Lauren Turek
@laurenfturek.bsky.social
4.9K followers 3.1K following 370 posts
Historian of U.S. foreign relations, human rights, & religion. Associate Professor of History & Director of Museum Studies at Trinity University. Musician and sci fi fan.
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laurenfturek.bsky.social
It's officially out! @burnidge.bsky.social and I are so excited and thankful to all of the authors who wrote such fantastic chapters!
www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...
The Routledge History of Religion and Politics in the United States Since 1775
laurenfturek.bsky.social
An excellent piece on the curation of #materialreligion w/a call to museums "to interrogate and critically rethink outdated 'shrine rooms' and their old curatorial underpinnings" & to "transform...installations frm static backdrops into sites of dialogue, ethical reflection, & cultural recognition."
yaelrice.bsky.social
Excited to share my friend/colleague Melissa Kerin’s hot off the press @hyperallergic.com piece on Tibetan Buddhist museum shrine rooms. It’s likely to ruffle some feathers of our curator colleagues, but it needed to be said hyperallergic.com/1038180/the-...
The Fetishistic Fiction of Museum “Tibetan” Shrines
Institutions peddle a Western aesthetic of “traditional” Tibetan shrines without scholarly backing, negating their limitless lived variety.
hyperallergic.com
Reposted by Lauren Turek
darrigomelanie.bsky.social
I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.
laurenfturek.bsky.social
This was an excellent episode
🗃️
lastweektonight.com
Here’s last night’s story about presidential libraries, how they help shape history, the troubling ways they can be used, and – of course – some tasteful conjecture about one president’s undercarriage. youtu.be/dB1-lg-xZWc
Presidential Libraries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
YouTube video by LastWeekTonight
youtu.be
Reposted by Lauren Turek
susancolbourn.net
Applications are now open for the 2026-27 predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships with the America in the World Consortium!

Applicants from all disciplines whose research bears directly on American grand strategy, broadly defined, are welcome to apply.

Deadline: December 1
AWC Pre- and Post- Doctoral Fellowships 2025-2026
The America in the World Consortium at Duke University, Johns Hopkins SAIS, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Florida seeks applications from current Ph.D. students for its Pred...
www.awconsortium.org
Reposted by Lauren Turek
anthonyclark.bsky.social
BREAKING: sources say NARA has forced out Dr. Todd Arrington, the federal director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, after he declined to allow the Trump administration to remove a sword from the library for a gift to King Charles

lastcampaign.substack.com/p/exclusive-...
EXCLUSIVE: NARA Ousts Eisenhower Library Director Over Proposed Trump Gift to King Charles
The director, a historian and Army veteran, declined to allow the Trump administration to remove a priceless artifact from the library's permanent collection
lastcampaign.substack.com
Reposted by Lauren Turek
jennyqshen.bsky.social
The entire piece is worth a read.

"The evidence suggests that compromising on basic humanity doesn’t broaden coalitions; it hollows them out. The work now is to find ways to expand our reach without abandoning our foundation—to bridge gaps, yes, but never at the expense of our neighbor’s humanity."
"The authoritarian playbook deliberately seeks to conflate these two forms of anger. First, you normalize hate by presenting it as merely another political position deserving of debate. Then, when people express righteous anger at this dehumanization, you accuse them of being the real problem—intolerant, divisive, unwilling to engage in public discourse. The aggressor becomes the victim; the defense of human dignity becomes the attack on civil discourse.

Klein’s strategic pragmatism—suggesting pro-life Democrats run in red states, seeking compromises that might expand the coalition—has an appeal, assuming one accepts the premise that the dwindling political center remains the main electoral prize. Sometimes difficult compromises have led to better outcomes: Obama’s calculated positions on same-sex marriage arguably helped him appoint justices who advanced equality. But these compromises carry profound risks. They signal whose humanity is negotiable. They tell vulnerable people that their rights are chips to be bargained when convenient. And crucially, such compromises should never be voluntary—they should only come when all other avenues have been exhausted, not as an opening bid for hypothetical coalition expansion.

But here’s where the strategic calculation becomes self-defeating: “Bridging gaps” cannot come at the expense of key parts of your coalition feeling abandoned and without a sense of belonging. When we muse about trading away reproductive rights or soft-pedal responses to hate speech, we don’t just lose moral clarity, we lose the very people whose passion and commitment form the backbone of progressive politics. The trans kids facing violence, the immigrants branded as invaders, the women losing bodily autonomy—they need to know their party won’t trade their humanity for swing votes. And so do their families and those who love them."

From Adam Bonica's "On Data and Democracy"
https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/you-cant-expand-the-tent-by-shrinking
Reposted by Lauren Turek
matthewstiegler.bsky.social
Instead of the next judicial education session, all the judges watch this tiktok instead.
Reposted by Lauren Turek
patsobkowski.com
Not only is this foreign aid stay an assault on the separation of powers and rule of law, it’s also an assault on Congress as an institution. If Congress can’t tell the executive to spend money, what can it *actually* do?
laurenfturek.bsky.social
A true delight of a thread:
dieworkwear.bsky.social
Let me tell you a beautiful story about this couch. 🧵

IG msviciousdesign
Reposted by Lauren Turek
kwcollins.bsky.social
Do still we have a system of "checks and balances" if partisan allegiance to the Executive makes the Court unwilling to uphold clear division of power between Congress and the Executive, and the Congress isn't willing to protest?
kjhealy.co
IOKIYAR, literally overriding the Power of the Purse edition.

www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...
Cite as: 606 U.S. _
(2025)
1
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
No. 25A269
DEPARTMENT OF STATE, ET AL. U. AIDS VACCINE ADVOCACY COALITION, ET AL.
ON APPLICATION FOR STAY
[September 26, 2025]
On September 3, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered a preliminary injunction directing the Executive to obligate roughly $10.5 billion of appropriated aid funding set to expire on September 30. Of that $10.5 billion, $4 billion was proposed to be rescinded in a "special message" transmitted pursuant to the Impoundment Control Act. See 2 U. S. C. §681 et seq. After the District Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied stays of that order, the Government filed this application to stay the District Court's injunction.
The application for stay
presented to THE CHIEF JUSTICE and by him referred to the Court is granted. The Government, at this early stage, has made a sufficient showing that the Impoundment Control Act precludes respondents' suit, brought pursuant to the Administrative
Procedure Act,
to enforce
the
appropriations at issue here. The Government has also made a sufficient showing that mandamus relief is unavailable to respondents. And, on the record before the Court, the asserted harms to the Executive's conduct of foreign affairs appear to outweigh the potential harm faced by respondents. This order should not be read as a final determination on the merits. The relief granted by the Court today reflects our preliminary view, consistent with
laurenfturek.bsky.social
A must read thread!
gilduran.com
1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that
photo of paulina borsook
laurenfturek.bsky.social
Draft bill would authorize president to kill anyone he deems as "narco-terrorists," in what Harvard law prof Jack Goldsmith describes as an executive power grab and “an open-ended war authorization against an untold number of countries, organizations and persons...” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/u...
Draft Bill Would Authorize Trump to Kill People He Deems Narco-Terrorists
www.nytimes.com
laurenfturek.bsky.social
It made me uncomfortable on many levels: the sycophancy of the AI models, the dangerous use/misuse of therapeutic language, the corrosive effect on ppl's ability to communicate w/mutual understanding/reality w/their partners. All so these companies can burn trillions of dollars and our environment!
Reposted by Lauren Turek
sreynolds.bsky.social
NEW: Internal report reveals DHS intelligence portal was accidentally opened to tens of thousands of users for months, exposing sensitive intel about Americans. @brennancenter.org obtained the docs. @wired.com has the story. 🧵

www.wired.com/story/a-dhs-...
www.wired.com
Reposted by Lauren Turek
brycecovert.bsky.social
“I wept and screamed.” Man whose wife and newborn died after they tried to go to a clinic shuttered due to USAID cuts.
Reposted by Lauren Turek
michaelpbrill.bsky.social
I was honored to be invited to contribute a piece to the newly published @shafrhistorians.bsky.social Passport Roundtable paying tribute to the Cold War International History Project, formerly at @wilsoncenter.org. CWIHP will thrive elsewhere.

www.shafr.org/assets/docs/...
laurenfturek.bsky.social
Dude. For real. I'll send it to you.
laurenfturek.bsky.social
For real! When we doing research for our university roots commission, our special collections librarian and I wrote a chapter about how the university has remembered its history...we found some wild stuff in the archives/old campus papers. Incl the musical the univ commissioned for its centennial...
laurenfturek.bsky.social
The elimination of the CPB and funding has devastated rural and tribal stations and with those cuts "the question confronting much of the country, where airwaves are dominated by the chain stations of Sinclair Broadcasting and iHeartRadio, will be how any news can compete with the political right."
After Trump’s Cuts, ‘Crippled’ NPR and PBS Stations Must Transform
www.nytimes.com
Reposted by Lauren Turek
lollardfish.bsky.social
well I'm sure American media is ready for complex semiotic analysis of online videogame fan culture right? right?