Timothy Burke
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timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke
@timothyburke.bsky.social
6.5K followers 920 following 1.4K 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 · 2h
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 · 2h
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 · 2h
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 · 2d
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 · 2d
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 · 2d
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.

Reposted by Timothy Burke

phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 2d
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.

Reposted by Meredith Farkas

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
I'm really happy to see this level of smart attention to surveillance practices on college campuses by students.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
"Both sides are equal"-ism now the defining trait of the legacy media, driven entirely by a depraved unwillingness to judge actual facts in a proportionate way.
washingtonpost.com The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 2d
Column: For nearly 20 years, Americans’ anger toward the federal government has steadily intensified.

Now, that anger is reaching record levels — driven almost entirely by the party of whoever occupies the Oval Office.
Column | Anger is a defining character trait for both parties, new study shows
An updated Pew study shows that, with the change in administrations and party power in Congress, Democrats are now at record levels of anger toward government.
wapo.st

Reposted by Timothy Burke

washingtonpost.com
The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 2d
Column: For nearly 20 years, Americans’ anger toward the federal government has steadily intensified.

Now, that anger is reaching record levels — driven almost entirely by the party of whoever occupies the Oval Office.
Column | Anger is a defining character trait for both parties, new study shows
An updated Pew study shows that, with the change in administrations and party power in Congress, Democrats are now at record levels of anger toward government.
wapo.st

Reposted by Timothy Burke

igallupd.bsky.social
Ignacio Gallup-Diaz @igallupd.bsky.social · 2d
Esénia Bañuelos, the President of Bryn Mawr College’s Self Government Association, has written a powerful letter about the current climate on campus:

“This Is Bryn Mawr College”
This is Bryn Mawr College
Student journalism has long carried a heavy burden in representing the emotional and physical impacts that these violations against students have created. In a recent article for the Bi-College News, ...
bicollegenews.com

Reposted by Timothy Burke

emollick.bsky.social
Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 2d
The worst literary game ideas, brought to life thanks to nano banana: Strunk and White as a dating simulator, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery as an FPS, Ethan Frome as a racing game, The Yellow Wallpaper as a match-3 mobile room decoration game.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
Right! 100 this. This is what drives the impulse to find "voices" that are by the fact of absence from archives presumed to be intrinsically more truthful and untainted by power, when all speech acts are interpretation and all of them involve power.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
But I do get the point that Carolyn Steedman and others have made that for historians, archives (particular and various) have a kind of epistemological status that makes partial, incomplete, silenced etc. archives into a problem to be solved rather than just something that is just inevitable.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
Honestly, if the various cases in front of the Supreme Court go their way, the next step is revocation of citizenship from people who do the same--regardless of the length of time that person has held citizenship or the history of their family's presence in the country.
shayan86.bsky.social Shayan Sardarizadeh @shayan86.bsky.social · 3d
The US State Department is instructing its staff to deny visas to those engaged in activities like combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

www.npr.org/2025/12/04/n...
State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship'
The order is focused on applicants for H-1B visas, which are frequently used by tech companies and is part of a campaign by the Trump administration against online content moderation.
www.npr.org

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
Is it controversial? I mean, I'm not sure who talks about "the archive" as a concept who is unclear that they're actually talking about many particular archives.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
Somebody needs to do a little film about ridiculous awards that egomaniac authoritarians have been given by various ass-kissers and sycophants.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 2d
I mean, at this point, Hollywood is like Samuel Ratchett/Lanfranco Cassetti in Murder on the Orient Express--*everybody* is killing it.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
Right. But they might not be able to do theatrical releases if the theatre chains themselves keep making their situation even worse. They've got to make a lot of changes in order to make going to the movies seems like a special, premium experience--big screens aren't good enough.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
I get the angst in the industry about Netflix and WB. But there's two weights on the other side: 1) Better Netflix than Ellison/Paramount and 2) the big movie theater chains are doing a great job of destroying themselves already without any impact from the merger.

Reposted by Steve Peers, Brian Keegan, Timothy Burke

shayan86.bsky.social
Shayan Sardarizadeh @shayan86.bsky.social · 3d
The US State Department is instructing its staff to deny visas to those engaged in activities like combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

www.npr.org/2025/12/04/n...
State Department to deny visas to fact checkers and others, citing 'censorship'
The order is focused on applicants for H-1B visas, which are frequently used by tech companies and is part of a campaign by the Trump administration against online content moderation.
www.npr.org

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
Meritocracy, amirite?
atrupar.com Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 4d
this shit is just beyond parody, man

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
I...I'm not even sure this is a dad joke. It's like a baby genre of its own.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
This is awesome in an innocent way and yet also pretty close to cooking porn. Hooray for Norway, either way.
historycass.bsky.social Cassandra @historycass.bsky.social · 3d
I would like to be an ambassador and have this gentleman cook for me. 🍽️
norwayinusa.norway.no Norwegian Embassy in Washington @norwayinusa.norway.no · Oct 29
After some savory grilled cheese, Chef Eilif is here with something #sweet. Check out how to make #homemade Norwegian #CinnamonBuns – with some American icing. Don’t forget to follow us and Chief Eilif (@chefeilif) on Instagram for more delicious stories! tinyurl.com/44e4h75r

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
This time, though, if they affirm the Administration's legal representation, they're saying the President can decide to void all jurisprudence on his own accord, without prior findings by the Court, because Trump's people are saying he can just decide the 14th means what he thinks it means.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
When think about the practice of rulers in antiquity taking small amounts of poison to immunize themselves from poison (think the Man in Black in Princess Bride taking iocane powder), I think "That's the best demonstration of inescapable sociality I've ever heard of".

Reposted by Anna O. Law, Timothy Burke

historycass.bsky.social
Cassandra @historycass.bsky.social · 3d
I would like to be an ambassador and have this gentleman cook for me. 🍽️
norwayinusa.norway.no Norwegian Embassy in Washington @norwayinusa.norway.no · Oct 29
After some savory grilled cheese, Chef Eilif is here with something #sweet. Check out how to make #homemade Norwegian #CinnamonBuns – with some American icing. Don’t forget to follow us and Chief Eilif (@chefeilif) on Instagram for more delicious stories! tinyurl.com/44e4h75r

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
The most astonishing aspect of the Supreme Court majority's complete abdication of their authority is that there is a reasonable chance that they would allow the POTUS to decide by himself to reinterpret the 14th Amendment and void all the jurisprudence in between.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
Well, that moment is certainly going to be instructive for people curious about the difference between contingency and structure.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
I'm not sure that any of us have been able to fully process people who had some measure of power (Republicans in Congress, the Supreme Court, university presidents, high-powered lawyers, various CEOs) so casually surrendering it in ways that may not be easily reversible.

timothyburke.bsky.social
Timothy Burke @timothyburke.bsky.social · 3d
Regardless of what the Supreme Court rules on any of the zillion or so challenges to blatantly illegal or unconstitutional actions, they've already fucked up just by allowing some of these challenges at all given the incredibly shitty legal reasoning coming out of the Administration.