@brian_gettler@mas.toI've got a new article on loans made by an Indigenous (Wendat) family to their settler neighbors in the 19th c. Among other things, it looks at credit in the countryside, Indigenous interactions with banking and capitalism, Catholicism and usury, and notarial archives (they're the best).
Paywalled, but I know a guy.
"The Vincent-Picard Family’s Investments: Wendat Wealth and Notarized Contracts in the Mid-Nineteenth Century"
@memeorandum@universeodon.comKennedy's autism crusade ignores history, including his own family's (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5325652-autism-diagnosis-rfk-history-family/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250602/p10#a250602p10
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialIn Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading
@cdarwin@c.imWhen Ashley Robinson and her mother took DNA tests 10 years ago and began meeting long lost cousins,
they stumbled across a surprising family history that changed their lives.
Robinson’s lineage traced back to the 272 West Africans who were enslaved by Jesuits
and sold to plantation owners in the southern US in 1838.
The sale of the enslaved Africans helped fund Georgetown University,
the oldest Jesuit higher education institution in the US,
and served a…
@cai@mastodon.socialI’m a US citizen who has never lived there but has family there and has a certain history, affinity and complicated relationship with the country. I am simultaneously disconnected from the reality of “on the ground” culture — just as incredulous and horrified as the rest of the world — while also having a particular additional fear and a grief from my personal connection. I don’t really have capacity to examine that at the moment. That’s why I’m not talking about it, really.
@prachisrivas@masto.ai
@mszll@datasci.socialInteresting interview: Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/16/why-a-professor-of-fascism-left-the-us-the-lesson-of-1933-i…
@threeofus@mstdn.socialHappy #TuneTuesday. This week's theme is #ClipClopMusic .. 🐎
So pleased to have an excuse to share Knights of Cydonia from #muse. The most epic sci-fi Western video in the entire history of sc…
