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Reposted by John Raimo

Elizabeth Spiers @espiers.bsky.social · 3h

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 · 3h

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.'

John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 3h

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 · 3h

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 · 5h

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 · 6h

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 · 10h

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 · 7h

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 · 15h

(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 · 15h

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 · 15h

Thank you for your time and patience sharing this!

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 15h

(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 · 15h

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 · 16h

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 · 16h

»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 · 16h

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 · 16h

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 · 16h

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 · 16h

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 · 16h

I seem to recall reading how James Bennet himself did fact-checking at the last minute on that shitty Tom Cotton piece after staffers raised the alarm multiple times.

Not in the same Gravediggers of Democracy League © as McConnell, &c., but god does Bennet deserve some infamy--not least for Weiss.

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 16h

There's a photo of the op-ed department in a recent feature, with what looks to be well over a hundred people to my eye. 👇 But it's still unclear to me. Former NYT employees told me no, and I've seen readily disprovable assertions in Stephens', Douthat's, Brooks', and guest-writer's pieces. So: 🤷‍♂️.

The Opinion That Ate the Paper

Under Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times’ “Opinion” section has doubled in size. What kind of publication is she building?

nymag.com

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 16h

Bonjour Ghilene, ravie de vous voir sur Bluesky ! Merci pour celui-ci. J'ai beaucoup d'idées sur le « centrisme » avec ses propres histoires conceptuelles .... Je me demande cependant si la sociologie n'explique pas Macron plus précisément que l'idéologie (une question vraiment ouverte à mon avis).

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 16h

Extremely niche & impertinent question to put out there, but ... a very well-informed friend of mine told me that Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Fumaroli had been a couple.

This is great if true. I'm just curious as I consider Lagerfeld as a patent intellectual fraud and Fumaroli as a grand, grand érudit.

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

Genuine question for British friends and colleagues out there:

I follow British politics (from a distance), I have lived in the UK, &c.

How come Osborne's austerity policies now barely come up in conversation? Even Brexit seems almost like a synecdoche to me here or at least a consequence of them.

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

Typo: #Bretbug (hope this is still a thing)

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John Raimo @johnraimo.bsky.social · 21h

(What's also remarkably is that the headlines in the NYT--which will also change on the homepage over time, occasionally--very often diverge from the actual substance of *reporting* in individual pieces. It's like the NYT's C-suite having a breakdown while running around with scissors and glue.)

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