This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT.
After eight years on the academic job market, I'm thrilled to be joining
@Stanford
as the inaugural Harold Hohbach Historian at the Silicon Valley Archives. Come visit me in the Bay! I start this winter, and there's so much to be done.
Next year I'll be a visiting assistant professor at Cornell. My first class just went on the books: "Disassembling Silicon Valley: A People's History of High-Tech America across Race, Gender and Empire." Sign up and help me strip the Valley down for parts.
Thinking about another Stanford undergrad's account of campus politics, ca 1965: "They've got to find a new niche … And one of the niches is this civil-rights-student activist niche they fit into. As soon as they're there their independent thought stops."
New syllabus just dropped! "Capitalism: Theory and Practice." Would be v grateful for suggestions on the readings—it's a bit of a trick matching up historical studies with chapter and verse from 'Capital', and I'd love for this to be less Atlantic-centric.
The only truly great historian on the standard US history general exams list — which is why everyone just reads the intro and conclusion. Will never forgive Daniel Rodgers for doing Republicanism dirty.
This is half my conversations with
@CoreyRobin
. It's a brilliant point, and gets to the root of today's fascism debate—which was *exactly the same* in the 1950s, when academics were certain the US was on the road to fascism, with McCarthyism the first act.
Just as an instructive episode in intellectual history, someone should tell the story, in a popular venue that is sure to be read, how all the leading scholars of the 1950s thought McCarthyism was motivated exactly by this term—"status anxiety"—which they opposed to
Try reading Ellen Meiksins Wood aloud in any history department these days and watch as everyone's brains explode: "We are not obliged to accept a Manichaean choice between determinism and contingency. The real alternatives to both is history.”
Last time I wrote for my substack,
@Stanford
had to put together an entire internal task-force, publish a 75-page report, and issue a public apology.
This time, I'm taking on my own profession, the Supreme Court, and the right-wing anti-woke machine. 🤞🤞
Next up: "Disassembling Silicon Valley: A People's History of High-Tech America," which ends with a staged battle between
@margaretomara
and
@BigMeanInternet
. Who will win? Only my zoomer students can decide.
Twitter may prefer 'Meritocracy in America', but the students have spoken. This summer at Deep Springs I'll be teaching 'Capitalism: Theory and Practice'. For theory, we'll read 'Capital'. For practice, we'll read historians putting Marx's ideas to work.
This summer I'm teaching at Deep Springs College, where the inmates run the institution. The interview was a student committee and one dean, who didn't speak. It's a long time dream.
Faculty submit three courses and the students choose what you teach. What gets your vote? 1/2
Can someone explain the material forces behind the FT sucking less than any other newspaper in the English-speaking world? Are the editors elsewhere being targeted by Cuban microwave attacks or is there some better explanation?
@adam_tooze
,
@_TimBarker
,
@simontorracinta
This summer I'm teaching at Deep Springs College, where the inmates run the institution. The interview was a student committee and one dean, who didn't speak. It's a long time dream.
Faculty submit three courses and the students choose what you teach. What gets your vote? 1/2
Shots fired.
This may sound crazy, but historians believe colleges began considering "diversity" in admissions as a cover story for excluding "non-diverse" Jewish students. You see this everywhere from the NYT to the Supreme Court. And it's totally wrong.
So pleased to see my paper out in the BU Law Review!
This paper surveys 50+ years of randomized control trials in criminal justice and shows that almost no interventions have lasting benefit -- and the ones that do don't replicate in other settings. 1/
The fakest discipline is History. No methodology, only borrowings; no subject matter, short of all time and space. The past may be a foreign country but even area studies is more legit as a discipline—at least then you have a shared geographic space.
If you need to teach the Great Society nothing will blow students' minds like Lisa Nakamura on Navajo trainees making microchips for Silicon Valley and Amy Offner on modernization theory coming home via the Bureau of Indian Affairs—the origin of "Corporate Responsibility."
Stanford still lets new employees choose their usernames like it's 1999 or something. Trying incredibly hard not to go with my AIM username or my MySpace login.
There is no theory of change, short of martyrdom. To dramatically increase fossil fuel costs you'd need a movement of a scale that could never survive the modern security state, short of mass insurrection. I don't see it.
Before they/we get down to this, I'm curious (sincerely) what the strategic vision is in which blowing up a pipeline makes sense. PIRA wanted to blow things up until British left and Loyalists lost/abandoned state power. What are the next steps in the pipeline theory of change?
If you're an undergrad looking for a thesis topic or a grad student looking for a seminar paper, the Charles Reich papers and the Theodore Roszak papers are both now open for research.
It’s an interesting sign of the (changing?) times that you might just assume any educated person should be familiar with decolonization theory. It’s not something I personally heard much about until recently.
Tfw every winner of the top prize in your field in the last four years has failed to land a tenure track job — or even, as far as I know, get a campus visit.
Animal Collective, Sleigh Bells, (late) Death Cab — the dream of indie rock ca 2010 is alive and well in Bishop, California, where graying Millennials go to climb, and presumably to die.
.
@nplusonemag
's annual Bookmatch quiz is here and the questions and the recommendations are as ingenius as ever. Thanks
@embot
for this winter's reading! Take the quiz now to get your own personalized recs.
This week at the Silicon Valley Archives:
@MoiraDonegan
in conversion with
@AnnaShechtman
on her astounding new book, "The Riddles of the Sphinx." Not to be missed!
Tfw your students walk right through each door of your lesson plan and the first class ends with a bang.
At the end of my meritocracy class a first-year turned to me and said, "Well this gave me a lot to think about." ❤️❤️❤️
Why is the number one sign that someone's Gen X the refusal to identify as part of a generation? My take on "Gen X Erasure" and what it would mean to put the most anti-historical generation back into history.
Back to planning my life around the maybe 20 libraries in the US with collections large enough to write a serious book. If this ruling stands, historians will be stuck with the research methods of the 1970s, essentially in perpetuity.
BREAKING: A federal judge has decided in favor of four publishers in the long-awaited copyright case Hachette v. Internet Archive. "There is nothing transformative about IA's copying and unauthorized lending of the works in the suit," the judge writes. This story is developing.
'Early' retirement, i.e. at 65, has been strangely absent from discussions of the humanities jobs crisis. Here's Kant scholar Paul Guyer on why he decided to step aside at, well, 75.
I think Burning Man is basically fine. Plenty of the world's worst people but no more than your average trip to the Metropolitan Opera. Like the Met we'll keep it around after the revolution, only with better drugs and more equitable seating.
Most useful thing I've learned at Deep Springs: when your home is invaded by moths, it's best not to kill them with your copy of the New York Review of Books, which is effective but whose loud thwack sets the whole room aflight. Just use your bear hands, silent and deadly.
1. Training for rock climbing
2. Indie rock 2002-2009
3. Editorial fights at n+1
4. The history of the 20th century social sciences
5. Dating an analytic philosopher
What are five topics you can talk about for 30 minutes with zero prep?
Mine are:
1. Christian publishing
2. The SBC's design and work
3. Leadership theory and implementation
4. The MCU
5. Late 19th Century British literature
Every morning I wake up in disbelief that I get to live in San Francisco. And that people who could live here choose to live in some placed called Palo Alto instead.
Lol, no. Kristol first said a neoconservative was a liberal who had been mugged by reality after he split with "the Left" over voting for Reagan in 1980!
In general I side with
@samuelmoyn
in a preference for overt politics (read: "democracy") against law, but curious what if any acts Trump could have taken that would lead Moyn to agree that a court should bar him from the ballot. Is there a line in the sand? Or none?
Instead of the 1920s, the origins of "diversity" in college admissions can be found in the real integration of white ethnics into the WASP elite in the 1950s. And this is why "diversity" was so easily repurposed for the inclusion of non-white groups in the 1960s.
.
@gabrielwinant
: millennial in the streets; boomer at the keyboard. Anyone under the age of 50 knows a terabyte is table stakes for working historians today.
As OpenAI burns through billions, I'm starting to suspect ChatGPT is the Gen Z equivalent of the "Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy." We got cheap rides in Ubers — my students get badly written essays. Neither comes close to the actual cost of production.
One funny thing about Napoleon is that film critics keep saying "these battles are huge" and historians are like "why is the Battle of Waterloo, waged by 200,000 men, the size of a playground brawl?"
I can't believe I have to use a Dell until my Stanford MacBook finally materializes ... but also the keyboard on this POS feels amazing. Could Apple just once choose utility over design? Jobs is dead guys.
Guys 'The Two Faces of American Freedom' is so brilliant. Someone could do a whole season of a podcast just based on this book and still blow everyone's minds.
Teaching Marx and the students of course start by asking me about the difference between alienation and exploitation, which brings me back to this classic.
@JKandiyali
@alexgourevitch
@daraghjgrant
@theoryhack
I think the big difference between alienation people and anti-alienation people is that the former think people resenting or not understanding what they're doing sounds terrible while the latter think it sounds like Tuesday & is just not a big deal.
Even if it were to work (has it ever?) the theory of change for symbolic political terror requires a populace weighed down by the yoke of autarky, which suddenly sees violence as a way out. That's not exactly a description of the US public's relationship to, say, Exxon.
My summary of "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept": Oh, you all just skimmed 50 pages from a 550 page book? Maybe instead of actually reading it you should just never talk about it again.
More on all my favorite people: the inventors of the very idea of "leadership" in academia and industry and their friends in social science and the first HR offices. Now with special guest star—the most iconic Big Man on Campus in the history of the university—Herbert Hoover! 🗃️
This couldn't be more true. But the elite capture of the culture industries and a small subset of business sectors (law firms, consulting) leads to the mistaken impression that elite degrees confer lifelong financial advantages — which is totally mistaken.
My take on Napoleon is that Barry Lyndon and Master and Commander are good movies but they are not the same movie. You can't have your hero be an upwardly mobile idiot savant wandering the 18th Century and a military genius sitting astride the modern age.
Is the point symbolic political terror? Basically, assassinating the Tsar? An anarchist blowing up Archduke Ferdinand? Then the targets should be human, not physical infrastructure. But symbolic political terror is supposed to produce a mass uprising, not just intimidate rulers.
Students telling me they can't turn in their assignments on paper because it will cost too much.
The assignments this semester run to 25 pages; the printing fee is 7 cents a page.
Corporate concentration is a possible explanation of price and profit hikes driving inflation. But concentration was high before inflation. So, why can firms hike prices in an emergency? We explore this question in a new working paper. A 🧵
Can someone explain to me why Marx starts talking about 'value' as such midway through the first chapter of 'Capital'? Is this concept distinct from 'exchange value'? How? This is maybe the sixth time I've read this section and I've never really understood it.
@CoreyRobin
I'm sympathetic to the alternative sources for the fascism comparison in the Black radical tradition. (Also hilarious TK in the link here!)
Saw the new John Wick last night and the all the fight scenes gave me the exact same kind of cinematic pleasure I get from the dancing in Singin’ In the Rain.