Benjamin L. Carp 🎏

“For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and tho’ himself might deserve some decent degree of honors of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.” —Paine

Personally experiencing context collapse as people report foreign election results during the same weekend early voting began for New York

Frankly it should be Generation Cocoon, since this generation is presently reaching the age Wilford Brimley was when that movie was released, like Goonies, in 1985 brimleyline.date

But if you want to feel better, some incredibly hot people are also turning 50 in 2026! Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Farrell, Rashida Jones, Ali Larter, Cillian Murphy, Ryan Reynolds, Keri Russell, Alicia Silverstone, Reese Witherspoon...

Hanging a sign in front of a table on campus that reads: The skin on this orange looks a little off: change my rind.

I'm not sure why I thought of this today but whatever happened to Cory Booker? He gave that marathon speech in 2025 and then I feel like I haven't heard hide nor hair of him--and he is not a publicity-shy guy! Is it just because this is Bluesky and he took some pro-Israel positions?

Like, the dude is Minority Whip and running for reelection! Granted it probably isn't a very competitive race, but it feels weird that I haven't heard his name in more than a year. Maybe this is just a reflection of my media habits.

“The slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.” --Rita Schwermer. The point is that it's not news without outsiders drawing attention to the problem (this was true with abolition, too).

“The slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.” --Rita Schwermer. The point is that it's not news without outsiders drawing attention to the problem (this was true with abolition, too).

An interesting quirk of feminist history; New Yorkers coined the term “sexual harassment” (Working Women United, Cornell, 1975) and #MeToo (Bronx-born Tarana Burke, 2006, popularized further by Brooklyn-born Alyssa Milano, 2017).

Why don't you disavow this? Why don't you disavow that? So much negativity! What if we asked politicians for avowals instead? Random shoutouts for the League of Women Voters or the Michael J. Fox Foundation or the American Cancer Society! There are lots of Americans doing great things!

Maybe the milkshake duck risk is too high.

Why don't you disavow this? Why don't you disavow that? So much negativity! What if we asked politicians for avowals instead? Random shoutouts for the League of Women Voters or the Michael J. Fox Foundation or the American Cancer Society! There are lots of Americans doing great things!

I went back and looked for the first non-Christians elected to Congress, and unfortunately a lot of the Jews (or Jewish-descended folks) who went to Congress in the 19th-century were slaveholders, Nativists (!?), husbands of Confederate spies, craven Democrats, etc. Others were cool.

(For context, of course, I suppose I should say that a much larger number of nineteenth-century Christians in Congress were also slaveholders, Nativists, future (or past) members of the Confederacy, craven Democrats, etc. Others were cool.)