Derek Gottlieb
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derekgottliebphd.com
Derek Gottlieb
@derekgottliebphd.com
1.6K followers 2.5K following 1.7K posts
Researching | Indexing | Writing | Skiing

I wrote "A Democratic Theory of Educational Accountability," I work at School Perceptions, and I live in Wisconsin.
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derekgottliebphd.com
I had this EXACT thought when I read JCO’s thing the first time. From Book 4:
And like a devillish Engine back recoiles Upon himself; horror and doubt distract His troubl'd thoughts, and from the bottom stirr The Hell within him, for within him Hell [ 20 ] He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell One step no more then from himself can fly By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie Of what he was, what is, and what must be [ 25 ] Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue. Sometimes towards Eden which now in his view Lay pleasant, his grievd look he fixes sad, Sometimes towards Heav'n and the full-blazing Sun, Which now sat high in his Meridian Towre: [ 30 ] Then much revolving, thus in sighs began.
November 11, 2025 at 11:51 AM
derekgottliebphd.com
The mantra of the Cobra Kai dojo, rendered in Zohran typeface. Strike first, strike hard, no mercy sir
November 9, 2025 at 1:56 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
My sicko haul of @princetonupress.bsky.social books showed up yesterday!
A stack of several dope PUP books on a kitchen table.
November 9, 2025 at 1:40 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
America Is Tired of This Shit
November 9, 2025 at 10:50 AM
derekgottliebphd.com
@lemieuxlgm.bsky.social called this “Plessy-grade gaslighting,” which is right and which IMMEDIATELY reminded me of Saidiya Hartman on the matter
Of signal importance in Plessy are the strategies of disavowal that remove the state from the domains that it in effect constitutes, the primacy granted to affect in determining the scope and enjoyment of rights and the duties of the state, and the reinscrlption of degradation in the elaboration of the separate..but-equal doctrine.
November 7, 2025 at 11:01 AM
derekgottliebphd.com
I regularly index for PUP, and so have gotten to read some of these for free (as it were), but because I’m a sicko, I’ve now also loaded up on all of these that I HAVEN’T read.

$87 total, in the end. Today’s the last day.
A bunch of PUP book covers
October 31, 2025 at 12:11 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
I know technically Let’s Get Free came out in 2000 and Barrio Fino not till 2004, but I don’t
Album cover of Sublime’s 40oz to Freedom Album cover of Beck’s Midnite Vultures Album cover of Dead Prez’s Let’s Get Free Daddy Yankee’s Barrio Fino cover
October 31, 2025 at 10:01 AM
derekgottliebphd.com
ruh roh
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October 29, 2025 at 10:44 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
Chapter 5 — the excerpt I quoted is from the conclusion, Ch. 8 — is really awesome:
Chapter 5 Lynching and the Horrific: From Ida B. Wells to Billie Holiday
October 29, 2025 at 10:40 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
@prorogers.bsky.social on James Baldwin making a similar point:
Similar to Wells’s use of “barbaric,” he does not deploy the term as determinative of who and what white Americans are fated to be. This is why, as he says, it is a terrible indictment because he thinks (and we ought not to think otherwise) his listeners can recognize the offense his claim represents—the offense to their character and way of being in the world. He demands that citizens be discursively agile—that they see the figurative use of the language as getting as close as possible to a terrible transformation of the self. What makes it a terrible indictment in another sense is the implication: many white Americans have shut off in themselves that part of them that responds to the pain of others, in particular civic others. To be a moral monster is to betray, we might say, the demand of thick relationships that define our shared political lives. This is the price of innocence and what makes it a crime.
October 29, 2025 at 1:23 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
The Deciding to Win business is gross in lots of ways, but the biggest thing is the INTERPRETATION of the policy-support chart.

Economic justice as a political goal must flow from a commitment to universal rights, and you can't have EITHER if you try to cleave them apart.
Survey results of voter preferences.
October 27, 2025 at 8:41 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
Massachusetts, 1647, about to pass the Old Deluder Satan Act:
A scene from a “dame school,” several children sitting in a chair, one in a dunce cap, one being apparently instructed to read.
October 27, 2025 at 10:01 AM
derekgottliebphd.com
October 27, 2025 at 12:09 AM
derekgottliebphd.com
Kids, man!
Room spattered with blood
October 27, 2025 at 12:05 AM
derekgottliebphd.com
Pretty dope to see two books I indexed show up in the New York Review of Books this month
Table of contents page for the Nov 6 2025 issue of the New York Review of Books
October 26, 2025 at 11:25 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
Also across the lake in traverse city
October 24, 2025 at 10:42 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
Packers fans unanimous
A bunch of skeets condemning a third down play call
October 19, 2025 at 11:17 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
Lorelai came to us in Colorado via a rescue/foster org from a shelter in Texas
A sweet dog living her best life nestled into an overstuffed chair
October 16, 2025 at 5:11 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
Big news everybody: my blood pressure is being reported as “26 and 26 and 27 and 20,000.”
Little girl wrapping a play BP cuff on my arm
October 11, 2025 at 3:01 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
This is the kind of public intellectualism that makes the public hate intellectuals. Instead of showing what ideas have to teach us about life, Pinker holds a gun to life’s head and demands it conform to his thought experiments. And he does it with the patronizing tone of someone telling his readers what to think from on high. In one passage, prompting us to imagine increasingly higher-order levels of knowledge about knowledge, he virtually pats us on the head. “Now let’s try four layers,” he writes. After we’ve tackled four, he asks, encouragingly, “Think you can handle a fifth layer?” Just hook it to my veins still from the simpsons
October 5, 2025 at 12:49 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
Astronaut meme, where the one says “wait it’s just solidarity and collective action?” and the other, with a pistol, says “always has been"
October 4, 2025 at 11:02 AM
derekgottliebphd.com
Hook it to my motherfucking veins

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/o...
To face this successfully may take a fundamental rethinking of the American-style political party, and a move away from a model of political consumerism — in which parties attract voters with minor message tweaks and appeals to identity and self-expression — and toward one of association, where the party is a participatory organization with purpose and structure beyond electing a handful of ambitious people to office.
October 1, 2025 at 2:20 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
This sure reminds me of a conversation I was having with @jessicacalarco.com last week. Also reminds me of @juliabowes.bsky.social's forthcoming book: When do we REALLY stress our deep individualism? When “manhood” needs reasserting.
Title page of Julia Bowes’s forthcoming “Every Man’s Home a Castle" The deep skepticism of state power and the combustible sense of manly pride was perhaps best captured in an anti-vaccination tirade published in Kentucky’s Hartford Herald in 1917 by an individual who styled himself simply as “A. Layman.” The “layman” disclosed neither his name nor his gender—nor did he need to. It was a rhetorical move that positioned his cause the common plight of all independent rights-bearing citizens, presumed to be white men, who needed to jealously guard their liberty against state power. His outburst was provoked by a recent local order that used the state’s compulsory schooling law to require the vaccination of all school-age children and laid out all of the arguments against vaccination that had been circulating in the country for three decades. He rejected the science and safety of vaccination: “Tens of thousands of miserable deaths, wrecked lives, and rotted arms,” he claimed, had not been caused by the scourge of smallpox but by “blood poison” resulting from the fraudulent science of vaccination. Next, he alleged there was a monopolistic conspiracy between vaccine manufacturers and the state who were both profiting off the public’s fear of smallpox.
September 30, 2025 at 12:35 PM
derekgottliebphd.com
Literally every time I see this photo, I think of this dude, who apparently has a whole backstory of his own, but appears mainly as Lando’s copilot in Empire:
From star wars wiki: Nien Nunb ( pronounced /nēin nənbə/) or ( pronounced /nīn nəm/) was a Sullustan male arms dealer and smuggler who joined the Alliance to Restore the Republic during the Galactic Civil War. Shortly after the Battle of Yavin, Nunb answered the call from his friend, Rebel pilot Evaan Verlaine, to help smuggle a group of Alderaanians off Sullust while avoiding detection from the Galactic Empire; the Empire was searching for surviving Alderaanians after the First Death Star blew up its first planet, Alderaan. He went on to further assist Verlaine and Princess Leia Organa in their mission to unite the surviving Alderaanians, during which time he helped Organa escape from potential Imperial captivity.
September 30, 2025 at 9:53 AM
derekgottliebphd.com
Most of me reading this interview is me going “Shut the fuck up, Ezra, and let TNC finish! He’s about to say something about transformative possibility! He’s about to reveal something about your own lack of faith, and where it leads!"
But the place I’m trying to push toward is that there is a diminishment of the political coalition-building that we now need to do because we have come to the view that a pretty wide variety of people are in some ways deplorables. I think it has weakened the last couple of years — I would never use that language. Jesus. When you were asking me about that Hillary Clinton clip — I would never say it like that. That’s great. I think it’s good that you wouldn’t say it like that. I don’t even think that, by the way. I don’t even focus on people. I am at war with certain ideologies and ideas, and I want them expunged. I want to turn them into phrenology. That’s what I want. But I don’t want the people out. When you start talking about who people are in their bones — In a way, I think we’re saying something not too dissimilar here. I guess the place where I felt a lot of pushback, and maybe this was not your pushback — the first piece, I can just accept that there’s a disagreement on what to do in the 24 hours after a death. You felt like I was whitewashing the guy.
September 29, 2025 at 10:28 AM