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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
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
collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commo...
a planning diagram for Boston's Central Artery
November 7, 2025 at 12:51 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
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
The most impressive part of all this:
Web banner reading "The author has never been in Boston. All the information has been extracted from sketches posted in Wikimedia Commons, and from pictures and videos posted in the internet as well."
October 21, 2025 at 5:52 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
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
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
a chatgpt prompt asking for an image of "the historian Leopold von Ranke taking a long and exhausted drag on a cigarette," and the generated image
August 5, 2025 at 5:58 PM
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
en-dash.bsky.social
On my niche nemesis list: the person who decided this was a useful way to filter a historical collections search by date of publication
A web search modal with "Date of publication" followed by a seemingly random list of dates and date ranges
July 14, 2025 at 10:32 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
"Therefore"
July 10, 2025 at 12:51 AM
en-dash.bsky.social
@bencosgrove.bsky.social knows the secret passphrase that gets you access to the cans
Ben Cosgrove’s hand holding a market basket Chelmsford golden ginger ale can
June 6, 2025 at 10:59 AM
en-dash.bsky.social
Epic Systems, which took in $4.6bn of revenue in 2022, has software that lists every single county in the US in a single dropdown menu.
screenshot of a dropdown menu with hundreds of counties listed in alphabetical order
March 31, 2025 at 12:56 AM
en-dash.bsky.social
March 18, 2025 at 12:10 AM
en-dash.bsky.social
Whoops on accidentally Venmoing 80% of global annual GDP
February 28, 2025 at 5:33 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
The only legitimate royal authority in the US
February 20, 2025 at 4:51 PM
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
GNIS has fallen edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-dom...
Screenshot of the Geographic Names Information System database entry for "Gulf of America"
February 10, 2025 at 11:57 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
Maybe this time they’ll finally nail Marlowe and Euripides
January 28, 2025 at 12:39 PM
en-dash.bsky.social
en_dash on twitter, May 8, 2007–January 24, 2025
January 24, 2025 at 7:28 PM