David H. Montgomery Profile picture
"A French history podcaster and enormous goshdang nerd after our own hearts" — @andrewvandam. Host of @thesiecle; senior data journalist with @YouGovAmerica.
colleenmw Profile picture Potato Of Reason Profile picture 2 subscribed
Feb 15 4 tweets 1 min read
I finally hit on why "Hazbin Hotel" is leaving me so cold. I love a stylized sitcom about depraved souls in the afterlife struggling toward redemption: It's called "The Good Place," & while it lacked raunch, songs & art deco animation, it had sophisticated multi-layered writing. Partly this is a difference in execution — if you hired Michael Schur to script-doctor the dialogue on "Hazbin Hotel" you'd get a much better show — but in large part it's just intent. TGP was aiming at the border between middle- and high-brow; HH is aiming at middle-low.
Nov 21, 2023 5 tweets 3 min read
You BET we polled people about #Napoleon. On the eve of a new biopic, most Americans don't know very much about Bonaparte, and what they do know, they don't especially like.

My story for @YouGovAmerica, with lots of charts: today.yougov.com/society/articl…

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The U.S. actually has the highest rates of considering Napoleon's legacy to be "negative" of any of 8 countries YouGov polled. That includes several other countries that Napoleon actually invaded, humiliated and occupied.

today.yougov.com/society/articl…
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Oct 26, 2023 5 tweets 3 min read
This is a fun one. I had @YouGovAmerica ask 29,000 people how they organize their books.

- 29% don't organize their books
- 22% sort by genre
- 19% alphabetize
- 3% sort by color

But it turns out this depends HEAVILY on how many books you own. My story: today.yougov.com/society/articl…
Image cc @WaltHickey @pbump @PatrickRuffini @goodreads @DanielBGreene @aedwardslevy @NateSilver538
Jul 5, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
NEW: Full-time caregiving is the #1 reason prime-age Americans don't work. In my latest for the @MinneapolisFed, I break down the stats behind this key demographic group:

- mostly parents
- mostly but decreasingly women
- mostly happy staying home
minneapolisfed.org/article/2023/w… Among adults age 25-54, women are 90% of full-time caregivers. But that's down from 96% two decades ago, while the share of full-time caregivers who are men has doubled.

https://t.co/xWLDUpz3cPminneapolisfed.org/article/2023/w…
May 19, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
When the @Suntimes ran an undercover bar to catch sleazy officials: "I think one of the things that amazed us is that these inspectors sold out public safety on the cheap. They were not taking huge amounts. We were told to leave $10 for one inspector & $25 for another inspector." @Suntimes From this oral history (via @kottke): topic.com/the-story-behi…
Apr 16, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
"Weak-link problems are problems where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is... Some problems are strong-link problems: overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters." experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a… "A car engine is a weak-link problem: it doesn’t matter how great your spark plugs are if your transmission is busted." But music is a strong-link problem: "At worst, bad music makes it a little harder for you to find good music."
Jan 30, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
@robkhenderson @AviWoolf You should read "Status & Culture" by W. David Marx. He has a simplified 4-class model of status-seeking:

- New Money: Status via conspicuous consumption
- Old Money: Status via cultural capital
- Professionals: Status by finding new cultural capital
- Lower: Whatever they can @robkhenderson @AviWoolf I oversimplified massively there — it's a book-length treatment on the topic and I had to repeatedly rewrite to fit it in one tweet. But very thought-provoking.
Jan 30, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
Looking at the author's choice of history podcasts — popular shows from big names that jump around from topic to topic — I'm not surprised he came to the conclusion that podcasts are shallow and don't teach you much. You can buy shallow books aimed at mass audiences that aren't very profound, either, but that doesn't mean that books as a medium suck. It just means you should choose better books. Or podcasts.

(May I suggest @TheSiecle?)
Jan 28, 2023 33 tweets 6 min read
I was sitting at home, minding my own business, when suddenly it happened *again*.

See everyone in 138 minutes. Image Reminded again of that guy who tweeted about how he couldn’t get more than 10 minutes into Master & Commander before turning it off in boredom.

This is what’s happening about the 10-minute mark:
Nov 7, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
#rstats: I've got a dataframe with some gnarly column names — sentences from a survey questionnaire.

I have a tibble with the shortname I want to replace each long column name with.

How can I batch rename this

Difficulty: no pivoting, needs to work if a column disappears. I can't pivot because that would wipe out factor orders. The exact questions in each survey vary a little — I have all the possible variations in my tibble, but something that relies on an exact list of columns appearing in an exact order won't work.
Nov 5, 2022 37 tweets 8 min read
There's been a lot of talk about supposed "election fraud" lately, so let's check in with some of the great masters of electoral shenanigans.

By now you know where I'm going with this — we're talking about the government of Bourbon Restoration France. THREAD: 2/ This thread is adapted from my history podcast, @TheSiecle. If you like this thread you should probably check it out! Available wherever you get podcasts, or read my full annotated transcripts online at thesiecle.com

I recommend starting from the beginning.
Nov 3, 2022 9 tweets 3 min read
Is Minnesota in the early stages of another fall #COVID19 wave? We can only guess.

Last week we saw hospitalizations rise making me think it more likely we were in a wave.

But this week saw COVID hospitalizations fall again, leading me to a downward adjustment in probability. Non-ICU COVID hospital bed use, which had been worryingly mirroring last fall's trends, broke away a little bit this week.

Meanwhile ICU COVID bed usage is a fraction of past levels with no signs of rising.
Nov 3, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
The brilliance of Tolkien is that The Shire feels so REAL even though a moment's thought reveals it to be both absurd and incoherent with the rest of his Middle Earth worldbuilding. The biggest issue, of course, is economic (Tolkien's weakest area of worldbuilding). The sophistication and abundance of consumer goods in The Shire makes no sense for a largely rural, mostly autarkic society.
Nov 2, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
For this post I'm ignoring most of this to focus on one historical claim: "You must do as Lincoln did. He... issued an arrest warrant for SCOTUS Chief Justice Taney."

Now, Lincoln did not issue such a warrant. But he *maybe* drafted one — though the evidence is very sketchy. Wikipedia has a page called "Taney Arrest Warrant," calling it a "conjectural controversy in Abraham Lincoln scholarship."

The sole source that Lincoln secretly drafted a warrant to arrest the chief justice is a later statement by Lincoln's friend & bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon.
Nov 1, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
POLL: Which of these leitmotifs from Howard Shore's #LordOfTheRings score do you think is the most *iconic*? (Not the best or your favorite.)

Links to samples in the replies. The Ring Theme:
Oct 29, 2022 100 tweets 20 min read
It's election season here in the U.S., so let's talk '20s elections.

I mean 1820s, of course. It's a history thread! 🧵 1/ 2/ These are the results from the 1824 elections for France's Chamber of Deputies.

As you can probably tell from the monochromatic nature of the map, the elections were something of a landslide. So-called "Ultraroyalist" candidates won *everywhere*.
Oct 28, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
Today's release was the 31st main episode of my history podcast, @TheSiecle, and the 47th overall release counting bonus episodes.

All told, for this project I've published 283,982 words since Episode 1 in January 2019, with 1,552 different footnotes from ~150 different sources. @TheSiecle The recordings have covered just under 22 hours of total audio content, and have been downloaded around 195,000 different times.
Oct 21, 2022 16 tweets 5 min read
WARNING: this thread is going to make you feel OLD.

Time's march inexorably buries all things, as surely as several feet of snow will bury a six-year-old wearing a puffy coat over a pirate costume.

That's right, it's a ❄️🎃❄️ HALLOWEEN BLIZZARD DATA THREAD ❄️🎃❄️ 1/ 2/ If there's one quintessential thing about this time of year in Minnesota, it's longtime residents rhapsodizing about the 1991 Halloween Blizzard, and newer residents wishing they'd just shut up about it.

But me being me, this year I thought: how can I *quantify* this?
Oct 21, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
The latest week of wastewater data for the Twin Cities shows a modest uptick in COVID levels.

Unfortunately we just don't know yet: will this KEEP rising? Or is this yet another random bump like we've seen so many times recently? Mid-October is about when wastewater levels started to spike last year in Minnesota (no Oct 2020 data, alas), so to the degree that COVID is seasonal (some, at least!) a modest weekly uptick is particularly unwelcome to see right now. But this doesn't PROVE anything.
Jul 24, 2022 25 tweets 6 min read
The magic in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" is murky and amorphous, and even Tolkien himself didn't have a firm grasp on the system of magic in Middle Earth. But one aspect is relatively clear and consistent: the power of words. A thread: 2/ The Silmarillion tells of how the world — "Arda" — was literally sung into being by the Ainur, directed by Eru ("the One"). And we all know Tolkien loved language. So we shouldn't be surprised that words are important for how magic works in Middle-Earth.
Jun 24, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
New wastewater data for the Twin Cities shows COVID concentrations last week weren’t merely plateauing as they have been for a while — they actually ROSE gradually. 5-10%, week-over-week. ImageImage This is mostly driven by variant BA.5, which is rising steadily. BA.2.12.1 is declining in absolute & relative terms. BA.4 is rising more gradually. Image