Jerome Hodos
@jhodos.bsky.social
340 followers 490 following 1.2K posts
Lost in Megalopolis: Global urbanism, sociology, city politics, planning, street vitality. Professor, Franklin & Marshall College; mistakes all my own.
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Reposted by Jerome Hodos
Where we stand, in long arc of history:

-Story on left, adding race as a factor when that favors white people.

-Story on right, banning race as a factor when that favors non-whites.

I often complain about NYT headlines and story-play. But these are strong. Including "If Court Guts 1965 Law."
Two headlines on front page of NYT.

First is "Trump Weighs Transforming Refugee Policy. White People Would be Given Preference."

Second is "Justices May Ban Race as a Factor in District Maps. Nation's Political Balance Could Shift If Court Guts 1964 Law."
Oh, and illegal strikes on foreign vessels in open waters. If this isn't authoritarian governance, what is? What would you say if you saw it in another country?
So, to summarize: We have federal law enforcement taking people off the street & launching tear gas at protestors, the Prez telling govt. attorneys to punish political enemies, the legislature isn't meeting, government's shut down w/o a budget, & the administration gets to pick what to spend on.
For all the folks saying Trump didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize, I say hold your horses. Even if he isn't the recipient, maybe his foreign policy agenda did win it. Time will tell; we'll see what happens with regime change efforts in Venezuela. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/u...
Trump Administration Authorizes Covert C.I.A. Action in Venezuela
www.nytimes.com
If only we had a regulatory body that could, you know, enforce some kind of no-spam rules... wouldn't that be a good idea?
It's amusing to me that the only reasons this approach can comprehend are "structural barriers," not things like ethics, devotion to craft, or, shall we say, less fascination with gamifying one's work.
Reposted by Jerome Hodos
I’ve been wondering how credit raters would respond to the possibility of universities joining the proffered Compact, since it means accepting both fed funds AND private gifts could be rescinded retroactively if a school’s found to have been “out of compliance” with any of the many criteria.
The university annually shall conduct, or hire an external party to conduct, an independent, good
faith, empirically rigorous, and anonymous poll of its faculty, students, and staff, providing them the
opportunity to evaluate the university’s performance against this compact. The results of such surveys shall
be made public and available on the university’s website.
Adherence to this agreement shall be subject to review by the Department of Justice. Universities
found to have willfully or negligently violated this agreement shall lose access to the benefits of this
agreement for a period of no less than 1 year. Subsequent violations of this agreement shall result in a loss
of access to the benefits of this agreement for no less than 2 years. Further, upon determination of any
violations, all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation shall be returned
to the U.S. government. Finally, any private contributions to the university during the year(s) in which such
violation occurred shall be returned to the grantor upon the request of the grantor.
Giving a midterm exam today, and students have a choice about whether to take it on paper or on computer. Almost all the women are choosing paper, and the majority of the men are choosing computer. If you've got speculations about why this pattern, drop a reply!
Reposted by Jerome Hodos
Here are 14 minutes of USWNT goals from the queen
A wonderful thread about Angel Island and how it separated, segregated, and classified immigrants, mixing the historical, the sociological, and the personal.
Just returned from SF where I went with my cousins & their kids to explain the history of Angel Island immigrant landing depot. It's an island off of SF, look how close it is to SF, yet for detained immigrants who were there, it was a world away to getting to the US. Was in operation 1910-1941. 1/
Angel Island in the distance in the water, photo taken from a San Francisco scenic point with a few other tourists.
Reposted by Jerome Hodos
Damn, D'Angelo. No, just no. Damn.
Reposted by Jerome Hodos
"Ahead of our Oct 16th edition... the Media School directed us to print no news in the paper, an order blatantly in defiance of our editorial independence and Charter... nothing but information about homecoming — no other news at all, and particularly no traditional front page news coverage."
Reposted by Jerome Hodos
Urban politics continues to have the most interesting coalitions, policy proposals, and characters and I am still glad that I decided that I was going to study it when I was 21 years old
It seems like the increasing rapidity of the global move away from free trade and neoliberalism in recent 10 years really should be a bigger story, no? It's an epochal shift, and a rejection of the last 50 years or so of international economic doctrine. www.politico.eu/article/dutc...
Dutch government seizes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia
The move could inflame wider trade tensions between Beijing and the European Union.
www.politico.eu
This is a great chart; it shows the decline of affordability quite clearly.
Homeownership rate by decade of birth by current age (United States)
www.datawrapper.de/_/27AUY/
Reposted by Jerome Hodos
this is a further sign of weakness, not strength, imo. It's not the red state publics that they needed to set off a general stampede. It's places like MIT. Turning this into a red state thing makes it _less_ likely to spread www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...
Reposted by Jerome Hodos
This is why the inflatable costumes works so well -- it works the same way calling them "weird" or "creepy" did. It disrupts their narrative, and makes them seem pathetic rather than cool-and-cruel.
You need to see this:

“The show of force is the point. They want these images to be out…The Department of Homeland Security is walking around Chicago with a film crew.” @jacobsoboroff.bsky.social
Reposted by Jerome Hodos
You're living through one of the biggest technological transformations in world history and it has nothing to do with AI
Grid scale batteries are changing our electricity system. Excellent new visual story on batteries in FT today shows just how far this technology has evolved.

Fasten your seatbelts, this is just the beginning.

ig.ft.com/mega-batteri...
Reposted by Jerome Hodos
Nobody wants it as a story but I have multiple NYPD sources who voted for Mamdani, are eager for his win in November, and who say their colleagues quietly feel the same.

They like that he wants NYPD to focus on crime, not quality of life enforcement.
Lmao is this supposed to be a bad thing?
A tweet from Bari Weiss that says “"It's shaken me to my core," a lieutenant said of Mamdani's unexpected victory in June. "The absolute dread I feel is palpable.
"
Today in @TheFP our @Olivia_Reingold talks to the cops who say they will walk if Zohran Mamdani is elected in November:”
Reposted by Jerome Hodos
Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed. After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....