Doing BJHS gave me a lot of good examples—yours among them.

Glad you thought so—means a lot from you!

An interesting and thoughtful review, that asks what #histsci was/is/will be. I'm also sympathetic to Dear - the Q of how science gained authority, and was shaped in the process, underlies much of what I do - but we gain from research on other kinds of natural knowledge. But is that #histsci?

Hinges on whether you see the canon as fixed or negotiable. I’d say it should always be (re)negotiated relative to an aim, so things might flit in and out. The bad luck of hist of mat sci was to mature as the field was walking away from those negotiations.

Leviathan reference intentional!

Canon Fodder. The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science Published in History of European Ideas (Ahead of Print, 2026)

Apparently what use this site for now is posting book reviews.

The latest of Peter Dear’s The World as We Know It.

No acknowledgments allowed in press, but thanks due to @coreenanne.bsky.social and Ludmilla Jordanova.

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JAHQP...

Why did disabled people support eugenics in the 1930s? | Aeon Essays In the story of eugenics, disabled people are often depicted as passive victims. But for some it seemed an opportunity

It is surprising how so few of the many histories of eugenics centre the voices of disabled people. Uncovering these perspectives contradicts all previous narratives of eugenics in interwar Britain

Yes! That's his home address, and was in 1953 as well. Too perfect. Lauriston Taylor lived a few houses down.

"Historians of science interested in the 1980s [...] can profitably learn from one another by comparing how scientists of different stripes moved through the greedy waters they swam in."

Joseph Martin's review of Greedy Science: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Breaking my social media silence because this #histsci review was oodles of fun to write, and I hope it's also fun to read.
www.brepolsonline.net/content/jour...

Thanks to @patrickmccray.bsky.social and Michael Gordin for the chance to review this one. rdcu.be/eMsRb

That tracks.

AD-X2: When US Politics Take on Science

www.historytoday.com/archive/hist...

Political currents The Eisenhower administration dismissed the director of the National Bureau of Standards in 1953. Suspecting political interference with the agency’s research, scientists fought back—and won.

The Eisenhower administration dismissed the director of the National Bureau of Standards (the predecessor of NIST) in 1953. As Joseph D. Martin writes, scientists suspected political interference with the agency’s research, fought back, and won. #histSTM #longread

I'm gonna open an NFL bar in London.

The Drop Back and Pint.

I think of it as "please clarify this (usually small) point." C.f.:
–The regarde-moi question (5-min talk disguised as a question).
–The please-expand question ('What does this have to do with my stuff?')
–The fuck-you question ('You're wrong. What do you think about that?')
Some overlap may occur.

You know, Steve Martin's 'King Tut' could very easily be rewritten for King Chuck.

♪ When Charlie was a young boy,
He never thought he'd see
Dear old Lizzie die,
And turn him to a king! (King Chuck)♪

I support efforts to restrict social media access for youth. Access to technology in an individual child's development should recapitulate the development of technology through human history.

That's why, a soon as they can crawl, I start my kids off with fire.

Imagine the world that might have been had Peter, Paul, or Mary thought to nip into a hardware store.

Cooper pairs

cricket, or, as I like to call it, tea-ball

A jigsaw puzzle blog called piecenik.

Cuny graduate school rolls back pregnant students’ protections after Trump letter Move comes amid Trump’s overturn of Title IX guidance, limiting schools’ liability in sexual misconduct cases

I misread this headline in exactly the way you would expect.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Well... touché.

The Common Ground of Science and Politics View all access options to continue reading this article.

There used to be scientists, too, who insisted happily that it was. Been reading this with new eyes...
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Will do!

Job 1—Advisor knew committee chair; other candidate tanked
Job 2—Didn't get offer til someone left for another position
Job 3—Got fellowship in a slow year
Job 4—No offer til first choice got permanent post
TT—Candidate w/inside track tanked; I'd met committee chair at another interview a week prior

But thanks for the source, incidentally. Salient to me in light of the soft matter people I've been talking to, many of whom came through Exxon labs in the early 1980s, which appears to have been a bit of a mini-Bell.

At the risk of muddying the waters... Not "Diversification: The New Oil Game"?

A hockey stick has a "lie"—the angle between the blade and the shaft—that is typically between about 133° and 137°. The smaller the angle, the higher the lie. Here we're looking at, what, about 100°? That's a very high lie! You can't buy a stick like that, and I certainly couldn't play with one.

This is the obligatory "seven words too long" post.