I also told him I thought his book would make a good TV show. This was on my mind b/c Shaun and I met working on So Long Dental Plan (@solongdentalplan.com), the upcoming book he edited about stories about unions in scripted TV. Keep an eye out for it, nerds of labor and TV! 3/3
We talked about the Trump administration's use of deportation to chill its perceived ideological enemies, and how that would sound familiar to Michael J. Obermeier, the union president who was arrested, convicted of lying about his Communist party membership, and deported during the Cold War. 2/3
It was great to interview @shaunrichman.org about We Always Had a Union, his page-turner history of the New York hotel workers' union! 1/3
I was interviewed in Jacobin (by @jennyhunter.bsky.social) about "We Always Had a Union."
jacobin.com/2026/04/comm...
That's exactly what happened.
I've argued that it wasn't that the Communists were braver, smarter or even more radical. It's just that they brought *disagreement* to the AFL & CIO. A movement that prioritizes unity sometimes just needs *disagreement* to hash out an approach to a thorny problem (like capital flight).
My 8YO wants to enter a 30-old trivia contest-cum-lottery she found in the back of the 100th volume of The Baby-Sitters Club.
shaunrichman.com/2026/04/20/r...
The groupthink is incomprehensibly strong with uni admin types. There are so many ways that my college (a winner in the distance/online shift) could stand out and stand up for the humanities. Instead, it’s baa baa white sheep.
This is an under-appreciated part of the Mamdani vibeshift. New York hasn't had a mayor who was constitutionally barred from having (unrealistic) presidential ambitions since 1952.
I don't have an agent, so take this with a grain of salt, but the pissier and more precious a literary agent's instructions to potential clients are, the more I think they can go get fucked.
(I don't include "please don't query multiple agents at the same agency" as "pissy." That's reasonable.)
You owe them what they promise you: nothing. Query multiple agents, publishers, etc. It's only when one gets to the point of asking to see the whole manuscript that you should give some small consideration to temporary exclusivity.
Well, yes, there is a lot of drug money to confiscate.
"It won't stop here." What is the terrifying next step? The ignominy of first class on Qatar Airways instead of employing your own equivalant of a US Airways subsidiary for the next time you want to get Dubai chocolate in actual Dubai?
What I will never understand about the $5M+ pied-à-terre owners is that you could just stay at the Waldorf=Astoria anytime you want!
Is it really that important to you to see the impersonal wall art your P.A. chose and drink your preferred brand of bottled water the 3 days a year you visit?
Because it was the least realistic/representative of the workplaces. Also because somebody else had pitched a chapter on just season 2, so I stayed away to avoid repetitiveness.
You know I wrote a book chapter about how "The Wire" was a TV show about workplaces, and perversely decided to skip over season 2 entirely.
www.bloomsbury.com/us/scenes-fr...
To be clear, the bad-faith right-wing attacks *are* real and have taken a toll on American HE since the 1960s, but they’re not the full story and the root cause of the legitimacy crisis in 2026 is driven by student debt and the sense that universities have betrayed their promise of social mobility.
This narrative—that the only reason universities are experiencing a legitimacy crisis in the 2020s is because of bad-faith right-wing attacks—conveniently ignores the neoliberalization of higher education.
They announced an emphasis away from meat dishes as a health/environmental choice three or four years ago.
Do you...not doing your own grocery shopping? Prices have absolutely gone up!
God bless you @colsonwhitehead.com
"Do you realize how much water and power it’d take to replicate the average writer’s narcissism, self-loathing and despair? It’d drain the Indian Ocean. You could light up Times Square for a year. We can’t afford it."
Corporations? Or universities? I thought Zoom is more popular in the private sector, while Microsoft takes advantage of lumbering bureaucracies.
In years past, you had to file a copy of your publication with the Library of Congress to enjoy copyright protection. A similar rule should apply to Internet Archive.
What strikes me about this post's text is the certainty of the author that the opposition winning enough votes will mean the complete reversal of the prior regime. It's frustrating that Americans can't go into the next two elections with similar hopes for our nominal "opposition."
Yeah, I wouldn't herald that guy as a Master of Thinking It Through.
It often seems like there has been little progress in fighting back against The Regime’s war on science, but this is a major victory.
The proposed cap of 15% for indirect costs for NIH funding has been defeated in court.
Doesn’t mean they won’t try again, but this is worth celebrating.
"This is what you get when you elect Republicans."
Every Dem within 100 feet of a camera needs to be saying this repeatedly.
Every time we elect Republicans, we get dumbass wars, tax cuts for rich people, and financial crises. Every time.
Fucking say it!
We'll all die of stress-related illnesses if this thing gets strung along two weeks at a time. It's time to start haunting our sorry-ass Congressional representatives until they take grandpa's keys away.
Kind of weird to be hoping that we only on the brink of another insider trading market moving statement as opposed to the commission of war crimes.
