David H. Montgomery

Folks doing Discourse about Obama and the Cheesecake Factory quip really need to read "Status & Culture" by @wdavidmarx.bsky.social about different ways people signal status, including passages on upper-middle-class professionals, and on kitsch:

The pettiest hill that I will die on is that if your cool character in a historical novel is rolling their eyes at social conventions, no they're not, eye-rolling didn't become a widely described gesture in English literature until the *1980s* books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

Oscar Wilde: In my book I invented the portrait that changes over time as a cautionary tale. Tech Company: At long last, we have created The Picture of Dorian Gray from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Picture of Dorian Gray.

was not expecting Jay-Z to become the Dick Cheney of football.

I really love this series of questions. (Survey research! It's useful for any number of things beyond asking people which candidate they would vote for if the election were held today!)

I’m still mad years later that this got absolutely no reaction from anyone.

My pal Danielle Koenig shared that her father Walter Koenig passed away last night at age 90. A performer whose kindness and warmth shone through the screen. He will be well remembered.

Lot of fear of people lying to polls. We don't have much evidence for it & don't need it to explain error. People uncomfortable sharing their choice are more likely to be in the now ~98% of people who don't respond than to take ~20 min survey to lie. Non-response much bigger deal

Brazil's election was decided in the densely populated south and north east

Figure of a Child Seated atop a Pig, 2nd–1st B.C, 📸 by @tomnweston

As much as I like lovely exercises like this, we need to stop saying that the choropleth map is "misleading". It can be misleading *if you don't know how to read it for the purpose it was created for*—to show who won were, nothing else. The problem isn't the map, but its improper interpretation.

When I was in middle school in Nebraska, I thought The Cheesecake Factory was a fictional restaurant that The Big Bang Theory made up. Then when I was in grad school at Caltech, I found out that some people thought Caltech was a fictional university that The Big Bang Theory made up.

Sure he did.

one of the neighborhood dads got one of the 13' Halloween skeletons and i now have some insight into what would happen if one country in a volatile region was first to a nuclear weapon

This is most of the text of a royal ordinance French King Charles X signed on July 25, 1830, one of four ordinances that day that amounted to a royal coup against France's liberal opposition. It provoked a bit of an uproar. Find out more in Episode 39 of The Siècle: thesiecle.com/episode39/

I was thinking about why you can’t get any of the .999… expansions by long dividing two integers and I realized it’s because of a certain (good! Let’s not change it!) conventional aspect of the long division algorithm, which is that when we divide a/b we choose remainders strictly less than b. /

We found that as of right now 73% of your campaign donation goes back to the consultants and vendors (!!!), four times more than just 20 years ago. Only 13% to ads. Even I was shocked.

I made an AI video about genzplyr and I lowkey love it. It's also 100% slop. In this post I dig into what makes something slop, when it's ok to share it, and how to avoid it in work that matters. Read more at: substack.hadley.nz/p/what-is-slop

the sheep detectives 2: ewe can see everything

macromedia shockwave, print ad (1999) archive.org/details/eu_W...

We were investigating Wedgewood for faking their data and emailed them for comment this morning, ahead of publishing the findings tomorrow. They are now trying to cover up their fraud with the "we were doing a social experiment" excuse. Full story here: blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/fiftypluso...

the knicks' ring ceremony was cool. i think marriage should be between two people but at the end of the day it's not really about what i think

Whoooole lotta sirens moving through Uptown now.

While I'm recovering from injury I'm thinking outside of the box to get in my workouts. I thought I'd explore something new. Duck Duck Go offering really valuable insights on how to begin.

Or they could respond basically the same way every society ever has responded to strategic bombing, which is a hardening of resolve to resist. acoup.blog/2022/10/21/c... It is difficult to imagine what news might be more warmly greeted in Kyiv than news that Putin had bombed Paris or Berlin.

The name of New Mexico is funny because it's one of those things that you'd think is really simple (oh, it's it used to be part of old Mexico, so we'll call it New Mexico!), but it's much more complex New Mexico as the name for the area predates Mexico by several hundred years!

What the Mets did by mediating the transfer of Freddy Peralta between the two eventual pennant winners without really netting anything for him or getting even replacement level production out of him, it’s really art. It’s like a weird version of money laundering where only you go to jail.

Just got all my boys together to take on the wandering ronin who came to town. There’s like 15 of us and only one of him so pretty much the only thing that would give me any pause is if he was master of the devastating and lightning-fast iaidō style. But that’s not likely. Coward hasn’t even drawn h

France is facing civil unrest. A weak government led by a leader with dwindling support has failed to control left-wing rioting, which threatens to bring a right-wing government to power. The year, of course, is 1831, as I covered in Episode 50 of The Siècle: