Trying to think well
Joined November 2021
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22 Photos and videos
Learning to spot these many years ago marked the start of my urbanist awakening here in Chicago. Relegalize them everywhere! They're not much good as residential spaces anyway — either too public or too dark.
28 Dec 2025
Imagine how fun Chicago would be if the storefronts in all of these late 19th century apartment buildings were still commercial. We can blame, in part, Daley (fils) and his campaign against corner bars and corner stores, which he considered déclassé.
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Dan retweeted
25 Jan 2024
The death penalty strips away a society's claim to decency, elevating violence and vengeance instead—it heaps death upon death, and puts killing its own citizens at the heart of a political order
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Now that some good-faith reconsideration is happening on this subject, we really need to be sociologically precise when using a term like “2010s progressivism”—characterizing a political tendency is always hard, and it’s critical to be exact if the right lessons are to be learned
11 Jan 2024
I know complaining about wokeness is the lamest thing you can do on here but I gotta say that the way 2010s progressivism reintroduced the concept that "different races behave in different ways" was a really dangerous mistake
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In much of social science this does not hold because contemporary theory does not uniformly represent “progress” over the classics; many major and even dominant schools of thought have failed to take account of arguments made in older literature, whose lessons we need to relearn
22 Dec 2023
It's time to say it again:
There is no need to read the classics because the textbook treatments of their ideas are perfectly sufficient.
Have you ever met a physicist who said that you should read Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica?
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Disciplinary linguistics is a good example: generative grammar has made great advances, but has also from its birth aggressively discarded valuable older traditions of linguistic analysis, not to mention essentially all of social theory, a fatal error that leads to a dead end
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It precisely needs to be renewed by a fresh engagement with Peirce, Boas, Sapir, Benveniste, Bloomfield, Whorf, Hymes, Goffman—their value to the present is not just procedural (learning critical thinking skills, contextualizing the present state of knowledge etc) but substantive
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Dan retweeted
24 Aug 2023
When they ask about the homeless crisis every Republican says “more cops” and none of them say “build more housing.” The left needs to be unified on “build more housing.” This is a gimme. Stop arguing over this please.
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Compulsory annexation of all suburbs, or something close to it, is a key prerequisite to the solution of most of the American “urban problems” and should be a high policy priority. (This is really just a simple inference from the consensus results of mainstream urban sociology.)
12 Aug 2023
What's your most radically YIMBY opinion?
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One of the most important discoveries of social science is that our lived experience—no matter how sincerely felt and accurately reported—can nevertheless be a lie. So lived experience, though never to be lightly dismissed, cannot be the foundation of a political epistemology.
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A preview of what is coming soon to the US: the explicit left–right polarization of the urban–suburban ideological axis, with the right rising to the defense of car dependence and sprawl, and the left becoming the faction of dense urban living.
30 Jul 2023
Talking about freedom, sat in Margaret Thatcher’s old Rover.
Earlier I spoke to @Telegraph about how important cars are for families to live their lives. It’s something anti-motorist Labour just don’t seem to get.
And it’s why I’m reviewing anti-car schemes across the country.
ALT The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sits in a 1973 Rover P6 at Sidcup’s summer fair.
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A miniature art moderne masterpiece, I assume grafted in the 30s or 40s onto an older structure. One of my favorite storefronts in town
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These replies are really interesting because everything turns on the word "coded" — i.e., generally or conventionally understood as indexing a right-wing politics. But much of the time, that indexical link depends on a specifically conservative conceptualization of the attribute,
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