À paraître le 7 mai chez Verdier
@sorbonneparis1.bsky.social

a beautiful thing about having been on social media for my entire adult life is that I do not have even one shred of tolerance left for online rudeness, anyone being even one iota above "irksome" in my mentions will get blocked, I actually love tone policing and running a tone police state!

Peter Magyar displaying a ruthlessness that Biden and Starmer seem devoid of

Associate Professor (297742) | NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology Job title: Associate Professor (297742), Employer: NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Deadline: Sunday, May 3, 2026

My old university NTNU in Trondheim is finally! recruiting a fully tenured associate professor in modern environmental history. This is a great opportunity for the right person. #envhist

So, was seeing MattGPT’s event of the year worth the glory and the expectations that come with it (as in… delivering more investigative content on said person)?

Popular attitudes are often seen as a safeguard against democratic backsliding: if citizens don’t oppose lib democracy, politicians have little incentive to erode it.

In @cpsjournal.bsky.social I argue that, while intuitive, this reasoning conflates two states of the world:

doi.org/10.1177/0010...

Yesterday I was trying to understand the Hungarian election system and didn’t get very far. But looking at this possible scenario, I can only imagine someone is looking at our election system with the same sense of puzzlement.

For years, but especially in the last few months, I have been trying hard to imagine what it will feel like seeing Orban decisively defeated. I just couldn't. And yet here we are: it is truly and well over. I have more reservations about Peter Magyar than I could say in 300 characters or a thread...

walking from my election party to the Tisza rally and we heard crowds cheering in the distance as Orban officially conceded 🥰

The 2023 elections in Poland… 🥶

This is something I’ve been trying to articulate (nicely) for a while, so it’s good someone else managed to do it for me…!

Most of what I’ve been doing since my surgery was… listening to podcasts that just kept on raising my anxiety levels.

Illinois-based Judson U. to host Kremlin-backed Bosnian Serb secessionist Dodik, who was under US sanctions only a few weeks ago. Uni boasts about "Standing Up for Democracy" while hosting the world's most prominent Srebrenica Genocide denier. Truly vile. www.judsonu.edu/the-world-le...

It’s alarming how a lot of outlets still treat Varoufakis as some kind of moderate leftist voice when he has been well into the crankosphere for some considerable time now

Why I went to Moscow

1/ This Yanis Varoufakis screed made me so angry the only way I can salvage my day is to go through it line by line as catharsis.

You are welcome to come on the journey toward my aneurism with me.

An angry h/t to @sianushka.bsky.social for bringing this into my life.

unherd.com/2026/04/why-...

I listen to an unhealthy amount of history podcasts and like the worst thing is when brilliant, knowledgeable historians feel compelled to “make it current”, and it’s often with the most banal platitudes. I’m here for the Bronze Age Collapse I don’t give a shit about social media echo chambers.

(Also needs iterating after that “we” quote: I’m not Israeli and I find any kind of nationalism really problematic at best, so it’s technically not even my nationalism. The Royal Jewish Space Lasers We, I guess).

Like, you can criticise Israel’s state structures, politics, fascist government and general racism without pretending they’re so unique they need an extra term (just like Erlich: we’re not the chosen people, our nationalism is just as ugly as the rest of them).

Great quote. But this is always why I find (non Jewish) anti-Zionism to be intellectually problematic: Jewish nationalism is just as ugly as other nationalisms, why need the anti-Zionist epithet? Like what’s wrong with just being anti nationalist, anti racist and anti fascist?

This study shows that disinformation spreads, not as “false facts”, but as narratives. Compare that to how mis- and disinformation are often operationalized in the big-N quantitative and experimental research in the Nature/Science journals — that’s a major weakness in the field.

"All people should go back to the land where their ancestors lived" is in fact a deeply reactionary political sentiment, no matter how much you may try to dress it up as progressive and liberatory.

Honestly I've let dozens of these go but this endless stream of antisemitism just proves everything I was saying in the post.

(For the hard of thinking the ambulances were used for the whole community regardless of religion, and even if they weren't racist arson would still be unacceptable.)

what next? what, are we gonna provide *roads* for the wealthy too? gonna have health inspectors keep contaminants out of their groceries? are we just gonna have gutters and sewer systems around rich people's homes?

Thing is, them kids came out of this class pretty annoyed with their own fragility (something they generally hated) and thinking it was a very bad idea to escalate things to the current state.

Next time you say the Orange Man has the mind of a child, think about these kids who knew better.

Which basically got some of them to ask very quickly: “if Iran decided to close the Strait pf Hormuz, could you not just kick Iran in the balls? (Sic.)” and that started a pretty long conversation in about the meaning of war and the difficulty of maintaining normal circulation with blockage.

Also, that was in 2016, so just after a couple of the kids in that class had lost family members in the Bataclan terror attacks, while others had Lebanese family members who hated Hezbollah, so they had heard the word Iran and didn’t like it much.

This meant introducing the kids to the concept of chokepoint and discussing Hormuz. Now, we’re talking about a bunch of pretty privileged kids who mostly thought oil = big cars = yay. So hard to share my social critique with them. But that also meant they knew well that oil = a part of their lives.

At the time I was teaching history-geography at the French school in London, so I basically followed the French curriculum in English, and one of the geography themes in the 5ème (Year 8) is… oil and with it also chokepoints.

The one time I dealt with the Strait of Hormuz in any meaningful way was with a group of 12 year olds, and I think that experience has been back on my mind over the last few weeks. 🧵