Farewell to Habermas, whose essay "Modernity—An Incomplete Project" lies at the very cornerstone of my own thinking. platypus1917.org/wp-content/u...

GYWO is my #1 case for Things Were Better When I Was Young

I’m working on a piece that’s in part about how agriculture (and especially forestry) were vanguard domains for administrative state autonomy in democracies in part because they had to operate on planning timelines that were chronologically longer than electoral cycles.

The Louis Vuitton pattern but it’s LW and Lowly Worm

This came to me in a vision last night and now I’m posting it here for posterity in case a Scarry-Vuitton lawyer drone strike annihilates my underground bunker

Map of Blue Hills Reservation with a bottom-left text blurb highlighting the Observatory location and a top right text blurb saying "Boston, ~10 miles," with an arrow pointing to the top-right of the image.

Topographical map of Blue Hills Reservation, with a text blurb and arrow pointing out the Observatory. The date of the map, 1895, is circled, and added text beneath reads "The Blue Hill Observatory has a public data set for snowfall measurements that stretches back to 1893".

Dreaming of a snowy winter? ❄️☃️

Every $15 donation from now until December 31 will make ½ inch of snow “pile up” in our snow tracker. And, instead of having to shovel out afterwards, you’ll receive a gift in the mail as a thank you for supporting our mission!

www.leventhalmap.org/donate/decem...

Lonely Crowds Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the gla...

Just finished this and I think it might be my favorite work of fiction by an American author in the past decade www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/steph...

Genuinely wild to me that a company would forcibly inject AI front and center into the user experience, then *utterly hallucinate* a false ability to accomplish a core functionality of the program (in this case, creating a calendar invite).

The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved

"If AI can diminish some of the monotony of research, perhaps we can spend more time thinking, writing, playing piano, and taking walks — with other people." @dancohen.org

newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...

It’s one example in my personal life of something I feel very strongly: we need ambitious expectations for public agencies, because, when they work well, they make our shared life better in ways that are impossible for private or voluntary actors.

The Orange Line has gotten so much better it has a new problem: Traffic An "unintended consequence" of all the recent improvements, Orange Line trains are now running into delays due to congestion at the end of the line. However, the MBTA has a plan to ease the issue. Mee...

I did a lot of @mbta.com griping on social media ca. 2020-2023. So credit where it’s absolutely due: competent management and the fruits of much-delayed capital investment have made the Orange Line an amazingly functional piece of public infrastructure this year.

www.wbur.org/news/2025/11...

I was primarily responding to the claim in the OP; I don’t disagree early C20 NYC was superior to barely-out-of-feudalism peasantry. But you could keep doing that comparison forever; most price-strangled neighborhoods in today’s US are similarly superior to a huge fraction of global housing stock.

I’m not one of the people who think all housing problems can be traced back to the original sin of capitalism. But, if the claim is “people in the early C20 US were satisfied, in their terms, with the affordability and quality of private housing,” that’s just not true as a historical point of fact.

There is a huge body of economic and policy literature from the 1920s and beyond which all accepts the premise of “the market has failed to provision adequate housing; what is the best way to intervene?” … so even at the time most people didn’t think this.

Gen Z does not have the drive to run away and join Van Amberg’s Mammoth Circus & Menagerie in order to prep for a future career as a financial buccaneer

In my lifetime since childhood, I have completed a full “watching lots of TV makes you an idiot” => “don’t be elitist and snobby, all forms of media are good and bad in equal measure” => “no, actually, watching lots of TV makes you an idiot” opinion cycle

Reposting this over and over until it stops being relevant

people have been torturing themselves over "regards," "cheers," "very best," and whatever else to sign their emails when "DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT" has just been sitting there

a planning diagram for Boston's Central Artery

collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commo...

Wikipedia article for Daniel Gookin

Telling my children this is Danny Go’s full name

Vito thought intensifies

bsky.app/profile/en-d...

screenshot of aerial images of round waterbodies in Massachusetts

For #30DayMapChallenge 3: Polygons, I'm re-sharing an old favorite: the 200 roundest waterbodies in Massachusetts. (Because technically a circle isn't a polygon ... except in GIS.)

glitch.leventhal.center/birds-eye-ca...

Screenshot of an Observable notebook with a line graph showing the home values of neighborhoods traversed by the MBTA Fitchburg Line

For #30DayMapChallenge 2: Lines, I've visualized the @mbta.com @mbta-cr.bsky.social Commuter Rail lines as they traverse geographies of very different home values outside of Boston.

observablehq.com/@garrettdash...

cc @masshousing.bsky.social

There’s always precedent, and it is very often specifically Andy Woodruff precedent

A pointy-headed, pointless exercise for #30DayMapChallenge 1: Points.

All of the official “Point” names in Massachusetts, with ortho imagery from @massgis.bsky.social

me in 2009: I probably can't go into politics, I have a few mildly left-of-center social media posts and a handful of vaguely cringe facebook photos

politics in 2025: would the nazi tattoo guy be an effective opponent to the diarrhea video president?

Web banner reading "The author has never been in Boston. All the information has been extracted from sketches posted in Wikimedia Commons, and from pictures and videos posted in the internet as well."

The most impressive part of all this:

Vito Marcantonio

Ghosts of unwritten books / in the land of undone things / unsung songs [W. E. B. Du Bois, ca. 1900] credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mu...

2. Dolores Hayden, "Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space," in "The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History"

3. William Cronon, "Kennecott Journey: The Paths out of Town," in "Under and Open Sky"

There are many good possible answers to this question, but my three go-tos for introducing this theme at the undergrad level are:

1. Donald Meinig, "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene, in "The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes"