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en-dash.bsky.social
Garrett Dash Nelson
@en-dash.bsky.social
170 followers 310 following 110 posts
a polity is a place
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en-dash.bsky.social
"If AI can diminish some of the monotony of research, perhaps we can spend more time thinking, writing, playing piano, and taking walks — with other people." @dancohen.org

newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-...
The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition
One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved
newsletter.dancohen.org
November 25, 2025 at 7:00 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
I did a lot of @mbta.com griping on social media ca. 2020-2023. So credit where it’s absolutely due: competent management and the fruits of much-delayed capital investment have made the Orange Line an amazingly functional piece of public infrastructure this year.

www.wbur.org/news/2025/11...
The Orange Line has gotten so much better it has a new problem: Traffic
An "unintended consequence" of all the recent improvements, Orange Line trains are now running into delays due to congestion at the end of the line. However, the MBTA has a plan to ease the issue. Mee...
www.wbur.org
November 21, 2025 at 1:24 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
Gen Z does not have the drive to run away and join Van Amberg’s Mammoth Circus & Menagerie in order to prep for a future career as a financial buccaneer
November 18, 2025 at 1:37 AM
en-dash.bsky.social
In my lifetime since childhood, I have completed a full “watching lots of TV makes you an idiot” => “don’t be elitist and snobby, all forms of media are good and bad in equal measure” => “no, actually, watching lots of TV makes you an idiot” opinion cycle
sky.skymarchini.net Sky Marchini @sky.skymarchini.net · 10d
I’m sorry, the average American spends 6.75hr watching tv PER DAY????? www.emarketer.com/content/us-t...
Chart showing since ~2022 the average American spends 6.5-6.75hr watching tv, which has mostly shifted to streaming
November 16, 2025 at 9:13 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
Reposting this over and over until it stops being relevant
en-dash.bsky.social Garrett Dash Nelson @en-dash.bsky.social · Feb 20
I originally posted this in semi-jest, but in retrospect I think it really explains a lot about what went wrong over the past 5 years.
A tweet from me on Sept 15, 2020 reading "A hallmark quality of centrism is the inability to distinguish between things that are annoying and things that are bad"
November 13, 2025 at 7:35 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
people have been torturing themselves over "regards," "cheers," "very best," and whatever else to sign their emails when "DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT" has just been sitting there
November 13, 2025 at 12:44 AM
en-dash.bsky.social
Telling my children this is Danny Go’s full name
Wikipedia article for Daniel Gookin
November 6, 2025 at 10:51 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
Vito thought intensifies

bsky.app/profile/en-d...
zohrankmamdani.bsky.social Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 22d
UNTIL IT’S DONE, Ep. 5: Vito Marcantonio

There are many who dismiss our vision for New York as impossible. To them, I say we need look only to our past for proof of how we can shape the future.

Tomorrow is Election Day. And this is the final Until It's Done of our campaign.
November 4, 2025 at 12:41 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
For #30DayMapChallenge 3: Polygons, I'm re-sharing an old favorite: the 200 roundest waterbodies in Massachusetts. (Because technically a circle isn't a polygon ... except in GIS.)

glitch.leventhal.center/birds-eye-ca...
screenshot of aerial images of round waterbodies in Massachusetts
November 3, 2025 at 11:31 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
For #30DayMapChallenge 2: Lines, I've visualized the @mbta.com @mbta-cr.bsky.social Commuter Rail lines as they traverse geographies of very different home values outside of Boston.

observablehq.com/@garrettdash...

cc @masshousing.bsky.social
Screenshot of an Observable notebook with a line graph showing the home values of neighborhoods traversed by the MBTA Fitchburg Line
November 2, 2025 at 7:18 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
A pointy-headed, pointless exercise for #30DayMapChallenge 1: Points.

All of the official “Point” names in Massachusetts, with ortho imagery from @massgis.bsky.social
November 1, 2025 at 8:14 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
me in 2009: I probably can't go into politics, I have a few mildly left-of-center social media posts and a handful of vaguely cringe facebook photos

politics in 2025: would the nazi tattoo guy be an effective opponent to the diarrhea video president?
October 22, 2025 at 6:43 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
Vito Marcantonio
katelynburns.com Katelyn Burns @katelynburns.com · Oct 13
name an italian more worthy of an american holiday than columbus
October 14, 2025 at 1:45 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
Ghosts of unwritten books / in the land of undone things / unsung songs [W. E. B. Du Bois, ca. 1900] credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mu...
October 10, 2025 at 4:47 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
Turns out the right wing’s critique of wokeness was not “this is bad” but rather “we are the ones who should be doing this, and with the power of the state behind us”
September 18, 2025 at 11:20 AM
en-dash.bsky.social
Now *this* is Abundance
Newspaper article from 1938 with headline "W.P.A. Is Almost a Separate Social System"
September 16, 2025 at 7:59 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
My daughter's reverse-side embellishment of this "digital citizens" handout makes me think she was working on commission for a magazine looking to illustrate a "dark side of the internet" longform essay this week
A kid's worksheet titled "meet the digital citizens" with illustrated characters colored in by a child The reverse side of the previous image, with demonic tracings of the front side
September 14, 2025 at 5:12 PM
Reposted by Garrett Dash Nelson
brentcebul.bsky.social
Mike Glass and I argue for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social that we’ve tried the #abundance incentive-based approach to housing crises before. But lack of oversight + incentives produced fraud, profiteering, and inflated rents -- and the Trump family fortune.
www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/add...
Adding Value | Phenomenal World
Mortgage insurance has traditionally been the method the federal government has used to induce investment in owner-occupied housing. But for multifamily rentals, the history of mortgage-insurance prog...
www.phenomenalworld.org
September 12, 2025 at 11:06 AM
en-dash.bsky.social
Age of Asymmetries
September 10, 2025 at 9:41 PM
Reposted by Garrett Dash Nelson
en-dash.bsky.social
I originally posted this in semi-jest, but in retrospect I think it really explains a lot about what went wrong over the past 5 years.
A tweet from me on Sept 15, 2020 reading "A hallmark quality of centrism is the inability to distinguish between things that are annoying and things that are bad"
February 20, 2025 at 2:20 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
Will be talking every day in my office, located in a Charles F. McKim-designed building, about how the people who wrote this are big dumb babies
Text screenshot reading: (c) "Classical architecture" means the architectural tradition derived from the forms, principles, and vocabulary of the architecture of Greek and Roman antiquity, and as later developed and expanded upon by such Renaissance architects as Alberti, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Palladio; such Enlightenment masters as Robert Adam, John Soane, and Christopher Wren; such 19th-century architects as Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Robert Mills, and Thomas U. Walter; and such 20th-century practitioners as Julian Abele, Daniel Burnham, Rafael Carmoega, Charles F. McKim, John Russell Pope, Julia Morgan, and the firm of Delano and Aldrich. Classical architecture encompasses such styles as Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco.
August 29, 2025 at 12:22 AM
en-dash.bsky.social
Hard to believe, but apparently nobody has yet published an article examining the question of consciousness in LLMs entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Chat”?
August 27, 2025 at 11:47 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
21st century urban challenges, 17th century political geography commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/deba...
August 6, 2025 at 10:56 AM
en-dash.bsky.social
Most of us are familiar with the visual metaphor from "Leviathan" of a giant body politic made up of a mass of people. But Hobbes also offers another vivid organic reference: political sub-units like towns and corporations are akin to roundworms in poop.
Text from Hobbes's Leviathan: "Another infirmity of a commonwealth is the immoderate. greatness of a town, when it is able to furnish out of its own circuit the number and expense of a great army: as also the great number of corporations ; which are as it were many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of anatural man. To which may be added the liberty of disputing against absolute power, by pretenders to political prudence ; which though bred for the most part in the lees of the people, yet-animated by false doctrines. are perpetually meddling with the fundamental laws, to the molestation of the commonwealth; like the little worms, which phy- sicians call ascarides."
July 29, 2025 at 2:29 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
The world as seen from The Hub: equidistant radii around Boston.

Thunder Bay, St. John's, and Jacksonville are all about 1,000 miles away.

Accra, Ankara, Magadan, and Florianópolis are 5,000 miles away.

Newcastle and Surabaya are 10,000 miles away.
A map of the world on an equidistant azimuthal projection centered on Boston, with cities labeled at 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 miles distances.
July 16, 2025 at 6:52 PM