𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗

@charlescmann.bsky.social

7723 Followers 292 Following

Author of "1491, "1493," and, most recently, "The Wizard and the Prophet." Podcast, co-hosted w/ Virginia Postrel, about the history of things you didn't know even *have* a history: http://bit.ly/4unQNCY

Excerpt from article: "If random disclosure of common-sense-defying detail is your idea of a searing, poignant journey into the light of faith, there’s more where that came from. Communion includes what is almost certainly the ne plus ultra of a new rhetorical trope—the posthumous invocation of Charlie Kirk to justify whatever the author or speaker wants you to believe or do. You know what I mean: the thing where a conservative podcast host assures his audience that a week or a few days or possibly just minutes before the man’s death, Kirk shared the secret gnosis about Israel, which is inevitably followed by a riposte from a Mar-a-Lago influencer insisting with equal stridency that milliseconds before (or perhaps even after) the shooting, she received private confirmation via text message of Kirk’s established public position. In this case, however, the spirit is summoned to explain why Usha had become pregnant again; specifically, we learn that Kirk’s widow, Erika, told Vance’s wife that she regrets not having more kids with Charlie, and that this moved Usha deeply and—*Marvin Gaye needle drop.*"
Map of Ontario burn area shows fires throughout the whole province, but especailly in the west and northwest.
Bristlecone pines against the blue blue sky. The wood is super-resinous so dead trees don't decay for centuries or even millennia.
Chart shows how emissions from Microsoft, Google, and especially Amazon are climbing despite all 3 companies' promises to zero them out by the 2030s.
A meadow at dusk with a shrubby, waist high conifer in the right foreground. Haze hovers over the grass and in the haze are countless tiny yellow streaks of light--fireflies.
Enthroned Washington, by Horatio Greenough, 1841. Washington is in a toga-ish kind of garment while seated on a bench and is holding up an admonitory finger on his right hand while his left hand holds a sheathed sword by the blade. The statue is weird and bad, I gotta admit, but it is right there in the entrance.
Logo of Santa Fe Weekly Gazette, issue of Dec. 21, 1853.
Wikipedia chart shows a couple dozen Amish subgroups on the Y axis and a long list of modern conveniences on the X axis. The main conveniences that most Amish groups won't give up are the washing machine, which basically everybody uses, and, somewhat less popular, the chain saw, and pressure-driven tools and lamps. Link in the post.
A meadow ringed by pine trees with the setting sun just peeping through the upper branches. In the shadow of the trees hundreds or thousands of fireflies are swarming, making tiny streaks of yellow light against the dark trees.
Excerpt from article: "My intention is to highlight the fact that LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation, but this is not to deny how impressive LLMs can be at generating conversational transcripts. At times, they do this extraordinarily well; the fact that this is possible indicates something completely unforeseen about the statistical properties of large corpuses of text, which is a topic worthy of investigation. But if the Caesar character were to become dispirited by something that the Genghis Khan character said, we shouldn’t become concerned in the slightest. The conversation might contain multiple sentences that eloquently convey sadness, but no one is actually sad."
Excerpt from article: But it is important to be clear about what AI is, and is not, doing here. AI is not simply translating the scrolls. Instead, it is helping researchers detect and visualise ink that the human eye cannot see. The reading, interpretation, editing and understanding of these texts still depends on papyrologists, classicists and historians. In other words, the technology is opening the door, but human scholarship is making it meaningful.
Headline from New York Post: Trump official says US control of Greenland could bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster.
Excerpt from the initiative's webpage: Today, we treat respiratory infections like the cold and influenza as a minor nuisance. The evidence increasingly suggests otherwise. *Healthy people spend roughly 15–25 days each year—about 5% of their lives—sick with respiratory infections like the common cold and flu. *Infections from common respiratory viruses can lead to severe outcomes. In 2021 alone, there were 12.8 billion infections globally. Annually, over 65 million of these progress to serious lower respiratory disease and account for ~7% of deaths from major causes in the U.S. *Respiratory infections raise our risk of serious illness, often years later. While researchers are still early in establishing these connections, it seems plausible that society has meaningfully underestimated the significance of seemingly benign infections on short and long-term health.
Map of the Earth shows areas with no brown rats: South Georgia Island and Alberta, Canada.
Photo from Washingtonian shows some guy standing by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool holding a sheet of blue paint--roughly 9 inches square--that peeled off the bottom a few weeks after being put on.
Headline and deck from New York Times: Iran Says Strait of Hormuz Won’t Have ‘Tolls’ but It Will Have ‘Fees’ Charging a toll is illegal under international law, but some fees are allowed for services. It is not clear what services Iran would provide, but there were no fees charged before the war.
Excerpt from X post by Gregory Bovino, former ICE commander. The whole post reads: NewsNation is reporting I’m exploring a run for President in 2028. Here’s the truth: My one and only priority is deporting the 106 million illegals who are here. That’s it. The grassroots support I’m seeing tells me the polls are completely wrong… If I’m getting this much energy, it’s probably because 90% of the country wants mass deportations and the media just isn’t asking the right questions. My commitment is simple, liberate America from this invasion and restore our quality of life. If running for President is what it takes to actually get it done, then all options are on the table. House Bovino. Men fight back.
Excerpt from article: "In a way that is difficult to imagine now, natives and newcomers lived cheek-by-jowl during the colonial era. Settlers in New England smoked tobacco, planted corn, carried wampum to trade, wore moccasins and deer hide to travel, and fished in canoes (rather than coracles). Indians cooked with steel knives and bowls, cut wood with European axes, and sometimes adopted Christianity. Cultural appropriation was two-way and rampant, and it moved at giddy speed."
Chicago river at sunset.
Text of post and reply is this excerpt from the cited book.
Airplane seat back with niche to hold stuff labeled, "Literature only."
Eight tweets denouncing Eric Carle for supposedly making ugly pictures, all done within an hour of each other.
Microfilmed title page of the actual dissertation shows the date of completion as 1972, not 1974.
Google's AI overview of the dissertation reads: "Man and Fire in the Central North American Grassland, 1535-1890: A Documentary Historical Geography" is a landmark 1974 Ph.D. dissertation by Conrad Taylor Moore at the University of California, Los Angeles. It explores how both Indigenous populations and early Euro-American settlers utilized and managed fire, fundamentally shaping the ecology of the Great Plains. Overview of the Dissertation Moore’s work is a cornerstone in environmental history and fire ecology. It relies heavily on primary historical documents to map out the spatial and temporal patterns of human-set fires over a 355-year period.
Many years ago, the late Robert Stone—as if he hadn’t already explained the situation clearly enough in his beautiful, black-hearted novel Children of Light—tried to impart a lesson to me about the condition of the Writer in Hollywood. Call it “The Parable of the Sandwich.” “It’s like this,” he told me. “You go there—they send a car, of course—and you’re sitting in the back, in your comfortable seat. And they hand you a sandwich. And they say, ‘Here.’” He spread his hands in a gesture of bestowal, and solemnly inclined his head. “‘This sandwich—this magnificent and costly sandwich—is for you.’ And you look at it.” His hands, now receiving the grand imaginary sandwich that had been bestowed, were a good two feet apart. “A submarine sandwich, you know, on a nice, big Italian roll, crispy crust, freshly baked. Inside, they have put only the finest imported Italian delicatessen meats, cappacola, sopressata, prosciutto, every kind of salami and sausage. And the cheeses! There’s provolone, mozzarella, fontina, all gorgeous.” His eyes widened, avid and marveling. “And the condiments! The pickles! The marinaded peppers!” He paused... “It is, without question, the most beautiful sandwich you have ever seen in your entire life. More beautiful than you could have imagined a sandwich could ever be. And looking at it, suddenly you realize that until now you didn’t even know how hungry you were. And you pick up this magnificent sandwich, and you lift it to your mouth, and you’re about to take a nice big bite, but then—” He stopped. He frowned at the imaginary sandwich. “Then you notice something.” He brought it in for a closer look. “Right there, smack in the middle of the sandwich, there’s a little piece of what is, unmistakably, human feces. Just a little, tiny bit of shit.” He wrinkled his nose. “And then you look at the magnificent sandwich, and you look at that little turd, and you say to yourself—” pausing for not even half a beat— “‘Maybe I could just eat around it.’”
On Xitter, some guy who IDs as "ZiriuZ" repeatedly posts "jaja un ingles de mierda," which means, roughly, "Yeah, yeah, a shitty English guy." English in this case refers to the Anglosphere, not literally England.
Excerpt from story: They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men. Hair tumbling wild, a dress that caught and released light, laughter with iron under it. Eyes that skimmed and did not land, as if what she wanted was elsewhere and she had to pass through men to get there. She wore the island’s mixed bloodlines like a crown – African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it, Carib in the way her gaze could bless and warn at once.
The National Library of Unfinished Books The National Library of Unfinished Books, located in the submerged city of Aethelgard, is a specialized repository dedicated to the preservation and study of literary works that were never completed. Founded in 788 AE (After Epoch) by the Order of the Perpetual Draft, the library's mission is to ensure that no narrative, however nascent, is lost to the void of uncreation. The library's collection comprises over 3.7 million manuscripts, scrolls, and digital fragments, representing an estimated 92% of all literary projects initiated globally since the Great Stasis of 412 BE (Before Epoch).
John Mix Stanley, Buffalo Hunt on the Southwestern Plains (1845)
A key sentence from the proposed rule: "By proposing this limitation now, the BLM is seeking to head off suggestions that grazing permits may be appropriate for other purposes, including preservation or conservation. "
Headline from Daily Montanan last fall: Governor, federal delegation send letter to Interior targeting American Prairie.
Map shows the area in NE Montana American Prairie is working in. Stippled across it are hundreds of squares, each one mile by one mile, that are federal grazing land and hundreds more of equal size that belong to the state of Montana.
Map shows the areas along the middle Missouri River that American Prairie is trying to link.
Excerpt from article: Some of Lepore’s errors can be caught by anyone with access to basic references. She tells us, “The term feminist was coined in 1913” (p. 353), and a page later that the phrase “birth control” was “coined by Margaret Sanger.” Neither of these is true. Later, in a parenthetical aside (p. 522), she avers that in 1977 the population of Alaska was only 10,000 people, a figure that should be multiplied by approximately 30. In discussing the presidential election litigation of 2000, Lepore tells us that George W. Bush’s “brother Jeb, as governor, had certified the results as a victory for Bush” (p. 560) — a flat falsehood: The job of certifying the election belonged to the independently elected secretary of state. On the same page, she tells us that Justice Scalia is “widely thought to have been behind the majority’s opinion” in Bush v. Gore. No intelligent observer thinks anything of the kind. The opinion of the Court, an unsigned per curiam, was obviously the work of Justices O’Connor and Kennedy, since Chief Justice Rehnquist (joined by Scalia and Thomas) wrote a concurrence that urged completely different grounds for deciding the case. Here’s one for the basic fact-checking department: On page 565 of her book, she describes Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit, a critic of the Heller ruling on the Second Amendment, as retired — which he was not then and still isn’t. Little bloopers like this appear throughout We the People. But I’ll close with my favorite. On page 313, Lepore refers to “Vice President William Howard Taft.” In a distinguished career that included the offices of solicitor general, circuit judge, governor of the Philippines, secretary of war, president, and chief justice of the United States, Taft somehow managed never to be vice president. How this got past editors is anyone’s guess.
Excerpt from article: Even within the Americas, the thirteen colonies weren’t top priority. In 1778, the British commander Henry Clinton was ordered to abandon his occupation of Philadelphia, the largest city there, and send the troops instead to St. Lucia (five thousand men), St. Augustine (three thousand), and Canada (two thousand). The Cabinet discussed—and George III supported—withdrawing from the coastal colonies entirely in favor of the Caribbean. Britain didn’t withdraw, but its Royal Navy gradually redistributed its ships. Forty-one per cent of the fleet was at the North American mainland in the summer of 1778, thirteen per cent in the summer of 1780, and eleven per cent in the summer of 1781. Lord Cornwallis encountered these imperial priorities in 1778, when he was briefly ordered to leave America along with four thousand troops during a panic that the French might invade Jamaica. He ran fully aground on the same priorities in 1781, when rebel forces surrounded him at Yorktown. Cornwallis needed reinforcements, and one reason too few came was that Britain had sent ships to the Indian Ocean, where it was fighting the Sultan of Mysore, Hyder Ali. The battles in southern India “were on a scale that far surpassed those of America,” Burnard and O’Shaughnessy write, and they burned through British resources. Pearsall deems Hyder Ali the unsung hero of Yorktown.
Photograph from above, probably via a drone, of a stand of longleaf pine in North Carolina. A narrow band of flame occupies the middle of the image. In front of it is a forest with a lot of low, dead vegetation. Behind it is smoke and burned vegetation. But the fire has burned low, so the canopy of the trees is untouched by it. The fire has swept through the forest, but not burned it.
Notice by hackers who took down Canvas: SHINYHUNTERS rooting your systems since '19 ;) Shinyhunters has breached Infrastructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some "security patches". WARNING If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at TOX to negotiate a settlement. You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked. Infrastructure still has till EOD 12 May 2026 to contact us. Contact info follows, but it's such a load of gibberish I'm not going to type it.
Excerpt from article: For years, Republicans have urged environmentalists to put their money where their mouths are. Stop suing. Stop lobbying for new regulations. Respect property rights and buy the land you want to protect. Well, one conservation group took that advice — and the Trump administration just punished them for it.
Boyfriend is of the same age, wearing a remarkably clean leather jacket, backwards gimme cap, and camo pants. His left hand, resting on his left knee, is bandaged but not so much that he can't hold his pink vape pen. He's got a cell phone in the other hand. He's got a longish goatee and tortoiseshell glasses. He looks like he's sitting on the back end of a minivan.
Photo of waifish drone operator in olive-drab camo Ukrainian military uniform accessorized with a pink Labubu, a pink ammo clip, a pink key-holder, a Ukrainian "morale patch" with a pink, embroidered Tryzub (trident coat of arms) on a Hello Kitty-themed background, and a cat-eye morale patch.
Excerpt from Wikipedia article about "Nuclear anxiety": Nuclear anxiety was prevalent in many parts of the world during the 1980s. Nuclear threats were identified among northern European students as their biggest concern, as the second or third biggest concern among North American students in 1986, and was a source of anxiety in Third World countries, such as among Colombian youth. It was rated the most frequently mentioned concern among Ontario students in 1985 and Finnish children and teenagers in a national survey in the same year.
Quote from an early page in Gravity's Rainbow: "Slothrop, Tantivy's guest at the Junior Athenaeum, got them both 86'd feinting with the beak of a stuffed own after the jugular of DeCoverley Pox whilst Pox, at bay on a billiard table, attempted to ram a cue ball down Slothrop's throat."
Picture of the image for which Comey has been charged. It's a bunch of shells on the beach arranged to say "86 47," with 86 being old slang for "get rid of" and "47" referring to Trump, the 47th president.
First excerpt: "Here is where the notion for the undertaking came from: Tucked within the viscera of the continental United States is a restaurant that gives away superb free bread. Every time I have eaten it (before this past year, three times total), I have said aloud (to my husband, who did not care), “This is the best free restaurant bread in America.” The thought made me feel the way you do when you realize you were just a half a moment away from being plowed by a car, and were spared only by a chance nanosecond of dawdling before stepping into the street: giddy and flabbergasted and grateful to be alive. It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate."
Cover of Mary S. Lovell's "The Mitford Girls."
Excerpt from article: In an email from department chair Kristi Sweet, Peterson was given two options: either remove “modules on race and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these,” or be reassigned to teach a different philosophy course. “Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented … You are making Texas A&M famous—but not for the right reasons,” Peterson said in his response to Sweet, which he shared with Inside Higher Ed. The Plato texts include passages from his Socratic dialogue Symposium that discuss patriarchy, masculinity, gender identity and the human condition. In one excerpt, the “Myth of the Androgyne,” the Greek playwright Aristophanes says, “First, you should learn the nature of humanity … for in the first place there were three kinds of human being and not two as nowadays, male and female. No, there was also a third kind, a combination of both genders.”
Chart of measles cases per year shows 1,780 cases already this year. Last year, a record, had 2,279.