Ben Schmidt

OK but business school professors are not exactly central to what the institutions do; if the guy who sells peanuts at Fenway says it’s time to stop playing baseball, would we listen? Let’s hear from the person who books the class ski trip to Vail before we throw the baby out with the bathwater.

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Ok but I’m still hung up on this one. www.salon.com/2004/10/30/b...

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

good look here at the contraption or whatever it is on Trump's behind

13 Sept

I had forgotten about this Jack Handey joke but it is obviously the germ from which the GLOAT (Greatest Lede of All Time) evolved.

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21 Aug

Copyright strikes again. Went to check this 2019 kickstarter to digitally fix The Departed bc: "the movie has one giant glaring flaw. In the last shot, Scorsese has an actual rat crawl across the screen. The rat symbolizes rats." We can't have nice things, chapter 237.

nofilmschool.comA Kickstarter to Digitally Remove the Rat from the End of 'The Departed'That rat was a bad idea and this guy really wants to fix it.

21 Aug

I love this guy: "you can pledge $70 to have to receive one of the 50 limited edition copies. "This will allow me to buy you a legal Blu-ray of The Departed, throw that disc away, replace it with my superior version, and mail it to you," Sacks explains." nofilmschool.com/2019/02/kick...

19 Aug

Google’s purchase of Spirit airways internal data is extremely interesting, and so is the way it intersects with the claims of unions that *haven’t* gone belly up really raises questions about alternative governance… www.forbes.com/sites/suzann...

forbes.comforbes.com

19 Aug

Doing my dissertation one of the big early questions was “what happened to the internal CBS archives?” Somewhere in the paramount/Sony/etc flow they just vanished. Corporations are terrible at preserving things. We rely on states and philanthropists:nonprofits to do that…

19 Aug

Unions tend to deposit their records at universities In a world where recent historical records have considerably greater economic value, I could see a case for legislation that more aggressively enshrines unions not unis as primary custodians of a variety of records in their industries…

Ben Schmidt reposted

JP Ahonen 🇪🇺

@jpahonen.eurosky.social

11 Aug

Replying to @jmkorhonen.fi

I think this graph is perhaps the most important to consider when trying to understand the failures of our energy policies.

28 July

Can anyone recommend reading about how de-Orbanization is going in Hungary?

nytimes.comHungary’s Parliament Votes to Remove Orban Loyalist From Presidential PostPeter Magyar, Hungary’s prime minister, defended the extraordinary move, which has been criticized by human rights groups and by allies of Viktor Orban, the former right-wing leader.

28 July

Seems like a useful topic, but I've seen literally nothing on it -- AFAICT there has been only a single, short article in the Times about Hungary in the last two months?? www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/w...

10 July

Gerrymandering makes nicely named legislative districts harder. Makes me wonder—are there egregious examples of gerrymandering at the city ward level? Or do municipalities always have sane-looking wards?

Mark J. Nelson@mm-jj-nn.bsky.social

Buffalo's the most extensive version of this I know of, with 9 named council districts.

8 July

Wow Deutsche bank “apex of civilizational ambition oftentimes expressed in steel and fire” gives pat buchanan’s 1992 convention speech a run for its money as “better in the original German”

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social

DEUTSCHE lays it on thick: “.. SpaceX represents in our view the apex of civilizational ambition, oftentimes expressed in steel and fire, bending the arc of history to make humans multiplanetary ..” $SPCX

8 July

“The apex of civilizational ambition, oftentimes expressed in steel and fire” —Deutsche Bank

5 July

"My favorite founding father is Thomas Paine" is an opinion roughly equivalent to "my favorite ice cream flavor is cocaine."

Bo Thompson@gaudipern.bsky.social

Thomas Paine is my favorite founding father. He was famously abolitionist and one of the earliest voices to point out the hypocrisy of fighting for independence while keeping slaves. He also firmly believed that keeping any friendship which required compromising your morals made you a bad person.

5 July

A) He's not a founding father; B) If you think you can handle it you're deluding yourself.

5 July

Anyhow my favorite politician from the founding generation is Thaddeus Stevens.

@imagineterrain.bsky.social

1 July

arxiv.org is finally graduating from Cornell. TIL it has almost the *exact same* origin story as the web -- a little project on a NeXT workstation in a giant non-university lab (CERN 1990 for the web, Los Alamos 1991 for arxiv). news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...

Ben Schmidt reposted

David Ramos

22 June

Time is a flat circle.

Ben Schmidt reposted

Alexander Doria

@dorialexander.bsky.social

15 June

Doing the most responsible thing an European AI labs can do after this weekend: shipping a blogpost. Why the EU can't into AI, how it's not about compute, but actual skill issue and failing for years to build an actual training ecosystem. pleias.ai/blog/fable-eu

Ben Schmidt reposted

Robin James

@robinjames.bsky.social

6 June

Saw that report on the supposed politicization of humanities & social science scholarship, ppl would be well served by reading John McCumber's account of what happened to US academic philosophy under McCarthyism, so much chimes w that today: nupress.northwestern.edu/978081014607...

nupress.northwestern.eduTime in the Ditch - Northwestern University PressIn Time in the Ditch, John McCumber explores the effects of McCarthyism on American philosophy in the 1940s and 1950 and the possibility that the political p...

22 May

Carl Sagan's books-as-seed metaphor shows what a milquetoast ninny he was compared to John Milton. "I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men."

Saganism@sagan.bsky.social

“Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.” — Carl Sagan

22 May

2020s sure suck but at least we're not in the 1640s.

Ben Schmidt reposted

Peter

@notalawyer.bsky.social

17 May

i’ve only seen one brief clip of Jonathan Haidt’s NYU commencement speech but it’s him saying purple is his favorite color and then immediately mispronouncing “2026”

@caitlindeangelis.bsky.social

16 May

Fresh torment nexus unlocked! 1. Job seeker spams a list of AI companies with resume/ llm-written cover letter. 2. The AI companies all have e-mail auto-reply bots that start responding to chain. 3. Classic reply-all e-mail chain with a twist: nobody on it cares that it keeps going!

Ben Schmidt reposted

Caitlin G. DeAngelis

13 May

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

Ben Schmidt reposted

Maria Antoniak

@mariaa.bsky.social

10 May

Replying to @mariaa.bsky.social

Somehow that got posted without alt text.

nytimes.comTrump’s Vision for ‘Garden of Heroes’ Keeps Getting Bigger and Higher in Cost

More garden of heroes reporting! Since last I indulged my obsession with this story, they've abandoned the idea this would be in North Dakota and moved it to Washington DC. Completely predictably it's over budget and behind schedule... www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/u...

Ben Schmidt@bschmidt.bsky.social

This was reported a while ago, but still insane to see that this is what’s replacing federal humanities funding. Two logistical points. 1. Is $34m is enough for this? WwII memorial was $200m. 2. July 4 2026 is really soon. How have they not even picked a site?

Oh wait John Lewis was already dead in 2020! It was just the Trump/Lewis feud I guess. But the diversity effort stops at black people -- 4 hispanics and 2 asians.

Definitely a pro-Catholic slant -- I couldn't have told you who Louise McManus, Nellie Gray, John Neumann, or Augustus Tolton, or John Carroll were.

nytimes.comTrump’s Vision for ‘Garden of Heroes’ Keeps Getting Bigger and Higher in Cost

Ben Schmidt@bschmidt.bsky.social

The list of great americans remains utterly inscrutable -- not representative of the MAGA worldview or any other. Nobody's making them put Dorothy Day or Mohammed Ali on here: and although they whitewash DuBois, Rustin, Baldwin out of black history they strive to include lots of black names…

IIRC the list got thrown together in 2020 during the BLM protests in defense of statues-as-history, so it has five people who died in 2020, while not including anyone who died after. This means we somehow get Kobe Bryant but not Bill Russell, C.T. Vivian but not John Lewis. And of course, RBG.

nytimes.comTrump’s Vision for ‘Garden of Heroes’ Keeps Getting Bigger and Higher in Cost

Ben Schmidt@bschmidt.bsky.social

Dear god these people are clowns they made a public website for children with a link to "their American Heroes Biographies FINAL" and the "final" copy link is to a protected sharepoint site the general public can't access. freedom250.sharepoint.com/:b:/s/Freedo...

OK, so -- the 250 years/250 heroes list has actually *increased* from 243 to 245 people over the last year. The two new honorees are the Marquis de Lafayette and Prince Estabrook.

nytimes.comTrump’s Vision for ‘Garden of Heroes’ Keeps Getting Bigger and Higher in Cost

Ben Schmidt@bschmidt.bsky.social

Wait no Grover is still there! With a straight face they say he is the only non-consecutive term holder and Americans *really* like a non-consecutive term prez BTW the anti-Trump talking point on Cleveland needs to become "One of only two presidents to win the popular vote at least three times."

One extremely confusing thing is that their new list of bios has a 'grouping by category' at the top that doesn't actually include all the people on the list.

nytimes.comTrump’s Vision for ‘Garden of Heroes’ Keeps Getting Bigger and Higher in Cost

Ben Schmidt@bschmidt.bsky.social

This part is interesting -- AFAICT they removed some people! I checked my list of the most hilariously undeserving people from last year and while Alex Trebek is still there, Grover Cleveland seems to have been nixed... who else has been taken off the list?

Ben Schmidt reposted

Benjamin McKean

@blmckean.bsky.social

theguardian.comBard president Leon Botstein stepping down after inquiry into his Epstein tiesInvestigation found Botstein – who had claimed he wasn’t friends with Epstein – made 25 visits to his townhouse

Extremely funny that Bard’s trustees have called for “an orderly transition,” like Botstein has been deposed by a color revolution

Stephanie Kirchgaessner@skirchy.bsky.social

Botstein is stepping down after WilmerHale completes its review. Among other things it suggests Botstein was warned not to have dealings with Epstein www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

lastpositivist.bsky.social

I’m struggling to remember what Richard Dawkins is actually famous for—at first I thought he was the racist guy who stole the double helix, but no, James Watson. The entomologist positivist? Nope EO Wilson. Now struggling with the idea the word “meme” somehow explains why I’m supposed to know him?

Matthew Sheffield@matthew.flux.community

In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis. Paywall bypass: archive.is/6RdK9

Ben Schmidt reposted

@lastpositivist.bsky.social

23 Apr

One of those "essays I'll write one day" is that a great many people forget that Du Bois really was a PhD economist in-all-but-title and thought with economist brain sometimes. The much discussed "psychic wage of whiteness" thesis from Black Reconstruction really just is classic economist reasoning.

Ben Schmidt reposted

Robert Kelchen

@robertkelchen.com

22 Apr

Here's an important read for today: policymakers are encouraging students to learn trades that are costly to teach, but community colleges and apprenticeships don't have the capacity to meet demand. This sends students to the more expensive for-profit sector, where they take on debt.

wsj.comThey Chose Careers in the Trades and Still Wound Up With DebtAs community colleges and union apprenticeships fill up, more students are turning to pricier training options for blue-collar careers.

19 Apr

Godzilla vs Erin Brockovich

ponder@ponder.ooo

most people focus on the immediate & obvious dangers, but actually the worst aspect of godzilla romping thru a city tends to be the hazardous particulates that get kicked up into the air. way more people die of godzilla-related mesothelioma than get crushed, radiation-lasered, &c

thecut.comNicole Kidman Is a Death Doula in TrainingNicole Kidman revealed that she is training to become a death doula, similar to Chloé Zhao, who is also training to be a death doula.

21 Apr

Although you greenlight that movie *please* check how long it typically takes for godzilla-related mesothelioma to manifest; actuarily we should probably be more worried about years of potential life lost, not raw death counts.

Ben Schmidt reposted

Philip Bump

@pbump.com

14 Apr

They tried so hard to make this headline shorter but there just wasn’t a way to do it.

New York Magazine@nymag.com

Nicole Kidman revealed that she is training to become a death doula, similar to Chloé Zhao, who is also training to be a death doula.

11 Apr

Feeling buyers remorse for booking in the quiet car now that I’ve realized the giant group boarding the loud cars is the Boston Symphony Orchestra.