Aaron Wistar
@aaronwistar
Associate Editor, @beaconpress.bsky.social Words in Jacobin, LA Review Of Books, Current Affairs, and elsewhere.
Visited 19th-century landscape painter Frederic Church’s estate in Hudson NY, and learned his wife Isabel was caught up in the Victorian-era craze "pteridoma-nia" or fern-fever, an obsession with collecting, cultivating and decorating with ferns.
Finally someone is speaking up for vulnerable men living in their mom’s pied-à-terre because their girlfriends are too depressing
I’m not scared to say it: Every adjunct professor should have to pass their GED BEFORE cashing their $79.95 paycheck.
New dads often imagine that they are not biologically “wired” to care for their kids in the same way that moms are. In Dad Brain, @darbysaxbe.bsky.social shows nothing could be further from the truth. An amazing, necessary book!
What makes American architecture American? @katewagner.wehwalt.net in @thenation.com
Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s quasi memoir of his parents time in the Weather Underground is fantastic—absolutely worth reading—but Emmett Rensin’s review in @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social captures exactly what is wrong with it.
Sophia Rosenfeld on Richard Bell’s new global history of the American Revolution in @thenation.com
Great article on why hegemonic decline will not be enough to dethrone the dollar. Moving from sterling to USD in the 1960s required a massive multilateral effort, including Britain itself. Hard to imagine a similar coalition emerging today to move to Euro or RMB. @phenomenalworld.bsky.social
NYT says Democrats fear Darializa Avila Chevalier’s inflammatory tweets, like … “deportations are wrong”
Princeton sociologist Dalton Conley “joins the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems” (as reviewers of EO Wilson’s Sociobiology put it 50 years ago)
The North Korean economy is booming, thanks to weapons exports to Russia, among other factors. New housing is going up rapidly in Pyongyang and satellite imagery shows the country now shines roughly three times as bright at night as it did five years ago
Why supply-side reforms—necessary as they are—don’t address our broader anti-tenant legal regime. @lpeblog.bsky.social
A 1927 pitch letter from Paul Revere Reynolds, the first American literary agent. In its entirety. Agents have come a long way.
Tim Barker evaluating Samuel Huntington’s argument that “The United States is unlikely to decline so long as its public is periodically convinced that it is about to decline.”
US overreach with sanctions and tariffs has pushed its adversaries into hardening their own financial systems, accelerated the development of substitutes for American products, and forced its allies into self-sacrificial choices while offering them nothing in return. @quinnslobodian.com
As the spammers who impersonate me get darker and more threatening, the spammers who spam me are getting friendlier and friendlier
Got my first impersonator—apparently targeting self-published fiction authors. Please note this is not me!
Tech workers have more power than they realize when it comes to stopping AI use for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, says Kate Andrias.
One of the benefits of working at a nonprofit publisher is that we have the wherewithal to keep publishing heavyweight nonfiction without chasing immediate market trends. If you are hearing this from big commercial publishers,I humbly suggest you send your proposal to me.