Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 06/10/2026"Clubs, fraternities, nations—these are the beloved barriers in the way of a workable world." E. B. White, who was himself an alum of a Cornell fraternity. 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 03/05/2026A thousand opinion columnists racking their brains about how to reconcile diversity with working class identity politics, and meanwhile this Jeep is just out there driving around 030 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 29/04/2026We need to get rid of geographic apportionment and instead create a 100-seat Congress where each member is represented by a single percentile of the wealth distribution. If you have a median net worth, you are now a proud constituent of US-50 along with 1/100th of the population. 000 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 14/03/2026Farewell to Habermas, whose essay "Modernity—An Incomplete Project" lies at the very cornerstone of my own thinking. platypus1917.org/wp-content/u...platypus1917.org 011 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 28/02/2026GYWO is my #1 case for Things Were Better When I Was Young 120 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 17/12/2025I’m working on a piece that’s in part about how agriculture (and especially forestry) were vanguard domains for administrative state autonomy in democracies in part because they had to operate on planning timelines that were chronologically longer than electoral cycles. 120 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 05/12/2025This came to me in a vision last night and now I’m posting it here for posterity in case a Scarry-Vuitton lawyer drone strike annihilates my underground bunker 020 0
Reposted by Garrett Dash NelsonLeventhal Map & Education Center @bplmaps.bsky.social · 04/12/2025Dreaming of a snowy winter? ❄️☃️ Every $15 donation from now until December 31 will make ½ inch of snow “pile up” in our snow tracker. And, instead of having to shovel out afterwards, you’ll receive a gift in the mail as a thank you for supporting our mission! www.leventhalmap.org/donate/decem... 011 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 04/12/2025Just finished this and I think it might be my favorite work of fiction by an American author in the past decade www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/steph...hachettebookgroup.comLonely CrowdsLuster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the gla... 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 01/12/2025Genuinely wild to me that a company would forcibly inject AI front and center into the user experience, then *utterly hallucinate* a false ability to accomplish a core functionality of the program (in this case, creating a calendar invite). 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 25/11/2025"If AI can diminish some of the monotony of research, perhaps we can spend more time thinking, writing, playing piano, and taking walks — with other people." @dancohen.org newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...newsletter.dancohen.orgThe Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting RecognitionOne of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved 011 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 21/11/2025It’s one example in my personal life of something I feel very strongly: we need ambitious expectations for public agencies, because, when they work well, they make our shared life better in ways that are impossible for private or voluntary actors. 000 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 21/11/2025I did a lot of @mbta.com griping on social media ca. 2020-2023. So credit where it’s absolutely due: competent management and the fruits of much-delayed capital investment have made the Orange Line an amazingly functional piece of public infrastructure this year. www.wbur.org/news/2025/11...wbur.orgThe Orange Line has gotten so much better it has a new problem: TrafficAn "unintended consequence" of all the recent improvements, Orange Line trains are now running into delays due to congestion at the end of the line. However, the MBTA has a plan to ease the issue. Mee... 210 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 20/11/2025I was primarily responding to the claim in the OP; I don’t disagree early C20 NYC was superior to barely-out-of-feudalism peasantry. But you could keep doing that comparison forever; most price-strangled neighborhoods in today’s US are similarly superior to a huge fraction of global housing stock. 100 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 20/11/2025I’m not one of the people who think all housing problems can be traced back to the original sin of capitalism. But, if the claim is “people in the early C20 US were satisfied, in their terms, with the affordability and quality of private housing,” that’s just not true as a historical point of fact. 110 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 20/11/2025There is a huge body of economic and policy literature from the 1920s and beyond which all accepts the premise of “the market has failed to provision adequate housing; what is the best way to intervene?” … so even at the time most people didn’t think this. 110 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 18/11/2025Gen Z does not have the drive to run away and join Van Amberg’s Mammoth Circus & Menagerie in order to prep for a future career as a financial buccaneer 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 16/11/2025In my lifetime since childhood, I have completed a full “watching lots of TV makes you an idiot” => “don’t be elitist and snobby, all forms of media are good and bad in equal measure” => “no, actually, watching lots of TV makes you an idiot” opinion cycle 110 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 13/11/2025Reposting this over and over until it stops being relevant 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 13/11/2025people have been torturing themselves over "regards," "cheers," "very best," and whatever else to sign their emails when "DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT" has just been sitting there 26111 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 07/11/2025collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commo... 121 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 06/11/2025Telling my children this is Danny Go’s full name 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 04/11/2025Vito thought intensifies bsky.app/profile/en-d... 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 03/11/2025For #30DayMapChallenge 3: Polygons, I'm re-sharing an old favorite: the 200 roundest waterbodies in Massachusetts. (Because technically a circle isn't a polygon ... except in GIS.) glitch.leventhal.center/birds-eye-ca... 090 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 02/11/2025For #30DayMapChallenge 2: Lines, I've visualized the @mbta.com @mbta-cr.bsky.social Commuter Rail lines as they traverse geographies of very different home values outside of Boston. observablehq.com/@garrettdash... cc @masshousing.bsky.social 030 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 01/11/2025There’s always precedent, and it is very often specifically Andy Woodruff precedent 000 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 01/11/2025A pointy-headed, pointless exercise for #30DayMapChallenge 1: Points. All of the official “Point” names in Massachusetts, with ortho imagery from @massgis.bsky.social 190 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 22/10/2025me in 2009: I probably can't go into politics, I have a few mildly left-of-center social media posts and a handful of vaguely cringe facebook photos politics in 2025: would the nazi tattoo guy be an effective opponent to the diarrhea video president? 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 10/10/2025Ghosts of unwritten books / in the land of undone things / unsung songs [W. E. B. Du Bois, ca. 1900] credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mu... 000 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 26/09/20252. Dolores Hayden, "Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space," in "The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History" 3. William Cronon, "Kennecott Journey: The Paths out of Town," in "Under and Open Sky" 150 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 26/09/2025There are many good possible answers to this question, but my three go-tos for introducing this theme at the undergrad level are: 1. Donald Meinig, "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene, in "The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes" 120 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 18/09/2025Turns out the right wing’s critique of wokeness was not “this is bad” but rather “we are the ones who should be doing this, and with the power of the state behind us” 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 14/09/2025My daughter's reverse-side embellishment of this "digital citizens" handout makes me think she was working on commission for a magazine looking to illustrate a "dark side of the internet" longform essay this week 041 0
Reposted by Garrett Dash NelsonBrent Cebul @brentcebul.bsky.social · 12/09/2025Mike Glass and I argue for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social that we’ve tried the #abundance incentive-based approach to housing crises before. But lack of oversight + incentives produced fraud, profiteering, and inflated rents -- and the Trump family fortune. www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/add...phenomenalworld.orgAdding Value | Phenomenal WorldMortgage insurance has traditionally been the method the federal government has used to induce investment in owner-occupied housing. But for multifamily rentals, the history of mortgage-insurance prog... 28627 0
Reposted by Garrett Dash NelsonGarrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 20/02/2025I originally posted this in semi-jest, but in retrospect I think it really explains a lot about what went wrong over the past 5 years. 031 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 29/08/2025Will be talking every day in my office, located in a Charles F. McKim-designed building, about how the people who wrote this are big dumb babies 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 28/08/2025Hard to believe, but apparently nobody has yet published an article examining the question of consciousness in LLMs entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Chat”? 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 06/08/202521st century urban challenges, 17th century political geography commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/deba...commonwealthbeacon.orgDebate over Everett soccer stadium shows flaws of decision-making by municipal boundary - CommonWealth BeaconDecisions about a possible professional soccer stadium along the Mystic River are being driven entirely by the City of Everett, though plenty of people in adjacent communities live closer to the site ... 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 29/07/2025Most of us are familiar with the visual metaphor from "Leviathan" of a giant body politic made up of a mass of people. But Hobbes also offers another vivid organic reference: political sub-units like towns and corporations are akin to roundworms in poop. 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 16/07/2025The world as seen from The Hub: equidistant radii around Boston. Thunder Bay, St. John's, and Jacksonville are all about 1,000 miles away. Accra, Ankara, Magadan, and Florianópolis are 5,000 miles away. Newcastle and Surabaya are 10,000 miles away. 000 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 14/07/2025On my niche nemesis list: the person who decided this was a useful way to filter a historical collections search by date of publication 010 0
Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · 25/06/2025Amazingly useful. Do you have a single geometry file for all cities available somewhere, or are these only available city-by-city from the Dataverse repository? 000 0
