iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The Clements Center's fellowship competition is now open. Details here: jobs.h-net.org/jobs/70425. Deadline is Jan 11. Feel free to contact me directly with questions.

jobs.h-net.org

Clements Center for Southwest Studies – Fellowships in the Study of Southwestern America | H-Net Job Guide

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Just reading manure letters: "when urate is made, it is essential first that the urine should be putrid before the gypsum is added for then alone will ammonium be produced"

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Ofc Fordist-like models broke down in Europe too so I’m not sure how generalizable the idea is but I think the ag productivity gains there were also dramatic

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Quack theory for today: the rise of ag productivity in the 20c broke Fordism. The original F was premised on farm household consumption, bc mass manufacturing meant substituting capital for labor, so even high-paid labor could never generate enough demand. 1/2

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

The amount of university required language on each syllabus has gotten more and more out of hand. Syllabuses are not contracts, that's a ridiculous way to approach teaching, and the more we turn them into quasi-legal documents the further we get away from a sane classroom environment.

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Good essay but the instinct to blame capitalism alone is strange given the disastrous communist famines of the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward. The problem is more general than capitalism. In any case, food inflation is bad but famine is less likely today than 50 or 100 years ago.

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Had to make myself a flow chart of how the Union financed Civil War procurement with a hierarchy of intermediate and final forms of payment.

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Very confused by these pages from an 1867 chemistry book that seem to suggest that a water molecule contains only one hydrogen atom? What am I missing? digital.sciencehistory.org/works/ld8bujg

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

How do you read this name? Andrew Zane?

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

Nicolas Barreyre has a short and very constructive essay on the "new history of capitalism." I think he makes an especially valuable point that we've reached a point where we can begin to re-engage with some of the economic historians who trained as economists. usabroad.unibo.it/article/view...

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Man I hate it when social scientific papers use parenthetical citations and forget to include the full citation in the bibliography. Go try to google (Smith 2011) with no additional publication details. One advantage of footnotes is that this kind of thing happens much less often.

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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Put yourself in shoes of someone in a oil & gas importing country Its triage: which hospitals get fuel, which industries shut, which crops get fertilizers? Those who don't have deep pockets in a bidding war pay in increased hunger, lost wages and shrinking economies. tinyurl.com/PolycrisisWesleyan

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

If your government is half blob, half swamp… you might be in imperial decline. Could write a whole Jeff Foxworthy-style standup routine around this format

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Dave Jones @cleanpowerdave.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

NEW: The first evidence of a solar take-off in Africa☀️✈️ x33 rise in Algeria solar panel imports in the 12 mths to June 2025, compared to previous 12 mths. x8 in Zambia x7 in Botswana x6 in Sudan x3 in each of Liberia, DRC, Benin, Angola, Ethiopia 🧵

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Heatmap News @heatmap.news · 08/04/2026

A toll on the Strait of Hormuz isn’t technically a carbon tax, but ... it still kind of is? @robinsonmeyer.bsky.social does the math of what Trump’s latest astounding act of climate policy means: heatmap.news/energy/trump...

heatmap.news

Trump Finally Found a Carbon Tax He Can Love

A toll on oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz isn’t technically a carbon tax ... but it also isn’t not.

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Civil War Era Article Workshop Sponsored by the Richards Center at Penn State and The Journal of the Civil War Era

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advait @advaitarun.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

I am slowly working on a thesis for why the US is dogshit at scaling up cleantech and, frankly, I think it's going to make nobody happy??

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Has anyone written a piece comparing resistance to the Embargo to our current tariff politics? @gauthamrao.bsky.social this is your beat, no? source: Mashaw, The Administrative Constitution

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

endnotes are an abomination

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

WSJ editorial board is lagging behind its news room

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

When people say AI can't think or understand, I guess they mean this. I asked ChatGPT to convert an old article chart into a vector image file. It's visually similar(ish), but it misses the chart's point and so fails to reproduce it in a way that's even remotely correct or useful.

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Basic Books Group @basicbooksgroup.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

"Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better," by @jandutkiewicz.bsky.social & @gnrosenberg.bsky.social, is now available!

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

There’s a larger point here, I know, but it’s hard not to laugh at this as terminal business brain

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Quite enjoying the WSJ hit piece on Noem

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Impossible to divine the true meaning of recommendation letters through the writer's relentless enthusiasm and goodwill--no doubt genuine--toward the applicant.

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Josh Lappen @jlappen1.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

This is PRECISELY why @gruberte.bsky.social and I say it's so important to be loud abt the consequences of fossil decline. These risks sound outlandish to many right up until they become reality. Who gets blamed then will depend a lot on whether govt has already warned and tried to take action.

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Dallas people are out here with rakes trying to shovel snow. Two inches of accumulation shut down the entire place nearly completely for four days.

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

It would be very funny if the Trump administration's plan to win the midterms with tax refunds were humbled by bureaucratic ineptitude they created themselves www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

From William G. Thomas, The Iron Way. For the life of me I still can't figure out what word clouds are good for. Does anyone have a reliable interpretive approach to these things?

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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

okay so fun news, I am launching a macro newsletter from Common Wealth about the supply side data and the US economy called Forces of Production Charts for bsky forthcoming at: @forcesofproduction.com Launch essay below: www.forcesofproduction.com/p/atop-the-f...

forcesofproduction.com

Atop the Forces of Production

Announcing the launch of the Forces of Production macro data newsletter

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

here for critical time-sensitive updates from the National Hay Association

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Kate Masur @katemasur.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

Thanks to @talkingpointsmemo.com for the terrific suite of articles on what Jan. 6 really was. Here's the report Greg Downs and I wrote for the J6 committee, in which we cast that day's events -- and the response to them -- as part of a very long struggle over democracy in the United States

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

writing a chapter that’s either a significant contribution to Civil War military history or an exercise in utterly pedantic antiquarianism. Really not sure which. Both? It took ages to put together these numbers showing the logistical burden of equine forage in physical vs cost quantities.

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

Foreign policy discourse on both the left and the right seems like such a strange mix of hard bitten realism and anime eyes fantasy

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Ariel Ron @arielron.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

Clements Center writing fellowship applications are due JAN 11. On to PhD-holders in any humanities or social science filed with book-length projects on Texas, the Southwest, or the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, incl. comparative projects w/at least one foot in the region. www.smu.edu/dedman/resea...

smu.edu

How to Apply

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