Timothy Burke
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timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke
@timothyburke.bsky.social
6.5K followers 920 following 1.5K posts

Professor of History at Swarthmore College. Writes at timothyburke.substack.com, continuing from his old blog Easily Distracted. Remembers when there was no Internet, and stays up late because someone is wrong on it.

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Political science 50%
Sociology 17%
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timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 1d
www.npr.org/2024/03/04/1...
This oral history of the 'Village Voice' captures its creativity and rebelliousness
Tricia Romano's The Freaks Came Out To Write chronicles the passion and talent that made a great American newspaper — and the forces that killed it.
www.npr.org

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
I was really struck reading a recent history of the Village Voice to see that Nat Hentoff was one of the writers who tried to block or suppress writing at the Voice that he felt was unserious--e.g., that had a politics he disdained. So much for the crusade for free speech.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
In one sense, this is nothing new. Remember the utterly unqualified graduates of Liberty U. etc who were sent to redo the Iraqi traffic code and so on during the American occupation. But this is taking it to a whole new level. It's hilarious that the right claims 'grade inflation' worries them.
parkermolloy.com Parker Molloy @parkermolloy.com · 3d
Worth noting that the student admits that she just threw the thing together in 30 minutes without reading the paper she was supposed to be responding to.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
There is a straight line from the naivete of well-meaning but easily fooled people who sympathetically credited talk of viewpoint diversity and cynical liars who played at those folks in order to install right-wing dogmatic ideology as the only allowable voice. Bari Weiss is the tip of that spear.

Reposted by Shannon Vallor, Steve Peers, Ralf Michaels , and 22 more

parkermolloy.com
Parker Molloy @parkermolloy.com · 3d
Worth noting that the student admits that she just threw the thing together in 30 minutes without reading the paper she was supposed to be responding to.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
That's the other Timothy Burke @bubbaprog.xyz but I couldn't agree more! Well done!

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
This more than anything else is what is so distinctive about the NYT in 2025--they just will not say, ever, despite the absolute factual clarity of the matter, that Trump and Trump's people are lying, no matter how many times they lie blatantly, almost randomly.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
Epstein photos are documenting the deeper truths of some conspiracy theories--a pan-ideological elite of people chasing exclusivity first and foremost, in which money and sex and commodities were only material precursors of engineered scarcity. They wanted only what others could not have.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
A source of comfort for a great many years and I assume years to come. Though Dreher actually seems to be a genuinely tormented person with a lot of weird demons inside and Brooks seems to have stepped straight out of a Cheever or Updike story with maximum blandished lack of self-awareness.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
I now have no doubt: there are people inside this Administration who are 100% consciously trying to do the cultural and social equivalent of flinging bodies over the walls of a beseiged city. They absolutely know that the "Patriot Games" sound like the Hunger Games, and they love the reference.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 7d
Recently, I wrote too theoretically and comparatively about political and military leaders in history who perform atrocities and violent cruelties with deep cultural resonance to terrify enemies. I meant to generalize in order to explain this aspect of Trumpism, but there's more to it. 1/

Reposted by Timothy Burke

shanegoldmacher.bsky.social
Shane Goldmacher @shanegoldmacher.bsky.social · 7d
NEWS: The DNC is killing off its 2024 autopsy.

DNC Chairman Ken Martin has decided not to publish a public report, believing that a backward-looking document would be counterproductive as the party has started winning.
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/u...
The D.N.C. Is Killing Its Autopsy of What Went Wrong in 2024
www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Mark Rice

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 8d
Gee who predicted this, oh wait most of us did. It's only going to get worse. We are passing beyond enshittification now--because the content of scholarly knowledge is now substantially digitized, generative AI is potentially going to start altering already published work, not just new work.
milesklee.bsky.social chopped unc crisis hotline @milesklee.bsky.social · 8d
Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.
AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don't Exist -- And They're Being Cited in Real Journals
Academic articles from authors using large language model are creating an ecosystem of fake research that threatens human knowledge itself.
www.rollingstone.com

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 8d
I just stayed at a favorite NYC hotel I've been to many times before, but not for a few years. They are now using an AI that sends texts to handle most communications with guests and it is infuriatingly bad. They might as well send a text that says, "Hey bud we don't actually do service any more".

Reposted by Suzana J. Camargo, John Horgan, Steve Peers , and 12 more

milesklee.bsky.social
chopped unc crisis hotline @milesklee.bsky.social · 8d
Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.
AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don't Exist -- And They're Being Cited in Real Journals
Academic articles from authors using large language model are creating an ecosystem of fake research that threatens human knowledge itself.
www.rollingstone.com

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 12d
It's *just* on the wrong side of the mix in the Fallout games. There needs to be some kind of sincerity or humanity in there somewhere and there just isn't, or when there is, it feels forced.

Plus, jumping puzzles in Outer Worlds 2. We need a ratings system that says "warning: jumping puzzles".

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 12d
There is just something about the worldmaking in the Outer Worlds franchise that breaks my connection to gameplay, and not in a good Brechtian way. It's so in love with its own irony that every moment of supposed feelings by or connection with NPCs comes off as dishonest and delusional.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 12d
When Amazon tries to use AI to do the season recaps for Fallout, there are really only two conclusions to draw: 1) that's all that they want it for, jobs like that--but those are marginal and simple tasks, so why? 2) they're hoping they can use it to make feature-length slop and fire everybody.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 12d
You could set up a March Madness style bracket tournament for all the fringe thinkers and extremists who are vying to be the Top Rasputin in this Administration. I think Laura Loomer would have to be the #1 seed, though.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 13d
I don't mind someone thinking in a big, expansive way about employee rights and arguing that getting fired should always require procedural reviews. I do mind it when it involves working the attention economy to say that an aggressively racist service worker deserved that protection.

Reposted by Anna O. Law, Kim L. Scheppele, Norbert Schwarz , and 11 more

anneapplebaum.bsky.social
Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.bsky.social · 14d
It's not just social media. Looks like visitors to the US from Europe and other countries that are part of the visa waiver program will have to submit an enormous amount of data about themselves and their families, including DNA, if proposed new rules are accepted

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 14d
You know, we don't even have a particularly good aspirant dictator in the US right now, because most dictators at least have the good taste to be secretive motherfuckers who don't blast off a thousand messages every night about how they're the greatest and bestest and did the mostest.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 15d
The federal government's entire social media presence now amounts to the communication strategy of supervillains in comic books, when they take over TVs and radios to send taunting messages to the public about the evil things they're about to do and dare any superheroes to try and stop them.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 16d
The thing that grips me so hard is that institutions like your recent employer don't even have the faintest idea what they are losing, what they are wasting, what they *are* as opposed to what they could quite easily be, given their capacities and resources and histories.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 16d
When you hear that there's been an official command insider the federal govt to shift to a non-woke font (and it's not about making sure nobody uses Comic Sans), you know the US government has been taken over by fringe revolutionaries. That's French Revolutionary Calendar-level shit.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 16d
Turns out that Bain is thinking along the same lines. www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie...
How Can Movie Theaters Fill More Seats Again? A Bain Report Shares Suggestions
"Audiences haven’t abandoned theaters; they need a more compelling reason to go," the consultancy highlights, sharing suggestions for how to bring fans back to the cinema in the post-COVID era.
www.hollywoodreporter.com

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 16d
Exactly this. Same consultants selling the same report, without any customization to the location, history, distinctive character or markets that a given institution maps into. Same leadership class buying the same consultancy to create permission to do the same dumb things that don't work.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 16d
How to save movie theaters. timothyburke.substack.com/p/how-to-sav...
How To Save Movie Theaters
Tuesday's Child Is Shouting Into the Void That Is Capitalism
timothyburke.substack.com

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 19d
Virtual reality is a fascinating counterpart to talk of AI inevitability. By my count, there have been four major episodes of hype about VR-inevitability all the way back to the 1990s and they all failed because people don't really want VR as it is imagined, not because the tech was inadequate.
phdhurtbrain.bsky.social Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 19d
The Metaverse was that rare public event that absolutely everyone knew was a bad idea. At no point in its existence did anyone want it to exist or think that it could work.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 19d
I thought that was an especially wonderful angle of approach here--I've been desperate for students to say exactly this about pervasive surveillance since it started to spread in the 2010s.