Sarah Churchwell
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sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
Sarah Churchwell
@sarahchurchwell.bsky.social
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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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! 🥳
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
Lincoln was re-elected on a party platform saying "That foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to this nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy."
They're not hiding it, folks—straight up neo-Nazi advertising, from the font to the language to the 11 stars for the Confederacy. Then you have the DHS openly using white nationalist language of "remigrate", which means ethnic cleansing.

This is who MAGA is now.
November 30, 2025 at 8:03 AM
“a dissonance” 🧐
This front page from the normally pliant NYT + the defecting GOP House members (following the protests/elections we just had) suggests we’re @ to witness a lame duck era for the ages. Anyone who wants my support draw up a plan to imprison all tech execs & we’ll talk. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/u...
November 30, 2025 at 9:37 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
He's clocked the fact that he may be charged with murder, or similar, in 3 years time, unless Trump issues him a pardon. He'd better not fall out with Trump in the meantime. So he really is Trump's bitch now, even if he wasn't before.
November 29, 2025 at 6:56 PM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
Lincoln himself had a fair amount to say about immigration, and he was both unabashedly for it and scathing in his denunciations of nativists as, more or less, idiots.
November 30, 2025 at 8:05 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1965: 20-1

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1990: 75-1

CEO-to-worker pay ratio today: 280-to-1

Trickle-down economics was always a sham.

Nothing has ever trickled down.
November 29, 2025 at 11:01 PM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
The death of browsing is part of the reason art is the way it is now. Our opinions are largely fed to us by algorithms. Spending a spare 15 minutes wandering around a bookstore or comic shop or video rental place was how you found stuff you wouldn't ordinarily pick up and thereby expanded your taste
Bookselling is like the most "people go to the store and buy what looks cool to them without a particular agenda" type business left, and your purchases have a huge influence on what is ordered, what is displayed, and what is recommended.
November 29, 2025 at 6:44 PM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
I really appreciate that @pbsnews.org ended the interview with this graphic.

It captures, in the simplest and starkest terms, the brutal arithmetic driving this country's homelessness catastrophe.
November 30, 2025 at 1:33 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
Insanely stupid and short-sighted choice. I didn't even know they were still trying to run this racket. You put more universities in danger with this shit you idiots!
BREAKING: Northwestern University has agreed to pay the U.S. Treasury $75 million, over the course of three years as part of an agreement with the federal government to restore funding and end investigations into the university

Full statement from NU below:
November 29, 2025 at 2:48 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
On major questions of university governance, a 99.3% majority vote of the faculty means nothing to the people who are actually in charge. This is a fact all of us need to take much more seriously.
November 29, 2025 at 1:18 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
It is tragic that this person was put in a position where she lost her life for no reason other than to serve the vanity of a man determined to establish dominance over a city that hates him
November 28, 2025 at 11:53 PM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
So apparently the administrators at Northwestern have caved to the extortionist demands of the Feds. Faculty voted 595-4 AGAINST this measure.
November 29, 2025 at 3:30 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
I mean, as fighting words as it gets here from a GOP official against the White House.
November 29, 2025 at 3:58 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
The DC shooting story is really getting to me because we literally trained this man as a child soldier for a death squad in a forever war and Stephen Miller et al want to blame it on other cultures? It's our culture, American culture, that killed that woman.
November 28, 2025 at 1:40 PM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
Harvard Law School’s Jack Goldsmith:

“In short, if the Post’s facts are correct, it appears that Special Operations Forces committed murder when the ‘two men were blown apart in the water, as the Post put it.’”

open.substack.com/pub/executiv...
November 29, 2025 at 4:25 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
"We blow up ‘alleged’ drug boats in the Caribbean but pardon actually convicted drug traffickers in the U.S. Someone help me make sense of this.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/w...
Trump Announces Pardon for Honduran Ex-President Convicted in Drug Case
www.nytimes.com
November 29, 2025 at 3:24 AM
Reupping this as BBC journalists now can’t even quote the censored statement of fact. This is appalling. Facts matter! Evidence matters! This isn’t even an opinion!
This isn’t just the BBC censoring an opinion, as objectionable as that would be. This is the BBC censoring an historical fact. There is a mountain of evidence to back up this claim.
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1
November 28, 2025 at 8:20 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
'These days, you can't even call Donald Trump “the most openly corrupt president in American history” without the politically-correct brigade' etc., etc., etc..

www.theguardian.com/media/2025/n...
BBC tells staff they cannot quote Trump line removed from Reith lecture
Journalists not allowed to repeat Rutger Bregman’s corruption claims against US president in coverage of edit
www.theguardian.com
November 28, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
We are now further away from the theatrical release of Raiders of the Lost Ark (June 12, 1981) than it was from the year it takes place in (1936). We have reached the Indiana Jones event horizon.
November 27, 2025 at 12:49 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
It's funny to see people saying the economy is fine, when you have tech dudes asking for a trillion dollars to invest in a product where their answer to "what's your business model" is "we'll ask our product how to make money".
November 27, 2025 at 11:39 PM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
remember, folks,
November 27, 2025 at 10:22 PM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
I wrote 4000 words about Nuzzi/Lizza/RFK, please read it before it gets taken down by HR
The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined
Inside the most important, and also least important, story of our time
www.theringer.com
November 25, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
new favourite New York Times term for a British thing just dropped
November 26, 2025 at 10:05 AM
Reposted by Sarah Churchwell
Serious howls of outrage in the media this morning at what is a relatively modest Budget from Labour that does nothing more than fiddle around the margins.

It does highlight the missed opportunity. If you’re going to get this reaction anyway, why not at least get it for attempting a big swing?
November 27, 2025 at 7:41 AM
This is, at long last, the correct take.

How can we be the only ones to be choking on all these Zs.
I'm sorry but first Nuzzi and Lizza and now Izzy?

Too many Z's man. Too many Z's.
November 26, 2025 at 11:40 PM
This isn’t just the BBC censoring an opinion, as objectionable as that would be. This is the BBC censoring an historical fact. There is a mountain of evidence to back up this claim.
I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture.

They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1
November 26, 2025 at 8:36 AM