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charlescmann.bsky.social
Author of "1491, "1493," and, most recently, "The Wizard and the Prophet." Working, inefficiently, on another book. The background image is pretty old by now, but I like the pig. The avatar photo is only a couple years old, though, so that's something.
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"This spaghetti tangle of ownership of RAF [Royal Air Force, UK] aircraft is surprising to those of us who naively believed that RAF military aircraft belonged to the RAF, and that the hundreds of billions of pounds the state lavishes on 'defence' was used to do things like buy military jets..."

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Egg producer Kipster has now implemented in-ovo sexing, a technology that enables it to stop culling male chicks. If the entire egg industry were to adopt this practice in the U.S, it would spare around 300 million male chicks each year from grisly slaughter. sentientmedia.org/tech-to-end-...

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

Every now and then you read a Reddit post that is a master class in sustained scorn and invective, and this is one of them. My hat is off to the writer, whoever he or she is.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Always surprising to me that these people never think to check before shooting off their yaps. NYC was the main immigration center for the US for 2 centuries. It had more than 40% foreign-born residents from 1850-1900 and more than 35% for the next couple decades. www.nyc.gov/assets/plann...

submitted 3 days ago • 6 comments

A special moment that never gets old, unboxing a new book after years of work on it. Please help me welcome The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide.

submitted 4 days ago • 39 comments

Infuriating, RFKJr has said and done nothing to make the vaccine system safer and better, such as addressing problems with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program--issues that pro-vaxx people have acknowledged for years, and have been calling for reforms.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Surprising, at least to me: @tedgioia.bsky.social measured the length of current NYT best-selling novels and they are longer than they were in the immediate past. www.honest-broker.com/p/audiences-...

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

"The prospect of 400 kg of enriched uranium disappearing into the desert of a failed state is the kind of nightmare that should keep you up at night." -- @jvl.bsky.social

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

This thread is very much worth reading, all the way through.

submitted 6 days ago • 7 comments

Uncanny, the parallels between the voices I'm hearing arguing for intervention in Iran and the arguments in 2002 for the Iraq war. "They are evil so we need to destroy them which we can do at minimal cost." "So you're saying you want the mad mullahs to have nukes?" "It's a fait accompli."

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

IANAL, so here's a question about this concurring opinion in last week's appellate decision in the Appalachian Voices et al. v. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission pipeline case. Does this kind of judicial lashing out have any significance? Or is it just venting about our permitting mess?

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

Adding this to my list of reasons for loving Maine. Seriously can’t tell if this boat listing on our local barter and swap Facebook page is humor or the real deal: “Selling due to getting rid of husband and gaining boyfriend with a bigger boat.”

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

Fantastic lede, maybe even better quote a few grafs down. Terrific journalistic writing from @kashhill.bsky.social. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/t...

submitted 13 days ago • 2 comments

Organizers have just apologized for poor sound--rally crowd is twice as big as expected.

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

Northampton, MA.

submitted 14 days ago • 5 comments

Trump cancels deal on 4 Snake River dams--putting tribes in charge of salmon recovery, seeking alternative energy sources--that Biden negotiated in 2023 to end 30+ yrs of litigation, uncertainty, and cost. The odds of this not plunging the region back into the morass that everyone hates seem tiny.

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

Whistleblowers have long argued that Boeing Dreamliners were made so poorly and with so little quality control that after years of use they would eventually begin cracking up and dropping from the sky. One of them just did.

submitted 15 days ago • 7 comments

WTF? LIGO is one of the world's most exciting and productive astrophysics facilities. Just 10 years old, it's already launched a new, US-dominated field, found utterly surprising results, and won 3 Nobel Prizes. Why is the administration talking about crippling it?

submitted 16 days ago • 3 comments

The good news: battery storage capacity is growing so fast that Texas's energy agency predicts many fewer blackouts (see below). The bad news: Battery developers r canceling Texas projects due to tariffs & the "big, beautiful bill" gutting energy subsidies. www.houstonchronicle.com/business/ene...

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

Physics World--the monthly publication of Britain's Institute of Physics, the second-oldest professional physics society-- sums up in an editorial what is happening to US science under the current administration.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments