iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 2h

Sucks that the President is enabling Russia & undermining the crucial sanctions on their fossil fuel industry, but if the public actually perceives this as addressing cost of living issues it may be one of the few good political moves he’s made recently. Ukraine has so little public salience. Sigh.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

What do you think the best Robert Dahl book is for strong but early undergrad level readers? I can never make up my mind between ‘On Democracy’ and ‘How Democratic is the American Constitution.’ Alternately, is there a similarly themed book you think is better than either?

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 12h

Has the Rodriguez government in Venezuela made any moves at all towards liberalization of the political system? Or are they maintaining more or less the same gangster state systems are Maduro, just with her people at the top?

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 22h

Watched half the Georgia debate and half the Michigan one. I can't help have foreboding that if Democrats triumph in 2026 or even in 2028, the impossibility of restoring consumer positivity in the medium term means they'll get trashed again in short order when low-price utopia doesn't materialize.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 23h

Ossoff doing a good job here, admittedly he has a bit of a layup for an opponent. Even though modern debates are shallow soundbite manufactories, I still wish they were a more important part of our political landscape than the footnote-at-most, viewed-by-no-one shrugs they've become.

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GOLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 08/10/2026

if you want to be mad at the median american voter for caring more about their wallet than any other issue, go ahead, but if you’re in the business of winning elections, you’d be a fucking fool to ignore it

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Ran across this album a couple of years ago and gave it another listen today, it's a real gem of the stoner metal/desert metal genre. Hard for me to place EXACTLY who it sounds most like, it's not as 'clean' or catchy as Queens of the Stone Age or as wander-y as some Kyuss is. Really enjoyable.

discogs.com

Puddy - Sweetspot

View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 2003 CD release of "Sweetspot" on Discogs.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Yeah. What he does is very good for a specific vision of what AP is, but that vision is awful. And his success (and similar things like Fiveable) is a huge problem because it creates a downward pressure on all courses to follow the same patterns of focus those eduprenteurs do.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

That's probably wise, but it's also a great deal wiser than I expect an overwhelmed and stressed-out 17 year old to be.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

one of the better non-AP, non-admissions-industrial-complex courses my school offers is 'Thinking Like a Naturalist,' which is the total against-the-current paddling effort of a brilliant teacher. A kid who took that course would get this analysis, a kid who took AP Environmental Science might not.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

To some degree, the admissions-industrial complex means this is a little inevitable and students will probably find immediate benefits (with other long term costs). Many of my students are applying to 12-20 schools with competing supplementals, special essays, scholarships, test score options, etc.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

it's been about a decade since "does your writing have transitions to move the thought process from topic to topic" was a thing I could give grades for

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

a fairly substantial portion of the high school students I teach are first or second generation Indians, is this a Big Enough Deal that I should read up on it and address it in a near future class setting?

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

A lot of it does. A surprisingly large amount of the humor in those books is not particularly infected with racism or anti-LGBTQ themes. The things that hold up less well are, in some ways, their very particular English-ness and their treatment of technology and sci-fi themes.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

one of the worst things about the current world of Advanced Placement is the system of exploitative, lowest-common-denominator entrepreneurs that around it. They push the courses further towards total monotony and national standardization, with kids asking 'why doesn't my course match Heimler's'?

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It’s so striking that the vast majority of waste, fraud and abuse in programs like Medicaid, Medicare, social security, student loans etc are large scale exploits run by providers, businesses, shady nonprofits, etc. Yet so much of the political noise about them is about low income individual fraud.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

As high-potential students take larger and larger numbers of advanced classes in high school, each must step back demands to reduce student stress load. + we pay more attention to stress generally now. That’s commendable, but at some point the advanced quality of the classes starts to get diluted.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I approach the Kennedy case as 'there's something unusual here, Justices often disagree on law, but the common reading of the record below is shared, why did the Court deviate from that practice in this case? does it matter for evaluating the opinions and their usefulness or integrity of reasoning'?

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Oh! I'm sorry for misreading the thread. I didn't mean to sidetrack you.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

In the sense that, I will take the same exam question they will and try to justify my answers the same way they will if they would like me to! They need to have a position on the topic, a well justified one, not merely tell me the state of play in a particular topic. But their view need not be mine.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Hmm. I am not sure what I said amounts to soulless neutrality. It is possible to ask students to evaluate and assess (from my example) whether they think current doctrine in cam'n finance law is consistent with basic principles of democracy, grade them on their use of reasoning, existing cases, etc.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Teaching interest groups this week and it's just a perennial problem that it takes so much time and energy to distinguish 'groups can influence policy/politics' (laudatory, views the student agrees with) from 'groups can influence policy/politics (derogatory, views student dislikes).

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I'm not a law school professor, but I tend to think it's a useful thing for students to learn! It is reasonable that someone can teach about a topic ('how campaign finance law works, how Buckley/Citizens United were decided') without how their views on the topic stack up becoming very relevant.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

And the were DEFINITELY not those weird radical German Quakers, who were just as disreputable as the Moravians and even better politically organized. Why, Lutheranism left room for perfectly respectable and well organized slaveholding!

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

oddly, the periods at my high school are 45 minutes and they fully internalize that, too! humans are pretty trainable critters, it turns out.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The fiction magazine The Argosy, when it was shuttered for the first time, had lasted longer by 30 years than HBO has. It shaped cultural tastes of generations of readers (its influence persists!), career arcs of thousands of writers. Yet I don’t think one person in 50 today even knows it existed.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

One of my favorite activities of the year! Pulp fiction samples! The students will read 5 short pieces (shared in common) and one long piece (their pick). Here are the 5 short shared ones.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

for my representative portfolio of 1910s-40s pulp mag lit that the kids read in my pop culture history class I have by-women-for-women romance, a Chandler ('Goldfish'), Nowlan's 'Armageddon 2149 AD' and need to choose one more or replace one or two. I'd love your thoughts + suggestions!

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Found it! Thank god for HathiTrust. Thanks for the lead - I'll give a read and see if it fits my bill.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I'm torn between a Conan story, Lovecraft's 'Call of Cthulu,' a story from 'Two Gun Western Magazine' or one of the Air Combat Aces type stories from the 1930s. But am open to ideas!

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Hmmm, maybe, but I do a whole unit on the explosion of comic books later on - we haven't really touched on the emergence of superheroes yet. So while that's a good and appropriate suggestion I might have to save it for deployment later in the semester.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I do, but not until a later unit on comic books.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Quote-repost with no further explanation or context from a recent image on the device I happen to be using as ordered!

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

If you haven’t read it, his Wall Street Journal op-ed where he gleefully identifies originalist heresies which explain why all of his opinions are Originalism Done Right and everyone else’s are Bad Originalism is the epitome of that sub-graduate thinking complete w five dollar words in abundance.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The past had plenty of weird episodes and experiments, but SNW has engaged with that tendency in ways greater in quantity than in the past and in ways that are more far-reaching than in the past. I think that’s fine! But it is different, meaningfully so, from previous weirdo episode tendencies.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I agree - mostly! First, that episode was one out of 24 or so in a season, not out of 10-12. Second, even if the premise and content were wild it wasn’t wholesale stylistic change as SNWs genre episodes have been. I have liked the new season of SNW but it is more experimental than the past.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

(2/2) and that more of the genre experiments in this past season have been integrated into regular episodes rather than walled off from them - the vacation planet stoner comedy was a usual away mission filmed and written in a v different style, not a temp. warping limited to a holodeck malfunction.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

(1/2) Ive mostly been a fan of Strange New Worlds, including this season and I agree w you that other series have done lot of experimental episodes, too. But people aren’t wrong to see a difference. The big differences are that there are fewer episodes of SNW, so genre experiments take more “space.”

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This is true, insightful, and deeply frustrating to me, because teaching even AP/Dual Enrollment “how do American elections work” basic poli sci/civics to 18 year olds should not involve a convoluted detour into how buying TV ad points works! Yet now it must!

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Listened to a bit of Trump rally and watched the backing footage, was really struck by a bunch of very young (16-25) supporters who were deliberately placed in the immediate frame clapping at a joke about Alfred E. Neumann and James Talarico. I have a VERY hard time imagining they knew the joke.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I don't - I've only read about it from academics, mostly (I'm ashamed to admit) Randy Barnett before he went full kooky, or at least before I was aware of the extent of it. I'm sure that it features in at least a few briefs in the last 6-10 years and it would make a great project to see how many.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I'm frequently torn on just how much corpus linguistics can achieve to help us understand the construction of a term in a specific contemporary case, interesting as it is on its own terms. Knowing how capacious 'press' or 'libel' were in ordinary 1790 use helps me little thinking about TikToks?

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Thank for the encouragement, Joe! (I deleted the original post because feeling sorry for oneself in public is not ultimately a good look, but I do appreciate the positive response).

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Writing down a bunch of rapid fire interstate exit numbers to make your way through an awful area like the Northern VA mixing bowl used to be such a hellscape. That is definitely one area of driving that live GPS guidance has improved even more than it has the other areas of driving.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

One of the better museum exhibits I've been to recently was the Bill Maudlin temporary exhibit, WW2 museum in New Orleans. A v effective piece of work discussing indirectly the role of the free press, a person's own character development, how war shapes societies, and more. Wish I could teach w it.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Never did get the PhD, which is really the rub. An MA in History and an MA in Poli Sci/Am Gov't. But I appreciate the vote of confidence and agree that the cohort of mostly younger, mostly left-wing/plugged in set of academics on BlueSky are very charitable about belonging and barrier-policing.

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Sam Ulmschneider @samulmschneider.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I do talk about the yellow peril in pulp fiction, film and comics in the early 20th c, but it would take more time than I have to do a full exploration of the concept of orientalism. I’ll plan to bring that forward to reading Neuromancer for sure l, and that book sounds great - added to my wishlist!

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