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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗

@charlescmann.bsky.social
7.8K followers 292 following 4K posts

Author of "1491, "1493," and, most recently, "The Wizard and the Prophet." Podcast, co-hosted w/ Virginia Postrel, about the history of things you didn't know even *have* a history: bit.ly/4unQNCY

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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 13h
The utter loopiness of some of the main figures in AI is perhaps insufficiently appreciated. Here is a long thread about, well, the sex cult at the heart of "AI safety."
skywriter.blue
Page by SE Gyges | @segyges.bsky.social
I'm back, I missed you all. Since this is an important subject I know too much about, here's a 🧵 explaining that AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult. I don't think these people should make policy. (1/?...
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Reposted by 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗
Your Local Epidemiologist @ylepidemiologist.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
11/ The bottom line is that the benefits continue to outweigh the risks when it comes to the Covid vaccine, especially if you're 65 or older. If you haven't already, now is a great time to book your Covid vaccine. After some bumps in the road, the vaccine should now be widely available.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I was reminded by @joshtpm.bsky.social that this kind of thing was happening four years ago, and like he says it seems worthwhile to remind yourself of this stuff when thinking about the current AI boom. www.digitalengineering247.com/article/meta...
Headline of article about a 2022 McKinsey report: "Metaverse could grow to $5 Trillion by 2030."
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
That's one of the downsides of free speech. As the Trump people are zealously demonstrating, the methods developed to suppress Nazi speech inevitably get applied to anti-Nazis. The only solution is to let the jerks sound off unless they are doing something outright criminal.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
"I hope we can....calmly hear the things people in my industry already know: "1) We must never stop building the Universal Bone Dissolver. "2) The Bone Dissolver is out of control, and seems intent on dissolving our bones. "3) We are the smartest men who have ever lived..." (Gift link, I think)
theatlantic.com
I’m Calling for a Pause in the Development of the Universal Bone Dissolver
A recent incident has raised my concerns: Last month, the Bone Dissolver unexpectedly dissolved a number of bones.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I know Substack gets lots of flak here, but this program--a legal defense fund for their writers--is a good thing, one I wish other newsletter publishers would emulate. They just beat tech CEO Maury Blackman, who sued a Substack writer for accurately reporting his domestic-violence arrest.
substack.com
Defender | Substack
The Substack Defender program offers access to legal support as part of our efforts to uphold a free press and free speech, which we believe are fundamental to a trustworthy media system.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Owwww!
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Question for those more economically literate than I am: Given how much of the US economy is tied up now in AI, could this be an example of Dutch Disease?
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The true story of Spatula Man in In 'n Out, or, a New York Times writer gets to have some fun. (I deleted an earlier version of this tweet, because I inadvertently deleted part of the link, breaking it.)
nytimes.com
The Viral In-N-Out Spatula Hero Is Exactly Who You Imagined He Was
It started as a bizarre late-night standoff behind the counter of a fast food joint. It ended with no injuries — and free burgers.
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Reposted by 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗
rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
shirley jackson you tell em www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...
ar and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise
—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or—kindest of all—goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
In Make America Healthy Again news, we're closing in on 1000 measles cases in Pennsylvania and a fifth person there just died. Though the fatality rate is low, measles has a near-unique ability to screw up peoples' immune systems, so every case makes victims more disease-prone in the future.
pa.gov
Pennsylvania Department of Health Confirms Fifth Measles-Associated Death, Provides Statewide Update on Outbreak as Cases Reach 943 in 39 Counties
Pennsylvania Department of Health Confirms Fifth Measles-Associated Death, Provides Statewide Update on Outbreak as Cases Reach 943 in 39 Counties
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
A pal reminds me that XKCD, of course, was there first. xkcd.com/978/
xkcd.com
Citogenesis
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I read the links he posted--one is below--and he seems to be describing a recurring problem Wikipedia itself recognized and dealt with. It began in 2014 but as recently as '22 the guy was using a sock puppet account to post misinformation.
en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Jagged 85/Cleanup - Wikipedia
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I never heard of the guy. Racist or not, the article seems true. It is reporting on an issue that Wikipedia itself identified and dealt with. The original problem was in 2014, but as recently as 2022 the malicious poster under a sock puppet was still trying to add bogus stuff to Wikipedia articles.
en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Jagged 85/Cleanup - Wikipedia
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
It looks to me that this person is reporting on a problem Wikipedia itself has discussed and acted on as a problem.
en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Jagged 85/Cleanup - Wikipedia
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Are you saying this story is not true? Also, who is Jordan Lasker?
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Fascinating case study of how misinformation and just-so stories get spread. A Wikipedia editor used bogus citations to mis-credit many small inventions to classic-era Islamic scholars, attributions which then ended up in numerous popular books, articles, etc.
cremieux.xyz
The Invention of Islamic Invention
How a rogue Wikipedia editor credited Muslims with... everything
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Say what you like about Caitlin Flanagan's politics, but that woman knows how to write a lede. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
Opening paragraphs of Caitlin Flanagan article: 

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
and Silicon Valley types like Peter Thiel who blather about government). Term comes from a Greek tale about a cobbler who sees the artist Apelles paint a sandal wrong. Apelles fixes the goof. Shoemaker now criticizes the leg. Apelles says, "Sutor, ne ultra crepidam" (Shoemaker, not beyond the shoe.)
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
TIL from @wapolicygreen.bsky.social about the super-useful term “ultracrepidarians”: people who think that since they're experts in one area, they're experts in all areas. E.g.s include scientists and businesspeople who opine on subjects out of their domain (physicists who decry population growth...
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
"Donald Trump has done something that decades of climate advocacy and international conferences have never achieved. [Due to high oil prices from his Iran war,] Global CO2 emissions look set to fall in 2026 by more than in any year since the pandemic." rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/trumps-car...
Chart of International Energy Agency projections of 2026 show demand for fossil fuels shrinking by 0.4%, and a decline in emissions by 301 million tons of CO2.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I sympathize. It really sucks when people just grab up your work without credit or payment and use it as a shortcut to make a product that might put you out of business.
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Reposted by 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗
Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026
Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
nyti.ms
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Not so anonymous, apparently. I don't know anything about the guy, but a cursory search suggests he is indeed concerned about the cultural effects of AI: quillette.com/2026/01/08/a...
Excerpt from article: 

The author of the anonymous X account was later identified on the pages of the centre-right newspaper Le Figaro as one of its own columnists, Samuel Fitoussi, the author of an essay against “wokeism” on film and TV.

On his own X account, Fitoussi said he had initiated his campaign because even though he was “techno-optimistic”, he feared that “AI will cause the disappearance of reading and writing”.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Well, this happened.
theguardian.com
Novelist accused of using AI to write book removed from French prize list
Thélyson Orélien had been in the running to win a top literary prize before the AI claim emerged on social media
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Reposted by 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗
Jonathan Howard @joho.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
“At least six babies in Pennsylvania have been born infected with measles, with two so sick they had to be admitted to intensive care.” H/t @ameshaa.bsky.social
nbcnews.com
America had wiped out measles. Now babies are infected at birth.
Congenital measles has rarely been seen in the U.S. That’s changing as vaccination declines and more pregnant women become infected.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fine @countyhwy.bsky.social essay about 9/11, baseball, and childhood fandom. "I was a child terrified by the killing of thousands of people. I wanted to feel safe and help restore normalcy. There was nothing I could do. But I could root for the Yankees and the Yankees could heal the country."
countyhighway.com
The Yankees Win! | Sam Sussman
America's Only Newspaper
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
My German-speaking pal mentioned Herder, too, in the conversation that started this. We had begun by talking about how many people in the US decried and protested the 19th c. "removal" of native people from their homes. We tend to forget, I think, how contested all these things were.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is from "Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf" (usually "Perpetual Peace" in English), the expanded 1796 edition. The translation is mine, made with help from Google and German-speaking pal. The point is, the colonial enterprise was contentious even then. There was no single voice.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
...even then. Obvsly, the pro-colonialism side won the argument. But it's important to remember that despite all the Lockes and Colberts who shouted for colonialism there were always voices like Las Casas and Kant making a case against it. If you're European, you can pick the tradition to embrace.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Historians rightly say people's actions should be judged by the standards of their time. But what often gets lost is that those standards weren't what we think. Many 18thc Europeans hated colonialism--as an e.g., here's Immanuel Kant in 1795 castigating it as "truly appalling." It was contentious...
"Excerpt from Kant: "If one compares this with the inhospitable conduct of the civilized—and primarily commercial—states of our own continent, the injustice they display when visiting foreign lands and peoples (which they equate with conquering them) is truly appalling. To them, upon their discovery, America, the lands of the Negroes, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so forth, were territories belonging to no one; for they counted the inhabitants as nothing. In the East Indies (Hindustan), under the pretext of merely establishing trading posts, they introduced foreign military forces—bringing with them the oppression of the natives, the incitement of the region's various states into widespread wars, famine, insurrection, treachery, and the whole litany of evils that afflict the human race.

China and Japan (Nippon)—having had experience with such guests—wisely restricted access: the former permitted entry but not full admission, while the latter granted even that limited access to only a single European nation, the Dutch, whom they nonetheless kept isolated from the native population, much like prisoners."
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Reporting trip.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Yikes--now you're asking the tricky questions. I remember the food (great) more than the name. I think it was the latter one, because I vaguely recall it having a Viet-type name.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I've been there! Great place!
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
People's attitudes aren't like the caricatures. Last time I was there, I met a packing-plant foreman--a big white guy with a pickup w/ flag decals. He proudly took me to "the best banh mi place around." He said his workers were "illegals" but they were good working guys he'd known and liked for yrs.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
SW Kansas is North America's beef-packing center--a prosperous and incredibly diverse place, both thanks to the thousands of immigrants, Asian and Mesoamerican, who came there to work in the '90s. It's also super-Republican. If these guys are pushing back on ICE, it really marks a turning point.
kcur.org
After ICE sweeps Kansas, schools warn families of detentions and a meatpacking plant delays shifts
After federal immigration enforcement action in western Kansas, a meatpacking plant delayed some shifts Wednesday and a school district warned that students may have had family members detained.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
This has all the suspense and humor of that great Jennifer Egan short story told wholly in tweets, except that no terrorism or gunplay is involved. I'd call it the "New Yorker short story" version of that story, except that I think that Egan's original story was actually published in the New Yorker.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
...if it's not AI, there's a new and I guess unprovable way to discredit books, and if it is AI, well, the LLMS now can write well enough to fool French literary people into thinking they're human, which is something, anyway.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Speaking of AI, there's a fascinating dispute brewing in the French press about a new French-Canadian novel, C’était ça ou mourir, which is tipped for all kinds of prizes, but is also being accused of being 100% AI written (says Pangram, anyway). Haven't read the book or know of the writer, but...
Cover of the book with an excited blurb: "I read this novel in one sitting, breathless. A powerful text. A balm as much as a slap in the face." The title means, "It was that or die."Picture of someone who fed the first two chapters into Pangram and got back the assurance that it was 100% AI generated.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I was joking, but this measure is in fact for the purpose of affirming gender.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Gender-affirming care, MAGA-style. I am happy to note that the actual issued clinical guideline is apparently called, "Testosterone Deficiency in the Male Service Member". Images from press release: www.war.gov/News/News-St...
Department of War, press release, 17 Sep 2026. Headline: " Department Releases Guidance on Implementing Testosterone Deficiency Screenings for Male Service Members"A real sentence from this press release: "For service members with testosterone deficiency, replacement therapy or other hormone treatments will be an option."
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Reposted by 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗
Theodore Grunewald @tedgrunewald.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Can't recommend this book highly enough...
"Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm" by Thomas J. Campanella, Yale University Press (2003). Cultural and architectural history. The rise of the American elm as a defining symbol of the American landscape and urban design.  Winner of the 2005 Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. The American elm, elegant and highly adaptable, was an essential feature of America’s cultural landscape for more than a century, forming great verdant parasols above—and giving its name to—streets all across the nation. The elm became a defining element in the spatial design of America’s villages, towns, and cities, first in New England, and—with the westward transit of Yankee culture—eventually throughout the United States. This fascinating and generously illustrated book traces the elm’s transformation from a fast-growing weed into a regional and national icon, and shows how Elm Street satisfied America’s quest for a pastoral urbanism imagined since the time of Jefferson. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300184471/republic-of-shade/
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Last weekend so many of my friends went out to look at the new supernova, SN 2026aaiv. It’s been 400+ years since a supernova in the Milky Way (1604, Kepler’s star), and we're way overdue. But while we're waiting this fella, in galaxy NGC 7331 in Pegasus, ~45 million light years away, will do.
skyandtelescope.org
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Oh, sure. The interesting thing is that until the mid-1990s building codes in MA (and maybe the rest of the NE?) were so lax that 60mph winds could cause a lot of damage to homes. The idea before then was, "well, we don't get that kind of wind."
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
They're scaled by color. See the key.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
One in Worcester, MA, in 1953 killed 94 people and wrecked a whole lot of the city. www.google.com/books/editio...
google.com
Tornado!
Books on almost every conceivable type of natural disaster have been written and widely read, except on the subject of tornadoes. Tornado! 84 Minutes, 94 Lives is one of the first detailed, book lengt...
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I mean, wow, Oklahoma... how can insurance possibly deal with this?
Similar map of Oklahoma shows the state basically covered with little circles indicating "tornado touched down here."
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Here's the website, which has similar maps for all 50 states, based on NOAA data. Obviously, MA has way fewer tornadoes than, say, Oklahoma, but I'm surprised all over again by how I underestimate the frequency of natural disasters. I bet I'm not alone in this.
data.telegram.com
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Just came across this map of tornadoes in Massachusetts since 1950 and am again impressed with the worthlessness of my intuition about weather. I would've said New England has basically zero tornadoes and that any that show up are scary oddities that shld be treated as signs of change. Which, nope.
Map of tornadoes in Mass since 1950 from https://data.telegram.com/tornado-archive/. Basically, this place I thought was tornado-free has had scores of them since 1950--I just don't know about them.
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