Pod: Tides of History, currently covering the Iron Age. Book: "The Verge," on the world around 1500. Coming soon: The Pursuit of Dadliness. pwymanusc at gmail.
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Jan 6, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I've essentially stopped talking and writing about American politics since January 6th of last year because I don't think any amount of historical perspective - the thing I can actually offer - is going to change anybody's mind or alter the path we're on.
The situation is what it is. The stakes are as clear as they can possibly be. What's the sense in getting myself all riled up, getting yelled at on Twitter or Facebook by somebody who lives in an alternate political reality, when we're simply marching toward the inevitable?
Jun 14, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It's pretty tough to have an honest and necessary reckoning with the truth of American history when you're fighting against a myth of past righteousness that justifies the present.
History isn't neutral. It's always a matter of picking and emphasizing particular things. The things you choose make up the heart of the narrative you tell about the past. There's no such thing as an unbiased history, because your biases and interests determine what you choose.
May 20, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One of the funniest and bleakest things about the 21st century media landscape is the idea that guys like Chris Cuomo - good-looking middle-aged dudes who look good on camera, but are entirely devoid of any actual value - are worth millions of dollars
You could literally replace him with a low-rent chatbot projecting words through a barely literate bodybuilder you found at a local gym and there would be no measurable difference in his show
This is really good analysis of what the stimulus actually is and does, though I probably would’ve put more emphasis on the reliance on incompetent, overloaded state unemployment insurance and cross-pressured business owners to handle the actual distribution of benefits
Administrative burdens matter, so do the mechanisms we rely on to deliver benefits, and just because the numbers are in there doesn’t mean people actually got them; checks matter because they’re easy
Democrats will probably lose seats in the midterms or another future election if they do big stuff. So what? God forbid that some replacement-level congresspeople nobody will remember in a decade lose their seats and have to go on to lucrative posts doing something else.
Was getting Medicaid expansion and the ACA, with all its flaws, worth a bunch of Dems in swing districts losing in 2010? Absolutely! Take a swing, lose your majority, get back to it in two years. Christ, just have some gumption.
Oct 30, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
1) Carefully select what you're going to read in the first place - use bibliographies, Google Scholar, read reviews. 2) You don't necessarily have to read the whole book. You can get the overall argument out of the intro, conclusion, and intro/conclusion of each chapter.
Most books - at least ones that make it through an editorial process - follow a basic structure, where they lay out the argument, then the evidence, then the conclusions. Once you know how to follow the structure, the speed picks up dramatically.
Oct 18, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It's a fucking embarrassment to the historical profession that Jill Lepore keeps wielding the term "history" like this in deeply muddled, confused, and short-sighted op-eds. "Let history, not partisans, prosecute Trump" washingtonpost.com/outlook/truth-…
It's not entirely clear what she's arguing here - that the basic institutions of the US suffice to deal with the fallout from the Trump era, that the impulse to punish wrongdoing is actually bad in itself, or that truth and reconciliation commissions are not ideal.
Apr 18, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The range of potential outcomes we're looking at right now has something like "stumble through with many tens of thousands of deaths and a borderline depression" as the best-case scenario. The more serious outcomes are "constitutional crisis and mass social uprisings."
It's absolutely mind-boggling to me that the national political class isn't looking at enormous breadlines, reports of millions upon millions of people out of work, and a timeline of at least a year and thinking that they should be working around the clock on policy solutions.
Mar 25, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This is hard for us to grasp in our age of immediacy and instant gratification, but that's not how pandemics work; in the US, we're looking at a rolling wave of spread that's nowhere close to peaking in the vast majority of the country.
The whole point of social distancing and lockdowns is that the temporary disruption is preferable to a long, drawn-out period of rolling infection that overwhelms the health system, knocks vital workers out of their jobs with illness, and, oh yeah, might kill lots of people.
Mar 12, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I spent the better part of a decade thinking about the end of the Roman Empire and what it felt like to live through that, in all its various manifestations - the collapse of political authority, spreading pandemics, economic crises - and now it all makes a lot more sense.
Processes of breakdown happen very slowly and imperceptibly. They're mostly aggregates small things: taxes not getting collected here, bridges not getting repaired there, things like that. Then, in a moment of crisis, the sheer level of decay becomes clear. You see the aggregate.
Jan 5, 2020 • 20 tweets • 3 min read
I have some thoughts about the declines and falls of imperial ruling classes, which may or may not be relevant to our current state of affairs.
1) The United States is an empire. This shouldn't be controversial, but let's get it out of the way; empires don't all look alike, they do different things with different goals and approaches and technologies, and nobody who studies empires thinks the US isn't one.
Dec 17, 2019 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
So here's why I think this much-hyped paper - "The Justinianic Plague: An Inconsequential Pandemic?" is deeply wrong. This matters because its approach is superficially empirical and quantitative, but the data fundamentally doesn't speak to the problem they want it to.
1) Literary texts don't talk much or at all about the Justinianic Plague, they say, and those that do are unreliable. Well, for most of the region in question, there are no literary texts that could speak to plague. None. Zero. They don't exist.
Sep 16, 2019 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
People ask me about books all the time, and here's a brief, incomplete list of what I consider the most essential (but still accessible to the layperson) works across a range of areas and times:
1) Christopher Clark, "The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914." One of my favorite books because of how effectively it explores the relationship between deep structural forces and accidents of the moment.
Sep 6, 2019 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Some thoughts on the provocative "The End of the Roman Empire Wasn't That Bad" article by @JamesFallows: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…@JamesFallows Nobody whose opinion is worth hearing thinks that post-Roman Europe immediately devolved into a Mad Max-style hellscape. The world that followed was different. Population health and possibly diet were better, but it was less literate, urban, wealthy, and there were fewer people.
Feb 21, 2019 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I'm waiting to leave someplace and don't want to do anything productive, so here's a thread of historical figures and how they would've played on social media:
1) Erasmus of Rotterdam. Europe's first bestselling author in the age of print was an inveterate self-promoter, so it stands to reason he would've been a) good at social media, and b) utterly insufferable. Expect a steady stream of sponsored posts.
Oct 5, 2018 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
I'm basically retired from MMA stuff and didn't write anything about McGregor-Khabib. A brief thread of my thoughts, for those interested:
The basic dynamic of the fight is initiative and who holds it. Both Khabib and McGregor like to move forward, Khabib to use the fence for takedowns and McGregor to keep his opponent at distance and set up his counter left.
Sep 24, 2018 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Part of the reason that things in the US feel so turbulent right now is that we're in the midst of a good, old-fashioned, full-blown elite crisis.
This is most obvious in politics but also within the economy and society more generally. American elites largely define themselves as a meritocracy; a meritocratic elite is supposed to be fundamentally competent, so when they do incompetent things, it's hard to square.
Sep 4, 2018 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Been reading a lot about the Reformation recently, and thinking about how the printing press played into it. What's striking is that practically all the major reformers were "print natives" born after about 1480 - they had grown up in a world where print was everywhere.
The major reason the Reformation spread so far so quickly, and took so many different forms (often wild and disruptive forms) was due to print. The reformers were savvy and understood how to use print to spread their messages.
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