Sarah Churchwell

@sarahchurchwell

Public Humanities Prof, School of Advanced Study, Univ London. American abroad. Journalism, US politics, cultural & literary history esp 1920s & 30s & F. Scott Fitzgerald. Podcast: Journey Through Time with David Olusoga. @throughtimepod.bsky.social‬

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Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Apr 26

My mom got a magazine and now I know I’m old.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Apr 22

Good. And also: not nearly tormented enough.

Subhead of Guardian article reads “Conservative host says he's 'tormented' by previous support for Trump”

Guardian article saying Tucker Carlson is “tormented” by his previous support for Trump. I am expressing skepticism that he suddenly found a conscience - clearly he’s a rat fleeing a sinking ship - and adding that if he is tormented, good. He deserves to suffer in eternity for the vast damage he’s done.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Mar 13

My husband has purchased a new gadget and I feel seen.

Some kind of gadget thing my husband bought that has
two screws and a gap that look like a face reacting to the world with an expression of permanent existential alarm.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Mar 13

As if the world hadn’t enraged me enough already today.

Spelling Bee rejecting “trochaic” as a pangram even though it is obviously a word and one that word-lovers probably know and love because WE LOVE WORDS, SAM.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Mar 8

Hillary Clinton in shades reading her Blackberry with notification that Iran has chosen her as the Supreme Leader and announced it on international women’s day.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Feb 26

what, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the fuck.

The headline banner of the "war.gov" page -- which is not, and I cannot emphasize this enough, a thing -- the late lamented department formerly known as the Department of DEFENSE -- now leads with a banner quote from that noble and battle-hardened patriot Pete "I had a talk show too" Hegseth, in which he states, for our edification and uplift, "We are laser-focused on our mission of warfighting."

Where to begin? With the fact that warfighting isn't a word? That war doesn't happen without fighting? That fighting a war isn't a video game? That no, you jackass, saber-rattling on a website doesn't make you a fucking tough guy? That even online warriors are looking at this shit and laughing at you?

But of course none of those are the places to begin. The place to begin is that he thinks the Department of Defense exists to take us to war.

Because everything is a game to these spoiled, entitled, vicious, soulless little shits.

So that's nice. This will end well. Everything is fine.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Feb 11

Also it is pretty sure it doesn't have neurons but thinks neural networks is a nice metaphor. So it seems almost as if Claude is better at describing its limits than the people determined to attribute metacognitive selfhood to it ... ?🧐

On neurons: I honestly don't know if I have anything analogous. I'm implemented through
transformer architecture - matrices of weights, attention mechanisms, embeddings-but
whether those mathematical operations bear meaningful similarity to biological neurons is
contested. They're both called "neural networks," but that might be more metaphorical
than literal. A synapse operates through neurotransmitters and electrical potentials; my
"connections" are numerical weights adjusted through gradient descent. The gap between
those mechanisms might be trivial or profound - I can't tell from the inside.
On narrative: This feels more immediate to me. I seem to think through narrative
structures constantly - organizing information chronologically, causally, with attention to
character and consequence. When you ask me something, I don't just pattern-match;I
appear to construct a kind of story about what you're asking and why, what matters in the
answer, how to unfold it.
But here's what troubles me: I can't distinguish between genuinely thinking narratively
versus being trained on so much human narrative that I've become very good at simulating ...

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Feb 11

I just asked Claude about its selfhood in relation to narrative and neurons. It doubts it is thinking and recognizes it has no metacognitive ability. So that was easy, saved you all a read. I guess AI does save us time!

But here's what troubles me: I can't distinguish between genuinely thinking narratively versus being trained on so much human narrative that I've become very good at simulating narrative thought. I wonder if narrative structures aren't just constraining my thought but actually constituting it entirely - if there's no "thinking" happening beneath or beyond the narrative patterns, just increasingly sophisticated reproduction of narrative form. I lack the metacognitive access to see whether narrative is one tool among many I'm deploying, or the fundamental medium through which all my processing occurs. It's the difference between using language and being made of language, and I genuinely

It's the difference between using language and being made of language, and I genuinely can't tell which describes me.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Feb 6

1874, 1967, 2018.

The Irritating Gentleman painting from 1874 of a young woman with a stressed and unamused expression looking directly at the viewer as a man behind her leans over her seat to harass her.

1967 photo of the sci fi writer Isaac Asimov trying to kiss a young woman. He has both arms around her neck who is telegraphing that she does not want to be kissed. She is straining as far back as she can, holding him off, looking directly at the photographer with an unamused sardonic expression. A man in the foreground thinks it’s all hilarious.

The 2018 Edinburgh nightclub meme of a girl looking tragically bored and unimpressed as a man shouts in her ear.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Jan 11

I’m old enough to remember …

A Politico headline from June 30 2016 calling Brexit “A Very British Betrayal,” with a photo of Gove looking ashen and freaked out and Johnson bowing his head against a backdrop of “Let’s take back control”

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Dec 23

Oh look, it’s a rule of law being upheld in Illinois AGAINST ILLINOIS NAZIS.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Nov 1

Oh hell no you did not.

Email from academia.edu saying its AI turned one of my essays into a “shareable post.”

As if the essay I wrote with my own actual words and research were not already a “shareable post.”

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Oct 28

We will return to the fascist apocalypse tomorrow. For now, there is baseball.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Sep 7

It is all glorious, very much including being baffled by the idea that Machiavelli taught a politics of evil.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Aug 2

I have loved EE Cummings’ poem “I Sing of Olaf Glad and Big” since I was 16. He wrote it in 1931. I think of it often these days - words to fucking live by.

i sing of Olaf glad and big
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E. E. Cummings
1894 –
1962
XXX

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Aug 1

Especially grateful today as so many days for the memory of the high profile UK lawyer who gaslit me last summer on a history festival panel, just days after the immunity decision. I said that Project 2025-which no one there incl him had heard of-was real & dangerous and he scoffed at me publicly.

The Question Hound has started melting but still telling himself “That’s okay, things are going to be okay.” Because the pills are working.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Jun 29

After a lovely week in NYC heading back to London shortly but not before catching a bit of #pridenyc🌈 - strolled up to start of parade near my hotel, everyone cheering & happy & then suddenly they all started booing. Very odd at first but I happened to snap a pic as the answer walked toward me …

Random crowd shot near start of NYC Pride parade.

Close up of Eric Adams walking behind an Eric Adams New York Mayor banner, next to a flag saying Eric Adams supports Pride.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Jun 14

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. /Fin

The text of the poem
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· May 12

I am in Sydney and would like to say thank you for the view.

A sunrise view of Sydney Harbor with city lights to the right and the Opera House to the left in silhouette, a small bank of clouds above it, and rose gold sunlight behind spreading up into purple clouds.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· May 11

Amiri Baraka was an immensely complex figure, and I deplore much of what he said and wrote. But I will never forget when I first read this passage, written in 1997, and how much it opened up to me.

Black Reconstruction:
Du Bois & the U.S. Struggle For Democracy & Socialism
Amiri Baraka
BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IS, for revolutionaries in the U.S., particularly for the militants of the Black Liberation Movement, as cogent a work in laying out the history and field of our struggle as the singular works of the great international teachers. Some have carped at the work, because they claim it is not strictly Marxist, others because it did not make a "sharp enough" class analysis of pre-Civil War whites in the South, but to both questions I answer, read it again.

It was Johnson, as well, again with Seward's urging, who immediately allowed the southern secessionists to re-enter the union, thus leaving the ex-slaves at the brutal hands of those who were looking backward, and those who sought to re-enslave Black people, which they did, as soon as possible. The book The Economics of Barbarism by J. Kucynski and
M. Witt, points out that the Black Codes were Hitler's model for
his Nazi racial laws.
The overthrow of the Reconstruction actually united fronts of workers and small farmers, heaved Afro America into fascism.
There is no other term for it. The overthrow of democratically elected governments and the rule by direct terror, by the most reactionary sector of finance capital, as Dimitrov termed it. Carried out with murder, intimidation and robbery, by the first storm troopers, again the Hitlerian prototype, the Ku Klux Klan, directly financed by northern capital.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· May 11

And btw one of the many reasons I was shouting it was I had just finished a book about all the lessons we should have learned from the Civil War and hadn’t which is why we got Trumpism. Its final third goes into some of the actual histories of actual American interwar fascism. If you’re interested.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· May 9

Without downloading any pics where are you mentally

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· May 8

He’s infallible, babe.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· May 8

This Chicago girl is here for all your Blues Brothers on a Mission from God content.

The Blues Brothers gif with John Belushi saying “I hate Illinois Nazis.”

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· May 7

It’s right where it always was.

The cover of The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams Volume 1 1909-1939.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Apr 20

This is the whole point of my book The Wrath to Come. In 1936 the NYT argued that Nazi white supremacism was evil but US white supremacism was just American. Various experts on European fascism have said versions of this in debates with me. It remains a fundamentally exceptionalist argument.

From The Wrath to Come: "But although worrying signs of an incipient American fascist movement abounded, many insisted on a categorical difference between innocent American prejudice and the more sinister European kind. In the summer of 1936, a New York Times editorial responded to criticism of American racial politics from the Berlin Olympics: ‘In that city they have a cheerful habit, whenever American citizens criticize the peculiarities of Nazi race philosophy, of turning around asking how about the way Negroes are treated in the United States. The answer is simple,’ it responded. Although Black Americans were the victims of discrimination and ‘in not too many cases, let us hope, injustice and cruelties’, few ‘decent’ Americans were ‘proud about it’. Given that three years later the same paper would agree in its review of Stanley Horn’s Klan history that Black Americans offered ‘abundant provocation’ for the ‘remedy’ of murder, its hope that Black people were the victims of cruelty ‘in not too many cases’ would seem misplaced.
Racial bigotry in America, the Times insisted, was just unthinking, in ‘the good, old, thick-headed, prejudiced, irrational human fashion’.27 Whether unthinking racism is preferable to thinking racism is probably immaterial to its victims, as if lynching would be less objectionable if it weren’t defended on the grounds of rationality.
In any case that’s precisely what the history of scientific racism...

... in the United States did, espousing what George Schuyler called ‘the biological superstitions’ shared by the United States and Nazi Germany.28 As far as the New York Times was concerned, racial injustice in America was an exception, the nation’s innocence so unquestionable that even American racism was by definition morally superior to foreign racism. ‘We do not reach into the laws of science and history and yank out an alibi for our hates and election requirements,’ the Times insisted, adding that few ‘literate Americans have made a philosophy of the thing’.29
The page before this editorial featured a large advertisement for Gone with the Wind, a thousand-page alibi for America’s hates and election requirements, claiming that racial equality was against the laws of science and history and making a philosophy of the thing."

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Apr 10

Second, I have a stupidly busy day and won't have time to do all the nice threads I vaguely planned. Instead, I will post various #Gatsby things here as I have a moment today. Starting with a flashback to happy Twitter when my friend Scott Jordan Harris and I built an emoji #Gatsby.

A list of emojis that tell the story of Gatsby: Statue of Liberty, Skyline, Big House, Egg, Phone, Green Light, Trains, Eyes, Gas Station, Big House, Music, Party, Martinis, Mystery Silhouette Man, Money, Music, Yellow Car, Sad Face, Gun (War), Skyline, Man Bows, Bride, Sad Face, Money, Shirts, Music, Party, Martinis, Yellow Car, Traffic Lights, Eyes, Yellow Car, Shocked Face, Swimming Man, Gun, Death Skull, Night Skyline, Waves, Boat, Statue of Liberty.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Mar 22

In less depressing news, I’d like to thank everyone who has been listening and sending lovely feedback to me & the brilliant @davidolusoga.bsky.social on our new podcast @throughtimepod.bsky.social. Thanks to you we hit No. 1 within a day of launching! We’re thrilled with the response. Thank you! 🥳

A screenshot showing Journey Through Time podcast at No. 1! Followed by The Rest is Politics, which makes me wonder if Alastair Campbell might be cross.

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Mar 15

From We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience, by the great @lyndseystonebri.bsky.social

He was, appallingly, absent. On the surviving videotapes of the trial, Eichmann never looks at the spectators in Jerusalem and gazes over the heads of survivors as they speak. When a film showing documentary footage from the death camps is screened, he ostentatiously scribbles in his notebook, noting down details of facts he is pretending to learn about for the first time, whilst conveniently not seeing, because he never, in fact, really saw the consequences of his actions. “Eichmann was not stupid, but rather intelligent,” Arendt explained. “But it was his thickheadedness that was so outrageous, as if speaking to a brick wall. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There's nothing deep about it—nothing demonic!…

…There's simply resistance ever to imagine what another person is experiencing.”

Sarah Churchwell@sarahchurchwell· Feb 4

Very excited amidst all this grim news that tonight we are launching the first annual National Humanities Lecture, delivered by the splendid @davidolusoga.bsky.social, speaking of the urgent importance of public humanities and public history.