm seeing predict one of two things.

1/8 1.) He reverses course & Twitter returns to something resembling what it looked like in Summer 2022.

or

2.) Infrastructure decay & active user flight spiral the company towards bankruptcy & obsolescence.

Unfortunately, I think there is a door #3.

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