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William M. Cavert

@williamcavert.bsky.social
2.2K followers 1.7K following 1.3K posts

Historian of Britain, its animals, pollution, energy, climate, nature, and people. Author of The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City. Living in St Paul, MN.

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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 4h
Congratulations in advance on the forthcoming praise and prizes.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 5h
On shared governance of universities. Which, it's worth remembering, is how European universities began: as self-governing organizations of scholars, who students could pay to learn from. Not as employees of anyone else, not as servants to a board of regents or CEO.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 6h
It would be more informative and no less accurate to say "man found shot on train in front of KSTP-5 news building."
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Soccer fans will remember Todd Boehly as the guy who bought Chelsea FC from Roman "Putin-Who's-He-I-Don't-Know-Him" Abramovich, and proceeded to spend over a billion dollars on mediocre players who did not work out.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
but how else are we going to prepare the next generation for the drearily disappointing and entshitified world of tomorrow?
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
An American analogy might be saying something like "no Fox News did not pay for that illegal thing because the funds came directly from Rupert Murdoch."
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
In terms of scale and impact this is probably the biggest scandal in the global history of professional sports. And the perpetrators, who have always proclaimed their innocence, revealed that their "irrefutable" defense is the flimsiest thing imaginable.
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Richard Bell @richardbell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
My new book, Imprisonment in Early Modern England: Politics, Debt and the Origins of a Carceral Society, is (sort of) out now! Currently available online for anyone with institutional access: www.cambridge.org/core/books/i...
Book cover of Richard Thomas Bell, Imprisonment in Early Modern England: Politics, Debt and the Origins of a Carceral Society
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
When I started reading How to Train Your Dragon aloud I put on accents for the characters, with shouty Scottish for several of them. 12 books of shouty Scottish is a lot.
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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Here’s Chris Rufo and his podcast co-host addressing “the Indian question,” a reference to “the Jewish question.” That question was whether Jews could be incorporated into European society, and the Nazis were the ones who claimed to have developed the “final solution” to that “problem.”
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
sure but now they have a QB with a 27.5 rating so it all worked out
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
One of the absurdities of this is how many mission statements there are, at the level of institution, college, and department. Such statements get painstakingly crafted and then routinely ignored by the people in who are most entrusted with following them.
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🌬Breeze @cool-summer-breeze.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is the Stolen Neighbors Quilt. Each of the 11,000 squares represents a person taken by ICE in Minnesota.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is kind of amazing, it's like the least funny a person can be while telling a joke.
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autumn coded @hoovybaby.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
“The humanities are useless / don’t matter” and yet rightwing billionaires are plowing massive resources into these programs
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I like the attention to detail involved in specifying that "all my books" does in fact include the book with the holy covenant in it, just in case someone thought that one had been ignored or was supposed to be donated to the charity shop.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
So you march through in triumph if you are worthy, but inside are weapons that automatically kill you if you are not. All top national capitals need a Southern Oracle.
static.klipy.com
Never Ending Story Attack
ALT: Never Ending Story Attack
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
part of being a parent is teaching the difference between right and wrong
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Raider @iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Austin City Council Member Mike Siegel said he has been briefed with preliminary information and that ICE appears to have shot a man in the back.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
This is like understanding "people made sourdough to cope with covid" to mean "covid made baking fun."
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Hiking in wild nature became popular after industrialization with people who found industry to be damaging, ugly, unhealthy, alienating, or scary. So the word "because" is up to some strange tricks here.
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Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
"People are really mad and however mad you are, it’s not enough. Because there is something so profound about no longer believing in the future, about seeing no value in our shared home, in the natural world. They’re traitors to creation.” www.theguardian.com/books/2026/s...
theguardian.com
Naomi Klein: ‘Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist’
She’s tackled neoliberalism and the digital world, now the writer and activist is taking on tech billionaires. She explains how the super-rich are capitalising on climate and financial chaos in pursui...
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Liberal coastal elites, leave your ivory silos and get out there and understand these people. They are concerned about the decline of the white working class.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Please read my first book, "Yes, It Is!" Also, please read my second book, "But Sometimes, No It Isn't."
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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 10/09/2026
Our refugee program, created under law by our Congress, no longer exists. The Administration is illegally using it as a visa for exclusively white people from a single country (South Africa), which has zero relation to Congress's intent and design. Congress could end this perversion tomorrow.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Thank god someone finally writes about Oberlin. For too long we've ignored the school attended by over .01% of America's college students. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
newyorker.com
How an Op-Ed in Support of Football Divided Oberlin’s Campus
The liberal-arts college Oberlin has barely won any football games in the past few years. Still, one senior argued, the school and its students should support the team.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
"revising" should be "reverting to", because the state formerly had a terrible flag that no one liked, so it was replaced with something better/fine, and of course Republicans now pretend that the old terrible flag was their beloved heritage and must be brought back
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I also went to the MN State Fair today and we also noticed the sparse attendance at the Republican booths, plus the ways that they had zero reference to the leader of their party. No Trump flags, no slogans, just local nonsense cultural politics like revising the (very racist) former MN state flag.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Spoiler alert! Lord of the Rings is about some hobbits who live peacefully because the hard men of Gondor successfully maintain law and order.
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David Veevers @davidveevers.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Police arrest climate change activists BEFORE they protest, but apparently they take their time to get to the scene when hundreds of masked thugs pour out of vans after months of very publicly organising their campaign of terror.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
I'm sure this happens plenty, but it's not been my experience of being on hiring committees. More common is a version of: "This applicant didn't get a letter from McFamous, who I've heard sucks and who wrote identically gross letters for 10 other candidates. Good for this guy, now I'm intrigued."
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
There are multiple ways the conversation can go when a scholar is asked how their discipline teaches skills needed for the job market. Leaning towards:
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
There are a billion literate people, who each have written a thousand things, so the odds that you wrote this thing are 1 in 1 trillion.
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Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 02/09/2026
Every. day. Everyday one of these ICE charter planes has to abort takeoff, or do an emergency return, or has a decompression, or gets stuck somewhere for 20+ hours with shackled immigrant passengers trapped onboard. And we never find out why. There is no transparency.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
The director of the shuttered "Center for Advanced Hindsight," who is in the Epstein files hundreds of times, appears to have fabricated data.
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Jim Swift @jimswift.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
The cruelty is the point. Shame on this administration and shame on the people who voted for this. www.springfieldnewssun.com/local/spring...
springfieldnewssun.com
Springfield Haitian student takes his own life after being fitted with ICE ankle monitor, advocates say
A 20-year-old Wright State student took his own life on Interstate 70 out of anguish over a required ICE ankle monitor, according to local community advocates.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Looking forward to Dem leadership examining what kinds of tax deductions to grant for end-times related expenses: "When the sun becomes black as sackcloth made of goat hair and the moon becomes as blood, hardworking family farmers deserve a little help."
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
static.klipy.com
Ya Gotta Do Better Than That - Home Alone
ALT: Ya Gotta Do Better Than That - Home Alone
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I'm not saying I support everything he did, but that Iago had some interesting ideas and I think if we really, really took the time to . . .
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flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
It feels like there’s a particular theme developing in the academics this magazine is targeting, but I can’t quite put my finger on it
Andrew Gilligan
@mragilligan
X.com
Simon Woolley is not fit to lead a Cambridge college. Me for the Spectator.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Good stuff at the MN State Fair.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
The Onion has gone too far, it's not cool to invade people's homes like this:
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Reminds me of that Key and Peele sketch about the black Republicans, all sitting around wearing the same khakis and having the same mustaches and mmm-hmming together about how they aren't all the same.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Part of the attraction is a different model of pro sports: less militarized/nationalist, no constant tv commercials, less in-game gimmicks, fans that aren't mindlessly happy, "clubs" with local roots rather than business "franchises." Stressing the English context of the league is part of that.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Confused why this would say that there are 996 supporters but the datasets (at the bottom, under "Explore the source data") clearly show almost 3000.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Richard II returns from victory in the crusades to a war-ravaged homeland, where cruel Prince John raises taxes, murders Becket, beheads wives, burns witches, and outlaws Druids. The sexy jouster Robin Hood is arrested and tortured. Freedom! he cries with his dying breath, inspiring a nation.
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History News Network @myhnn.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Primary sources are the necessary building blocks of history — unless you ask a chatbot to write it. www.hnn.us/article/ai-i...
hnn.us
AI Is an Anti-Primary Source Machine
Real voices from the past are threatened by chatbots designed to amplify — and ultimately become — the loudest voices in the room.
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James Talarico @jamestalarico.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
BREAKING: Liam Tadeo was just deported by ICE.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Hang it in the Louvre. And hang the perpetrators anywhe... actually never mind just any accountability whatsoever would be great.
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William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Reporting on Trump and his administration shares something important with reporting on climate change: in both cases there are bad changes happening before our eyes that get framed as possible-or-maybe-not harbingers of the future. It's not a portent of the future, it's the current present.
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