A walk through a modern apartment, through the eyes of the people for whom everything in it was new.

A fun little experiment, comparing a rather average modern apartment with quotations from recent historical eras where the simplest modern conveniences would have been unthinkably rich.

From the beginning of his papacy sorcery and heresy were at the forefront of John XXII’s attention. And, it would be during this period that sorcery would be transformed from sin to heresy, thus forever transforming western attitudes toward magic. But, what was this process and how did John XII transform our understanding of magic and even set the stage for the nightmare of the witch trials?

Loved this video on the Medieval Church, magic, sorcery, and the origins of the modern "pure vs heretical" strains in popular thought.

In light of the recent Ceuta massacre, Iker Suárez provides deeper historical context regarding the immigration policies of Spanish social democracy, focusing on the contradictions between progressive rhetoric and border enforcement in a world structured by imperialism.

The Last Museum is a semantic search engine for 5.8 million artworks from the world's great museums. Search by theme, style, subject, or any description you can imagine.

Warning that this feels like LLMs are involved but at least the art is not generated at all. Still, could be useful as a search engine for historical art.

But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.

An in-depth 1-hour analysis of Lenin's vital text. It's not just history, grasping this overlooked lesson is crucial for tackling today's opportunism & most urgent political challenges.

I've enjoyed this series on the Russian Revolution disguised as Marxist analysis for a while now, I recommend this one if you're looking for a long video essay.

“Donna remembers the names of everyone in the group that gravitated to her 9th Street apartment. I intoned the names with her: ​‘Sally, Oak, Billie, Binky, Chris, Jill, Marlene, Lynn, Sharon, Joan, Nancy, Suzy,’” Giannecchini writes in ​“Alphabet City,” a return to the apartment where 18-year-old Gottschalk lived in 1967.

Thinking about how art and history can move you, can make you feel like you know people you've never met and could not have met.

Attendees float outside their environment and consciousness, smoking opium and building a Xanadu pleasure-dome near the desert stream of Wadi Nahabir. Suddenly: a massive boom. Sirens. Cracks. Pops. Hisses. And screeches. A universe is broken and remade by the warfare that nurtured it into being.

Absolutely fantastic, heartbreaking, infuriating writing on the legacy of Israeli genocides, Palestinian resistance, raves, and EDM.

Music scenes often develop through the same dynamics of resource enclosure and commercial exchange that those who live through them typically ignore. For instance, it would be dishonest to speak of Chicago house music without some understanding of land theft, racial segregation, environmental neglect, and wealth inequality in the North American Great Plains. The same is true of Israeli rave and EDM. Culture never develops in isolation, and electronic music is a reflection of the political systems—in this case, colonization—that allows it to thrive. It is through that system, especially its security and policing guarantees, that land is stolen, reallocated, remade, and finally positioned to force permanent exile on its refugees living nearby.

I don't even know what more to say. If you're interested in the modern rave scene I think this has to be required reading.

Israeli electronica launders the reality of mass killing, managing the psyches of those whose lives are built through the violence of a racist system. It will be remembered for its fascistic utility like Wagnerian opera and Beethoven symphonies in Nazi Germany, and those who resist it will be remembered for their bravery and steadfast opposition to injustice. When the guns fall silent, and Zionist leaders like Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir are brought before a new version of the Nuremberg Trials, there must be a parallel discussion about Israeli raving and the roles it has played in the bloodshed.

It's a nice idea that "This Land Is Your Land" should be our national anthem, a wonderful song full of generous and idealistic sentiment that's actually easy to sing. [...] But the truer one, the one that speaks to our collective inability to stop repeating the sins of our forebears and the ultimate inadequacy of even the brightest and boldest among us when it comes to making our long violent history actually past, is "John Henry."

When I think of the undercurrent of gravity moving this buoyant, lively poem, somehow I imagine one of those plums of the first line bobbing in a river.

What combat motivation studies have tended to show is that morale will get a soldier to the battlefield, but will not keep him on it; it is cohesion instead, the ability of a unit to stay together under pressure that is essential for enduring the terror of combat.

For the worldbuilder then, thinking about fictional armies (or the student of history thinking about real ones), be sure to think about the entire military-leadership life-cycle.

Really fun technical breakdown of all the computers in Jurassic Park (1993). I love this stuff.

The year baseball died and took everything else with it.

A beautiful little VN. Well worth your time. Gay and labor-interested and historical and heartbreaking.

The great African American poet and Harlem Renaissance figure, Langston Hughes, wrote two poems about V.I. Lenin in the 1930s. They reflect the tremendous spirit of hope that the Russian Revolution breathed into the national liberation struggles of Black people in the U.S. and all oppressed peoples around the world.

Had a great depressing afternoon reading all of this and flicking through a couple different wikipedia pages. When I say things like "the destruction of the USSR was a genocide", this is why. The destruction of Yugoslavia, the ethnic genocides on its former lands, the utter lack of response from NATO or the so-called peaceful forces of Europe -- this is what the USA wanted. This is what the end of the USSR meant: death, killing, massacres of people who once were united. This was the victory of the Nazis.

To put it in a metaphor, when it comes to a topic, a trained professional historian’s knowledge is often like a swimming pool that smoothly slopes from the shallow end to the deep end, while the autodidact enthusiast is sometimes more like a shallow puddle with really deep potholes. [...] But the chuds... it’s just a puddle. Not especially wide or deep.

Really good blog post about the nature of the "chud history guys". You've definitely seen them before, on X The Everything App or other places. People who believe the value of Roman society was its Power or Culture or whatever. As a definitely not-rightwing Roman History Fan myself, I have always found this not only exhausting but, well, dumb. It's a tremendously shallow and ignorant understanding of history in general and Roman history specifically.

They mostly begin with the modern ideology, which as I document in The Bulwark piece, is generally a mix of authoritarian-inflected bigotry, with the core beliefs being a mix of white supremacist (often expressed as a hatred of non-white immigrants) and homophobia, often with a decent amount of misogyny and antisemitism thrown in. The precise elements are generally negotiable because the commitment is emotional and irrational, because – as Umberto Eco famously noted – that is the nature of fascism as an ideology: it is an emotional rejection of the universalizing principles of the Enlightenment and liberalism first which searches for rationalizations second.

Romans were a weird, warlike people with a strong sense of civic tradition, which had different manifestations and transfigurations throughout their long, nearly three-thousand year history. They are a complex people to pin down. Their periods of greatness were all bookended by great tragedies, and even their "great times" were marked by scathing, brutal repression and oppression of their lower classes. There were progressive and regressive elements of Roman society, from their beginnings as a class revolt all the way to the early modernists of Constantinople. They were violently homophobic and had deep traditions of homophilia in various forms. They were contradictory, in other words, in the ways that long-standing societies often are.

The strategic aim of the “democratic” imperialist states was to turn Hitler against the Soviet Union; in a few words, to use the Nazis as a weapon against the construction of Socialism in the USSR. That was the initial aim of the so-called “allies”.

The USSR saved Europe from fascism, and they never forgave the USSR for it.

I want to talk about games through crises and mass extinctions.

Outstanding piece from Paolo Pedercini analyzing the history of video games through an explicitly materialist lens of markets and populational trends. Pedercini makes the argument that games must be, ultimately, decommodified if we want the art form to survive, and moreover that that process of decommodification may already be underway. Excellent analysis and writing.

His purpose was pure. This isn’t to say it was innocent. Pure purpose is madness. Purity of any kind is intolerant to us. Either we besmirch it with our meddling, or it dissolves us.