Jacob Shell
@JacobAShell
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Geographer. Prof at Temple University. Author of 2 books. Elephants. Maps. Archaeofuturist Transportation.
Philadelphia, USA
Joined December 2016
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I visited Shipton’s Arch, an eerie, otherwordly physical feature a few hours drive west of Kashgar. Despite its obscurity it is reputedly the tallest natural arch in the world, able to fit the entire height of the Empire State Building in its void.
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Camels gather at a Saharan canyon-oasis called a guelta, northern Chad.
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It's a part of SF where everyone's white and makes a quarter million dollars per year.
This is the America that the average conservative is scared of
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why in 2020s does it cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per year to approximate a 1990s middle class lifestyle
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Map of North African during its late "humid" period, i.e. roughly 8000-4000 BC. I'd put chances that a big archaeological discovery remains to be found under the sands of the Sahara at better than 50%.
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Reminder that Battle of Rafah in 217 BC was the only time in history that African elephant cavalry fought Asian elephant cavalry.
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4 years of academics fearing Trump would do this to us, instead it's the president we voted for doing it.
@MiddleEastEye
Here’s
@EmoryUniversity
economics professor Caroline Fohlin knocked to the ground with her head on the concrete. Her glasses are thrown off. She shouts “I’m a professor”
#Gaza
#Protesters
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Fascinated by the "lone-wolf" sperm whale Porphyrios who terrorized Constantinople for a half century. Odd for a sperm whale to hang out in the Bosporus long-term, but this one really, really loved sinking Byzantine boats.
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Remember this NYT gem? Openly telling readers that critical thinking is bad.
To figure out subtext, recall what topics were being censored during that time.
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What they don't tell you in high school or college advisor offices is some of these are "winner takes all" majors and others aren't. The comp sci normie is making a nice living right now, but the physics major is a sunlight-deprived lab tech for 30 years in a row.
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Yeah it hit me a couple yrs ago that everybody under 30 who is instinctively drawn to reading difficult German philosophical prose for their own pleasure are the exact people the Ivies have been screening from admission or career prospects; so they turn to Anon Poasting.
Seems to me Columbia and other "elite" schools could solve this problem by admitting the so-called spergs who spend their days poasting about Tacitus, Spengler, Schopenhauer, etc., whom they read on their own volition for pure enjoyment and discovery.
I wonder why they don't...
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"My guy..." "my dude..." "my bro..."
"hope that helps"
When did these rhetorical tics catch on?
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Been hearing Dem pundits with elite credenitals wonder if the opera at end of RNC (Nessun dorma, the most iconically Italian thing imaginable) was GERMAN, maybe WAGNER.
See, this is why Ivies shouldn't have ditched their Great Books/Art/Music appreciation courses.
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I pressed the button once and the employee came over looking at me like I didnt get that the point is to let the store go out of business.
I have never asked a clerk to open a locked display case.
I used to buy shampoo and deodorant at Walgreens occasionally but now that they are locked I buy them at Amazon/Whole Foods.
Many people are like me.
Theft hurts retailers far more than just the direct losses.
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There was a all-too-brief moment in early 2017 when
"Hillbilly Elegy" was in windows of yuppy indie bookstores in blue cities, because there was at that time still a vague sense from liberals that it would be good to understood where right-populism was really coming from.
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@ObtainerOf
Much higher fertility rate in Mongolia than rest of E Asia. Could be interesting in about 40 years
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When were the earliest indicators that Millennials would be a very pro-censorship, pro-stigmatization generation? I have trouble remembering that vibe pre-2014.
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An enormous part of the story of academia's problems today is that people who would have made amazing professors, and should have been professors, were muscled out of the profession.
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@SwampCommunist
@spongeybobe
Did millions of Ukrainians and South Russians deserve to starve while youre at it
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I've been in 21st century academia long enough to see 21st c academic titles like this and instantly think "oh, there must have been tons of Sacred Prostitution in antiquity."
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Fury Road did well bc in the mid-10s there was mass-fatigue with excessive CGI in Marvel movies; Miller's movie offered spectacular real pyrotechnics. But I think everyone connected w FR may have mislearned idea that it did well because audiences were fascinated by Theron
I find it funny people are saying they don’t want to watch Furiosa because it isn’t about Mad Max…. when Fury Road is also not about him
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Medieval trade routes. Open image in new window for hi res:
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@JosephPolitano
I don't think you know what the term "high trust society" means. It doesnt just mean "people believe themselves to be trusting."
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I sometimes think about the fact that Denisova Cave was set near this gigantic inland sea which no longer exists and is hard to mentally grasp bc the geographic process that caused the sea to form (ice wall blocks rivers from reaching ocean) hasn't existed since the Pleistocene.
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They share the oasis water with the last Saharan crocodiles. Apparently they are not enemies, the crocodiles eat frogs and birds.
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It’s weird that the “internationalist” left, which is supposed to be interested in the different ways the world has manifested itself, has become in its own way the most parochial part of the entire discourse, unable to perceive histories that don’t mirror America’s.
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Realize that all the grant incentives in the social sciences reward research like this and penalize everything else.
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@sfmcguire79
NYT trying to retcon their own hysterias of just a few years ago as “just some West Coast thing, it has nothing to do with us”
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At the end the day, the reason I got into Spengler is bc in 1970 programs for "1000 nuclear power plants", or for bases on the moon, seemed to be right around the corner and then...a half-century of nothing.
Nixon's 1,000 nuclear power plant program would have saved us & the Middle East so much trouble. We are still in the long shadow of Three Mile Island...
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I think it’s hard to see this in the moment but the Democrats are actually in a deep and slow-motion crisis. 2016-24 was their window to construct a post-Obama coalition and rather than do it they became consumed by Trump. Now the window is closing. This is what the Biden
they are just conceding to Trump. incredible cowardice
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Since the pandemic, a lot of Philadelphians drive like stark-raving-mad lunatics, speeding at 60 mph on opposite side of street through red lights to do hairpin left turn with pedestrians diving out of crosswalk. It's a form of terrorism IMO.
Tragedy on Spruce Street in Rittenhouse tonight. An apparent drunk driver hit multiple cars and killed a cyclist. So horrifying. So preventable. Drivers kill.
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The biggest ongoing scandal in academia ought to be that it turned out in mid-2010s that 50% of studies in Psych were failing to replicate--but nobody's career has been penalized. Not a single demotion over the mass-fraud; instead much Bushesque "heckuva job Brownie" promotions.
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During my lifetime, US/UK self-congratulation and moral triumphalism over WW2 has led to nothing but trouble. Leaving aside whether FDR and Churchill should have done anything differently (I don't see at what moment they could have), what I want to know from the
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If you're the "party of the better educated" but can't tell Wagner and Puccini apart I think the unbathed masses may have a point in their intuition that your legitimacy is hollow.
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Wow this is completely made up. Kamala Harris dropped out of the 2020 primary on Dec 3, 2019. The "anti-police year" was still 6 months away from even beginning.
Kamala was terrible on the national stage initially because she ran for president in the worst possible year for a Democratic candidate with law enforcement ties and never figured out how to deal with that. Well, she figured it out now and her favorables are soaring
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Dzungaria is the first time I ever visited proper steppe and while I loved it there are two things about
#steppelife
that fetishizers should know. Both involve shit.
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Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, all visa free for Americans, they want Americans to visit.
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@NathanJRobinson
@Bbunchofnumbers
@feelsdesperate
OK now imagine same social rules applies to both. Automobile cars allowed on tracks. Big political movement to try to make it illegal for anyone to point out problems that might arise.
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I am surprised how few in the "anti-tenure" bloc grasp that without tenure academia would immediately degenerate into a catty game-of-whispers where the better networked and more ideologically correct would conspire to get anyone even slightly idiosyncratic fired.
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This model of ancient Chang’An interesting for showing the old Asian urbanist idea where most social life including commerce is in private walled compounds not “public street.” Within the walled compounds, smaller walled compounds. Great Houses, clans, big families are true urban
I think she’s pretty smart and unlike most of the post-Crash left she consciously knows that this project’s telos is to move as much normal majoritarian social life into the private realm as possible, requiring the private realm to grow and public sector to shrink. The intense
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Since this blew up I'll note that elephants still turn up in modern warfare -- for transport and logistics, not combat. Best example in the 2020s are the elephants of the Kachin Independence Army in northern Myanmar (pictured). 🧵
Reminder that Battle of Rafah in 217 BC was the only time in history that African elephant cavalry fought Asian elephant cavalry.
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@sfmcguire79
OK fine words but lets see what happens if a professor there invites Charles Murray to speak. Will the professor be beaten up by student protesters as at Middlebury, whose leadership never really did anything to protect free speech there?
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Yglesias concedes that this supposed “classic conspiracy theorist error” is not an error and under right conditions organizations are actually very good at keeping secrets.
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Kissinger wrote his senior thesis on Spengler. He didnt have to "anon poast" in order to write about Spengler, he could do it in a formal classroom setting. By contrast, in 2020s, zoomers who find Spengler interesting dont feel they can discuss Spengler in the formal setting
Spengler just one such example. Junger, Jung, Mosca, Schopenhauer. Where is the revival of seminars about such figures, the post-doc opportunities, the tenure-track lines? Nowhere. Instead the "smart career move" in recent years was the Jason Stanley Pivot
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I feel like Black Panther (2018) marked this turning point where American progressives became a lot less curious about the outer world. The movie was an invitation to mentally replace entire continents with fantasies drawn from internal US politics.
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Expect more of this. For the next 12,000 years.
Heavy rain is moving across... the Sahara Desert? 🤔
Mali and Mauritania are experiencing unusually high levels of rainfall right now.
This may be one reason why the Atlantic has had so few hurricanes so far. Tropical waves, which often develop into hurricanes, have not been
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"Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga"...clunky title gets at the producer confusion. If they wanted to make another Mad Max movie they could have hired Tom Hardy (or Mel Gibson?) again and done so. Or write a "Furiosa" movie capable of standing on its own without gimmicky "tie-in."
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The truth is these tactics are outward overcompensation for inward knowledge of having lost the war of ideas. And the climate movement lost that war when they refused from 2015 onward to say how they planned to reduce carbon emissions not in their postindustrial homes, but in the
🚨 BREAKING: Just Stop Oil Spray Stonehenge Orange
🔥 2 people took action the day before Summer Solstice, demanding the incoming government sign up to a legally binding treaty to phase out fossil fuels by 2030.
🧯 Help us take megalithic action —
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This was my experience at Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi a few weeks ago. Idea that Tarim Mummies were north Eurasian is presented calmly and neutrally, no asides (of type that are omnipresent in Western museum curatorship now) about how it’s “problematic to be curious in the first
Also great section on British settlement of the Kenyan Highlands and East Africa. Not even written in overly admonishing way, value-neutral presentation. Displays present enterprising Rhodesian Cape to Cairo Imperial 19th Century Anglofuturism Spirit without whiney woke asides
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No in all seriousness Kamala Harris should be president right now. Who cares if she doesnt have any fans; her job is to replace the president if he’s too infirm for the job. This is all very straightforward.
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@catehall
You dont think it was a propaganda platform before when users were banned for mentioning the Wuhan lab or Hunters laptop?
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One reason "Children of Men" is not as fondly remembered as it deserves to be is millennials went through a long phase of identifying with the rebels, whom the movie portrays negatively.
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@wmslamcan
I think theyve done the pivot because the way Kamala got the nomination was too undemocratic for Biden's "democracy is at stake" line to work coming from her.
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In a few cases it’s so obvious to me that a healthier civilization would have made them prestigious Oxford dons that I outright acknowledge them as influences in new book manuscript, as if they were indeed fellow academics
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