Sam Ulmschneider

the most embarassingly generationally typical thing about me is some of my musical tastes. recently re-listened to the Black Keys Attack & Release and goddamn do I still love that album. Just some incredibly good dirty blues rock.

extremely frustrated that, most all high school poli sci/civics, some of the most important concepts to studying the last decade of American politics like democratic deconsolidation or negative polarization are completely sidelined in favor of hoary civics class stuff that is hard to make relevant.

cheesecake factory discourse really funny to me bc I have spent a non-trivial amount of life thinking about & discussing how Madison & Jefferson (among others) were paranoid as hell abt dressing themselves, speaking, and building the architecture of the new nation as small-r republican as possible.

Basically every time I spend a day in my local public library grading or working it is totally packed. Really unfortunate that local govts can’t afford to pay library staff more and hire more of them, to expand the availability of this clearly highly in demand service.

Torn on that NYT piece. The reporting on housing markets and dorm construction here is great and effective, but the focus on the topline sticker price is pretty deceptive. A huge majority of in-state students don't pay anything near full price, and half or so are eligible for near zero tuition.

I really do hope the abusive-parent-enabling ad bites Ramaswamy in the ass hard, but I worry that a lot of low propensity or disconnected voters will only hear “her mom disowned her or something and there’s a big old dust up about it,” and never get enough info to hold it against him as they should.

Things that remain unsatisfactory that I need to try to fix on the next go-round: no female directors (well the Wachowskis are trans?), no screwball or class comedy (Duck Soup only sorta), no epic history or war films. Hard to get all the cross-sections I want and some element has to get sacrificed.

near-final film roster for US pop culture history class: Sunrise (1927), Duck Soup (1933), Notorious (1946), The Searchers (1956), West Side Story (1961), Jaws (1975), Do The Right Thing (1989), The Matrix (1999). It's a broad pup culture class, not film focused, so I have a limited number to show.

Every once in a while I check in on The Discourse rehousing affordability and local zoning reforms in my medium sized city and that whiplash always amazes me. More housing and more density, but anti-real estate interest, developer company influence. Hard to know who will build the density we want!

Eroding the principles of rule of law and neutral enforcement is like getting your tie stuck in a paper shredder with no reverse function. When an official or supporter of the opposite party is prosecuted for misdeeds, no one will believe the charges are legitimate regardless of whether they are.

Recently learned that Daisy Bacon's papers (longtime editor of one of the most successful set of pulp magazines, the Love Story family from Street and Smith) are archived physically a short drive from where I live. Only one good book has been written about her. Oh if only I had time for scholarship.

Once - one year - I got to teach a seminar for my advanced high schoolers where we read Putnam (Our Kids), Eirenreich (Nickel and Dimed), Yglesias (One Billion Americans), Desmond (Evicted) a whole book on how to run for local office, and more. These sorts of classes are mostly now foreclosed by AP.

Lots of chatter about how public will absorb the Ramaswamy campaign in Ohio's ad featuring the estranged and problematic mother of Amy Acton. I tend to think it won't have as much impact as we liberals might hope just because knowing why the ad is disturbing needs too much follow up for most voters.

God, I just want to take a scythe to AP/College Board domination of advanced curriculum and student choice. Why should we be giving gifted high schoolers 5x as much AP Psychology and AP Economics instead of a diversity of options from local history to intro to philosophy to European literature etc.

I've been trying to revisit albums I haven't listened to in a long, long time, listened to the remaster of Marshall Crenshaw's 1983 'Field Day.' Such a lovely, catchy piece of pop-rock, pure in its own emotive outpouring and relatively simple instrumentation. Not my usual fare, glad I took the time.

It's easy to complain about our problems in American political life (and there are plenty, and they're serious) but glancing over at a lot of our fellow democracies - Brazil, France, Canada, UK, Germany - suggests that even very differently structured democracies are in trouble, too.

The Republican Guarantee Clause and 14th Amendment's Privileges and Immunities clause are like dormant volcanoes of potential constitutional power. Sometimes I wonder if they'll erupt in my lifetime.

Russia's crimes in Ukraine and the American response to it really activate powerful historical analogies (which have their limits! lots of disanalogies too!) to America's responses to Japanese and Italian fascist aggression in the 1930s. Unwillingness to confront what a war of aggression really is.

Honestly really shocked there's never been a film adaptation of 'Shadow over Innsmouth'

Not looking forward to teaching the electoral college tomorrow. Honestly one of the hardest topics to (a) teach from the requisite 'the teacher and curriculum and field have no opinion stance and (b) compress into 45-60 minutes and the experience is always unfulfilling and surface level.

I really feel like the dynamics of media consumption and public opinion in most social media spaces have created one of the first genuinely new moves/questions in the long running dialogue about the nature of free expression and civic society since the rise of broadcast tv & radio.

The most frivolous dimbass thing I’d buy (not a real-luxury thing like a vacation home or a real-useful thing like the balance of my mortgage and all my relative’s mortgages) would be miniatures and painting supplies for them, and a hobby shed/outdoor extra office space for painting, gaming etc.

Truly maddening how much of the advertising for ai products to mainstream consumers (not coder types or business manager types) amounts to “don’t you hate reading? Aren’t words hard? Don’t you never want to deal with those icky things directly ever again?”

In an internet rife with unqualified speculation, I'm surprised there isn't more trying to directly quid-pro-quo connect the 'diesel deal' with Russia to the abrupt limit on Ukraine's intelligence and satellite access that caused their nation so much damage. Maybe we'll never know for sure, I guess.

philosophers of mind, epistemologists, etc on must be having a real monkey's paw moment with regards to the debate on AI agent consciousness, suffering, sentience, etc. Truly is there a more frustrating way for "I wish people recognized and engaged with the importance of my field more" to come true?

Really dislike that the AP Comparative Gov't list doesn't have a European parliamentary democracy, just a Westminster and a US-style one. China, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, and the United Kingdom is mostly a fine list of case studies but badly needs France, Italy, Germany or Spain added I think.

I really don't think I have a more favorite artifact of 1930s cinema than Duck Soup. The Marx Brothers best film, a thorough social and political satire, utter madness from start to finish and so constantly shape-shifting and verbally complicated that every time I watch it I grab a new line to love.

I spent a long while as a vegetarian, but cooking for others & being socially flexible while making ethical choices is a somewhat hard long game. A more ecologically and ethically simple choices was to cut out almost all beef and most pork - the most ecologically and ethically unsustainable meats.

what voices you know as well as you do the voices of your own family members? For me this includes Bob Bailey, longtime voice actor for Johnny Dollar in the 1950s, Clay Jenkinson, voice of my longest-time-listening podcast/radio show, Brooke Gladstone who I've had in my ear weekly almost as long.

Sucks that the President is enabling Russia & undermining the crucial sanctions on their fossil fuel industry, but if the public actually perceives this as addressing cost of living issues it may be one of the few good political moves he’s made recently. Ukraine has so little public salience. Sigh.

What do you think the best Robert Dahl book is for strong but early undergrad level readers? I can never make up my mind between ‘On Democracy’ and ‘How Democratic is the American Constitution.’ Alternately, is there a similarly themed book you think is better than either?

Has the Rodriguez government in Venezuela made any moves at all towards liberalization of the political system? Or are they maintaining more or less the same gangster state systems are Maduro, just with her people at the top?

Watched half the Georgia debate and half the Michigan one. I can't help have foreboding that if Democrats triumph in 2026 or even in 2028, the impossibility of restoring consumer positivity in the medium term means they'll get trashed again in short order when low-price utopia doesn't materialize.

Ossoff doing a good job here, admittedly he has a bit of a layup for an opponent. Even though modern debates are shallow soundbite manufactories, I still wish they were a more important part of our political landscape than the footnote-at-most, viewed-by-no-one shrugs they've become.

Ran across this album a couple of years ago and gave it another listen today, it's a real gem of the stoner metal/desert metal genre. Hard for me to place EXACTLY who it sounds most like, it's not as 'clean' or catchy as Queens of the Stone Age or as wander-y as some Kyuss is. Really enjoyable.

one of the worst things about the current world of Advanced Placement is the system of exploitative, lowest-common-denominator entrepreneurs that around it. They push the courses further towards total monotony and national standardization, with kids asking 'why doesn't my course match Heimler's'?

It’s so striking that the vast majority of waste, fraud and abuse in programs like Medicaid, Medicare, social security, student loans etc are large scale exploits run by providers, businesses, shady nonprofits, etc. Yet so much of the political noise about them is about low income individual fraud.

What do you think the best Robert Dahl book is for strong but early undergrad level readers? I can never make up my mind between ‘On Democracy’ and ‘How Democratic is the American Constitution.’ Alternately, is there a similarly themed book you think is better than either?

As high-potential students take larger and larger numbers of advanced classes in high school, each must step back demands to reduce student stress load. + we pay more attention to stress generally now. That’s commendable, but at some point the advanced quality of the classes starts to get diluted.

Teaching interest groups this week and it's just a perennial problem that it takes so much time and energy to distinguish 'groups can influence policy/politics' (laudatory, views the student agrees with) from 'groups can influence policy/politics (derogatory, views student dislikes).