Brendan P. O'Malley
@bomalley500
Public school teacher in Worcester, MA. DSA🌹. Holden DTC Chair. Historian of immigration politics in the 19th-century US. NYC history. CUNY GC PhD. Sloppy indie rock drummer. MA politics. He/Him/His. Diss topic essay:
Google is slipping in its obsequiousness game. It’s been over 24 hours and Lake Ontario is still there! “Gulf of America” remains.
I've seen flags like this while walking my dog and they break my brain. You have now explained them to me perfectly.
Is that Millinocket Lake in the foreground? We were there in February.
Long plane ride finally allowed me to dig into @unlawfulentries.bsky.social’s new book. Makes such a convincing argument for the American Political Development (APD) approach to yield insights (w/ a shoutout to Richard Bensel). It synthesizes so many disparate bodies of lit. Going to learn a lot!
Aside from looking like it was cellophane-taped on to the side of the building, the font gives moldy-carpet-smell-at-a-past-its-prime Cancun resort vibe, which is a pretty good metaphor for the United States right now.
Unfortunately an otherwise very good monograph I’m reading contains this monstrosity!
If you’re in Worcester on May Day, I’ll be speaking around 5:45 pm, but please come by for the whole thing!
Learned that Lillian Gish was an America Firster. Should not be suprised since she had been in Birth of a Nation when young. Her performance in one of my favorite movies of all time, Night of the Hunter, still gives me chills. Tough to be reminded that an artist you admire was a fascist sympathizer.
Worcester, Mass “Hands Off” protest—about 1,500 at City Hall. Great speech by our excellent rep, @repmcgovern.bsky.social!
A really excellent book cites my diss in the same endnote as Burrows and Wallace’s Gotham. This historian of NYC can die happy.
Democrats in Holden Mass doing our thing! Yes, Mass Dems exist outside of 495, Worcester, and the Berkshires!
The voicemail box is open! He's not going to do anything, but it's important that he hears how angry people are right now.
Our teen loves an elaborate (and violent) video game that uses Dante's Inferno as the framework for the world it creates. This led us to reading a canto a night before bed (Hollanders trans.). I laughed when he says he wants to know more about this "Christianity lore" to understand the game better.