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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 2h

Asking for a friend: when does one get to not suffer fools without any consequence? Say in academia?

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 3h

Mélenchon Rights Initiative. :-) The ways of autocorrect are mysterious and nearly all wrong!

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 3h

Then: 2008 happened—we're still living with those consequences, albeit in different national wakes—and there was a hardened ideological alternative, some basic retail politics experience on the ground, and (as others have noted) a transnational hard-right network(s) ready to offer an [A]lternative.

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 3h

I have a pet theory of sorts that European elites for decades consciously banked on some 15% of voters slipping to the far-right (esp. in the former DDR) as simply an acceptable price for regional disparities, &c., with parliamentary firewalls and gates (say >%5 results) keeping them contained.

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 3h

Perhaps one could argue for different national timetables for centrism (& globalization) to have discredited itself by its own stated terms. Also: not a fan of Habermas! But the legitimation crisis idea is great. Nor do I like the semantic blurriness attending much 'neoliberalism' critique, but ....

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 3h

Oh, tons to say here and mostly in agreement. (Wish it could be in person & over a coffee!) I still need to read Quinn Slobodian, Niklas Olsen, and others on neoliberalism, &c. Dahrendorf is a great hero of mine; I would appreciate it if you could share that reference!

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 3h

Anemona Hartocollis is an absurdly strange, unqualified figure to report on education. She went to Harvard herself and seems obsessed with it. Her MO is to find fringe rightwing voices on campuses & portray them as moral martyrs. Her puff-pieces on Joshua Katz & his student-wife speak utter volumes.

Reposted by John Raimo

Elizabeth Spiers @espiers.bsky.social · 8h

I was trying to put my finger on what bothered me about this portrayal and I think it’s that it just takes the guy’s words at face value, like he was a nice guy and reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death just pushed him over the edge www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/u...

She Despised Charlie Kirk. He Resolved to Make People Like Her Pay.

www.nytimes.com

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 9h

I vastly prefer Macron's foreign policy efforts, even if the Russia efforts in 2021 and 2022 were laughable. I'd gladly defer here to your expertise. There's an interesting question lurking here about what a left-of-center foreign policy looks like.

But the man & his ego embody a failed 'centrism.'

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 9h

Macron got 24.01% of the vote in the first round of 2017 presidential elections, 27.85 in the first round of the 2022 elections. There's never been a plurality of public support for the pension reforms, &c. The second-round victories were owed to running against Le Pen & the support of ... the left.

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 9h

This is well-put, especially with an eye to foreign policy, but I'm old enough now to wonder if "après nous, le déluge" isn't a Gallicized version of Thatcher's TINA so far as pushing a certain demonstrably unsuccessful set of economic policies, legitimation crisis, and generational interests goes.

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 11h

Bizarrely enough, I suppose, I also studied with C.K. Williams (cited at the start of this article--but to god that more historians read poetry ...). He was a fantastic teacher & unfailingly generous man as well: gruff but always giving a shit in treating the world & people with his full attention.

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 11h

Stray thought but I'm often reminded of Marilyn Young's work and continually grateful I was able to study a small bit under her. She was a wonderful scholar and human being. I wish her voice was still here in these troubled times, too; cf. academic.oup.com/dh/article/3.... #skystorians

“I was thinking, as I often do these days, of war”: The United States in the Twenty-First Century

I take the title of my talk from a poem by C. K. Williams, “The Hearth,” written after listening to the news on a cold winter evening in February 2003. He

academic.oup.com

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Reposted by John Raimo

Stuart Elden @stuartelden.bsky.social · 16h

Both an editor and translator of Émile Benveniste claim he read Derrida’s 1967 book De la grammatologie, and that notes in his archives prove it. I’m not so sure – the notes are on an article by Derrida, and I explain why I think this, and what this means
progressivegeographies.com/2025/10/12/d...

Did Benveniste read Derrida’s Of Grammatology?

Jacques Derrida was certainly a careful reader of Émile Benveniste. He wrote a critique of Benveniste in “Le supplément de copule. La philosophie devant la linguistique” which appeared in 1971, in …

progressivegeographies.com

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 12h

Excellent thread from an excellent scholar.

Mark Bray @mark-bray.bsky.social · 12d

I teach a history of antifascism course @ruhistorydept.bsky.social and figured I'd start an ongoing thread this semester to share some insights from course readings and recommend some great works on antifascism.

🧵

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

(But seriously, no one truly serious about books would have stored and displayed them this way, I'd argue: www.rarebookhub.com/articles/258...)

Karl Lagerfeld, Fashion Designer, Book Collector Extraordinaire, Dies

Your source for everything about book collecting: rare & antiquarian books, book auctions, booksellers & collectors magazine, bibliography & more.

www.rarebookhub.com

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

À propos of Karl Lagerfeld apparently owning 300,000 books (cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_La...), this is a beautiful film. It's available on Kanopy among other streaming platforms: youtu.be/FeIUY9EhZgI?.... At least Eco was clear on the importance of *unread* books in one's library. 🙃 #bookhistory

Umberto Eco: A Library of the World - Official Trailer

YouTube video by The Cinema Guild

youtu.be

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

Thank you for your time and patience sharing this!

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

(And really the last question from me on this score! I feel a bit impertinent asking this sort of thing on social media, so I really do appreciate your time and patience without wishing to make you out to be an infallible, official in-house historian for everything at the NYT, &c.)

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

May I ask whether this was instituted by Kathleen Kingsbury then? This article (particularly the excerpt screenshot'ed here) would seem to suggest that this wasn't the case before her editorial appointment, unless the NY Magazine reporting was itself flawed on this score. nymag.com/intelligence...

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

May I ask (respectfully & sincerely) whether this is done by a personal editor who also does copy-editing, if there's an assigned fact-checker to each staff writer, or ...?

I admire your work & am grateful for your taking the question seriously. This nitty-gritty fascinates me as a historian, too.

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

»Solange es Geschichte gibt, wird es Historie geben.«
~ Reinhart Koselleck

« L’Histoire est entièrement vraie, puisque je l’ai imaginée d’un bout à l’autre. »
~ Boris Vian

😉

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

There's some evident authorial cosplaying here that the interviewer uncritically gobbles down--it's quite funny, actually--but I still quite enjoyed reading this: www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7...

László Krasznahorkai, The Art of Fiction No. 240

László Krasznahorkai was born in 1954 in Gyula, a provincial town in Hungary, in the Soviet era. He published his first novel, Satantango, in 1985, then The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), War and Wa...

www.theparisreview.org

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

So Eric Brandom (@ebrandom.bsky.social), a fantastic historian, and I got down to wondering aloud how (if?) fact-checking works at the NYT op-ed section. If anyone cares to chime in here and enlighten us (seriously) ...! #skystorians

John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

From that NY Magazine piece above. It's ... really ambiguous to me! There's a "Gita Daneshjoo, head of fact-checking" and a "Mary Marge Locker, fact-checker" noted in the portrait. That's all I saw there--so ... two fact-checkers in total? Or just there for the group portrait? 🕵️‍♀️🔎❔

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

From that NY Magazine piece above. It's ... really ambiguous to me! There's a "Gita Daneshjoo, head of fact-checking" and a "Mary Marge Locker, fact-checker" noted in the portrait. That's all I saw there--so ... two fact-checkers in total? Or just there for the group portrait? 🕵️‍♀️🔎❔

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