This website has, sadly, become too broken & embarrassing to take part in. You can find me on Mastodon or Bluesky at the same handle. I've gotten a lot out of this website over the years, so thanks for that.

Remembering John Fahey, born 84 years ago this week in Washington, DC. Here he is performing "Red Pony" in 1969.

My favorite thing about histories is the long opening chapter that centers on some fraught and strange scene that will haunt the book like a ghost until we come back to it in approximately 600 pages.

In 1971, Chief Justice Burger set up a panel to propose court reforms. One problem the Justices complained about was all the appeals from prisoners, so the panel recommended creating a commission to keep them away from the Supreme Court by helping them: https://t.co/knE996Bi5M

I wonder if this 97-year-old former concentration camp worker is the oldest person ever to be tried & convicted in a youth court. (She was 18 and 19 at the time of the offense.)

Reuther’s UAW helped institutionalize arbitration as a standard feature of union contracts. Reuther pictured it as an “industrial supreme court,” & the early arbitrators (called umpires) at GM, like George Taylor, used creative interpretation to shape union contracts. 2 examples:

You sometimes hear criticism of modern white-collar unions (e.g. at @nytimes) for bargaining about non-economic matters that go beyond immediate working conditions. Thought of that when reading about how auto workers once demanded Ford management supply food for migratory ducks.

Just finished reading @NelsonLichtens1’s biography of Walter Reuther, the pioneering midcentury @UAW leader (“The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit”). Here’s a thread of a few bits I found particularly interesting:

There's a bar across the street from NY's Great Meadow Correctional Facility called Time Served ("the little house across from the Big House"), which has an incarcerated & shackled bear (or beaver?) as its mascot.

Scientists have translated the oldest sentence ever found in the first alphabet ever invented.