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Charles C. Mann@charlescmann.bsky.social |
1259 followers 153 following 1172 posts
Author of "1491, "1493," and, most recently, "The Wizard and the Prophet." Working, inefficiently, on another book. The background image is pretty old by now, but I like the pig.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Wild story: How three mixed-race, illegitimate South Asian boys became part of George Washington's family. (The boys' father married his step-grand-daughter, Eliza Custis, whom he helped raise--Washington had no kids of his own, but adopted Martha's from her first marriage.)
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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I love this sort of stuff and think it's how art and people really work best. Brett Anderson, one of my two favorite food writers at the NY Times, had a wonderful piece the other day about how America is transmuting Neapolitan pizza into something wildly different and splendid. (America! Fuck yeah!)
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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I know people keep decrying globalization but part of me wants to say, "Hey, what about the way that a young Japanese music student at Casio ended up creating some of the most iconic reggae beats in Jamaica?" /v @radosh.bsky.social
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Ah, I missed it when you posted the piece.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Fine WaPo piece from a couple weeks back that both highlights the empty rationales provided by Duke administrators for closing the university's herbarium, one of the nation's biggest, and explains why herbarium collections like the one at Duke can be so scientifically valuable.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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I know it's ridiculous, but I still picture the Seattle Times's op-ed room from decades ago when I see the NYT page--a congeries of drunks, failsons, and loudmouths (and one poor bastard who really knew aerospace, cuz Boeing was in town, and hated his life).
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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"Yeah! Put him there so I'll never have to think about him again!"
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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When I was starting out, my editor told me he had two problems. A long-time reporter was getting to be an unreliable drunk and the publisher had a loud, stupid nephew who wanted to work for the paper. His solution to both: the op-ed page. I've tended to look at op-ed pages that way ever since.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Totally agree. Good journalism is so rare--and dumb crap so much the norm--that its rare instances should be supported even in the expectation that they will be wrapped in cruddy hot takes. This, to be clear, is the famed "I'll eat around it" take that I'm endorsing.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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"Don't let the bad spoil the good!" I say, with unnecessary heartiness. Sheesh, some of that op-ed page stuff can sure be irritating. But then just the other day they had a couple reported pieces about what's going on w/ Oakland's mayor that I thought were really good and I had seen nowhere else.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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FWIW, my solution is to not read the op-ed page and horse-race coverage and enjoy the paper's generally excellent science, sports, arts, and international and regional news reporting. I get the annoyance at Douthat, but don't want to be deprived of, e.g, Carl Zimmer, Amy Harmon, and Dwight Garner.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Thanks for posting this. As the article suggests, these actions are so piecemeal and little-publicized it's hard to understand what's going on overall. Wanna bet Haaland, who presumably is behind these moves, is working this way to avoid attracting attention from the conservative outrage machine?
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Presidential age arithmetic from a couple months back by Matt LaBash. Kept thinking about this today for some reason. mattlabash.substack.com/p/the-cocoon...
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Sure, it's a tiny fraction of the country. But I had no idea that it would even be noticeable in a map of this sort.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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So many little jolting details. I mean, really, "golf" has that much land?
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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This is an incredible map. I'd never seen it. Thanks for posting.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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The book sounds great!
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Wildly pro-Israel right-wing minister leads group that successfully demands Texas school districts remove Anne Frank and other Holocaust material from their libraries. Do I have this right? www.jta.org/2024/06/26/u...
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Anyway, good luck!
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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In general, readers are (IMO) 110% willing to put in the work if they understand that the writer is sharing the material as an act of generosity. "Here's this cool and important thing I learned about, and I'm eager to tell you about it properly, which includes some of the special lingo we use."
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Don't know if this is useful to you, but FWIW I've found that the main issue is less the odd vocab than readers asking themselves "why am I being dragged through all this stuff?" Readers tell me it's helpful if I occasionally step back and recap, emphasizing the "why are we doing this?" as I do.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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The biggest climate risks, as researchers like Gernot Wagner emphasize, are surprises--unexpected effects from messing w/ systems we don't understand. Lots of those surprises will be bad. But some are happy--turns out sea islands may be less vulnerable than thought. www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/b...
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Ada Palmer
@adapalmer.bsky.social
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Deforestation in the Amazon continues to plummet in 2024: down 40% from last year and last year was *already* down 40% from the year before! And yes this is *even with* increased forest fires! #ShareGoodNewsToo news.mongabay.com/2024/06/defo...
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Good luck!
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Charming, even encouraging, words of advice about revision from Cormac McCarthy: www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/b...
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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The Cybertruck was released on Nov. 30. Today, Tesla announced it was recalling the vehicle for the fourth time, an impressive rough average of one recall every seven weeks. apnews.com/article/tesl...
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Sophien Kamoun
@kamounlab.bsky.social
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I just published: Distrutto! Vandals destroy experimental rice field in Italy
“As public scientists, we express dismay and sadness at having suffered unjustified destruction, a result of obscurantism and anti-scientific knee-jerk reactions.”
link.medium.com/a9rISSBxFKb
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Whoops! I may have misread my notes. Maybe this was in Ruth deFries' also-excellent presentation?
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Using reductionism where what is important is the whole. Or, at more length: When splitting a subject into its components and measuring them obscures that what is important about the subject is the relationships among its components.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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This is maybe the best visual metaphor for misguided reductionism I've ever seen. (Photograph of a powerpoint-type slide by historian Rachel Laudan at a presentation a few days ago.)
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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It's 87 in Yreka now, so maybe?
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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I know you're only supposed to bring over screenshots from the Other Place to mock them, but you could do a lot worse this weekend than listen to this excellent podcast, and if you wanted to you could begin with this episode about a key moment in US history that not nearly enough people know about.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Every time I come to far northern California and see Mt Shasta jump from behind the mountains and preside over the flatland around like a benevolent deity I'm stunned all over again by my luck to get to live in a crazy beautiful country.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Overheard critique of climate activism: "Throwing paint on a picture nobody has heard of? Young people don't even want to go to museums! I don't get it!"
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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No idea what's going on. I was quite surprised to come across this study and story. I hope what they are saying proves true, as I know and like a few translators and I'd hate to think of them being put out of work.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Seems odd to think you can advocate for the preservation of life and beauty by defacing things that make life beautiful and worth preserving.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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This really surprised me. Despite predictions that computer translation will lead to massive job losses for human translators, the number of translator jobs has been rising, and BLS expects it to keep rising for years. (NPR story in link, BLS stat in story below) www.npr.org/sections/pla...
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Four years ago, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed wrote an essay that is a kind of personal history of Juneteenth. I just re-read it and it's still 100% as terrific as I thought it was the first time.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Really interesting! Thank you.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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The post is about the #landback, not the dam removal.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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As I said, lots of people deserve credit, including and especially the Indigenous communities themsleves. But Newsom not only gave the necessary approvals, he aggressively pushed to make this happen quickly.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Oh my goodness, thank you.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Lots of journalists, including me, have been very critical of CA governor Gavin Newsom on a host of issues. But in this case he reacted quickly to take the chance to right a historic wrong. Lots of others were involved, notably the Shasta themselves, but Newsom was key to this.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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The removal of four huge dams on northern CA's Klamath River has freed up thousands of acres of land that were forcibly taken from Indigenous people a century ago to create the dam reservoirs. Today, the Shasta got 2800 acres of their homeland back.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Yeah, somebody told me he didn't actually invent and the law used to be called "Davis's Law" after somebody else. So it seemed safer to go with "journalistic saying" or somesuch.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Once again, the journalistic rule applies: The correct answer to any headline phrased as a question is "no."
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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I love this time of year in New England.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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There's something so great about spending a couple late-summer days on the porch with a bunch of books.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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Glad it's good. I bought it a while back but haven't read it--I've got it in a little stack of books I'm intending to reward myself with when I finish my current project.
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Charles C. Mann
@charlescmann.bsky.social
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I tried to do it a little in "1493." You see clear differences among them--a kind of gradient from the Fertile Crescent to the Caribbean. More disease and worsening labor conditions as you go west.
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