Notices by Zeb Larson (zeb_larson@zirk.us)

I’m trying an experiment for the next month or so and just letting myself be bored until the baby gets here.

I never let myself be bored; I also get consumed sometimes by NEEDING to have some big project that I’m working on. But I’ve never tried just ignoring that urge for a while.

Will I melt down? Or will I just be (sort of) recharged when baby gets here? Will something interesting fall in my lap? Or will I just use this time to run and put a lot of food in the freezer?

Bluesky needs to accept that the interminable “somebody was shitty/dramatic on Discord” posts are as boring and off-putting as Mastodon’s interminable “nerds fighting about FOSS” posts. In fact, they’re worse in some ways, I was able to steer away from the Mastobros much more easily.

Watching this guy (the assistant chief of the NYPD) accidentally pepper spray himself is only topped by his fellow cops trying to wash oil-based pepper spray off with water…on his forehead. Straight into his eyes.

https://www.amny.com/news/nypd-chief-pepper-spray-manhattan-bridge-protest/

Great to see my alma mater frantically reversing itself and admitting that yes, the guys on the roof did have "long-range firearms." It really feels like we're seconds from escalation into a true nightmare.

https://www.thelantern.com/2024/04/university-says-officers-had-readied-firearms-directed-toward-protesters-from-ohio-unions-roof-once-arrests-began/

@MisuseCase @seanbala The problem is that there’s very little prestige wrapped up in the teaching track among the people who train grad students, and there’s such an oversupply of PhDs as is. It’s a sick game.

One of the most tired genres of academic posting is complaining about your students. A lot of it is mean-spirited (how dare these kids not treat my exact passion with the seriousness I did!), but a lot of it is also just fucking lazy. Congrats, as a trained expert in your field you managed to nitpick a freshman to death, or discovered that they (gasp) skipped a reading.

Oof, too true to academic life. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/class-is-canceled-until-further-notice-while-i-do-my-job

A former cooperante recently reached out to me about an oral #history project.

Cooperantes are people who volunteered to work in Mozambique and Angola when the Portuguese left in 1975. Basically all of the trained civil servants and others left with them, and as colonizers they never bothered to train anybody around them. It jumpstarted a lot of people's work in development spaces; it also created long-term links for people in Southern Africa.

(1)

I would *love* to be able to take this on. The stories need to be recorded, and it was a history I at least knew in grad school. Hell, I wanted to write about it at the time -- I had some article ideas, one dealing with ex-cooperantes who tried to lobby against U.S. support for UNITA in Angola. (Who helped UNITA in this country? Paul Manafort -- that Paul Manafort).

But I also need to find a way to balance it against the fact that I'm no longer an academic.

(2)

Simply put, I do not have enough bandwidth to do this the way I'd like to do it (probably making a glossy coffee table book and making it a pictorial history). I have no institutional funding. My time is split between work, my family, the computer book I'm desperately trying to finish, my own dissertation which I still want to publish, and then all the other freelance writing I do.

What I really need are grad students who could use it for their research and a university to archive it.

(3)

And this is one of the limits of independent scholarship -- we actually have NO INFRASTRUCTURE in place to support being an independent scholar. If you do it (and I don't really do it), you do it like a TT scholar but without any of those supports. Unless you're independently wealthy, it ain't happening. But even if you are, it still imagines a single author/lone genius model for producing scholarship, and that's not an effective way to work.

(4)

If you want “weird” cities, they need to be cheap. Do you know why Portland was weird? It was cheaper than Seattle and San Fran. You could devote yourself to unicycle riding or making the perfect Turkish coffee because it was so cheap to live there.

(Columbus managed to go straight from unknown to expensive while skipping “weird.” It’s a sociological marvel.)

One of my weird historiographical hills that I will die on is how poorly congressional records are saved. There is no requirement that they save their papers, and there are no requirements about how they make them accessible. It is honestly kind of a crisis; it allows our elected representatives near-complete control over their history and the history of legislative governance in this country.

As an example, I was looking at the papers of Wisconsin senator William Proxmire a few years ago. Proxmire was in the Senate for decades, but all told, he had just ~180 boxes. That might sound like a lot, but it’s not. Imagine the sheer volume of correspondence, briefings, memoranda, and paraphernalia a senator’s office generates in a year. Daniel Moynihan had a similar tenure and had something like 3,000.

And all of Proxmire’s history, or most of it? Gone.

It happens in more vexatious ways, too. I really wanted to look at Richard Lugar’s papers in grad school, but they weren’t scheduled to be opened until ten years after the death of his wife. Moynihan’s widow has to give permission to look at his papers; Mark Hatfield’s wife only recently opened up his papers.

And then lots of people don’t do anything with them at all.

Imagine how much worse it’s going to get with the advent of e-mail. We’re about to enter an information black hole where correspondence can casually disappear and there’s no archival recourse that you can take. If you really want to think about holding Congress accountable, part of that is not letting members write their own histories.

I have a very simple protocol for dealing with people online. If you're annoying in somebody else's thread or mentions, I mute you. If you're annoying in mine, I block you. And if you're a racist or a bigot, I just skip step one.

@jwhevans @bmacDonald94 I think among some conservatives, Cruz is seen as a "take no shit" tough guy. Absurd, I know, but I've seen that take multiple times.

Which means that Ron DeSantis can't even rise to *that*.

There's always been a lot of liberal fear of DeSantis. He is a monster and an awful human being, but as it turns out he's nothing more than a black hole of charisma.

"If the great promise of the DeSantis candidacy was Trump without the baggage, Stuart Stevens, a top strategist on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said that what Republicans got instead was 'Ted Cruz without the personality.'”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/us/politics/desantis.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Aldi is the Linux of grocery stores.