Ted McCormick
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tedmccormick.bsky.social
Ted McCormick
@tedmccormick.bsky.social
16K followers 2.3K following 5.7K posts
Historian of scientific, economic and colonial projects in early modern Britain, Ireland, and the Atlantic; books http://bit.ly/3HYwNiA & http://bit.ly/3rKdAvt; http://memoriousblog.com; views mine; he/him. Montrealer in Philly, except when I’m in Montreal
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tedmccormick.bsky.social
Gonna tell my grandkids this was Pizzagate
January 29, 2026 at 10:37 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
absolutely wild to use this line unironically in Ireland
"Ireland a 'blank slate'"
January 27, 2026 at 5:19 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
I'm being assured that this is not Team USA's plan for the opening ceremonies
a still from "The Producers" showing several figures who look from here like what Gregory Bovino is going for; definitely not Team USA's entrance at the opening ceremonies for the Olympics, which haven't happened yet
January 27, 2026 at 4:57 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
I am going to create a negativity that is so relentless
January 21, 2026 at 9:23 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
first as farce
Dwight Shrute’s “Salesman of the Year” speech
January 21, 2026 at 4:09 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
Counterpoint: no it’s not
Quotation from the story, regarding the fate of Bari Weiss University at Austin: “It's a tragedy worthy of the Greeks”
January 16, 2026 at 9:11 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
Found the recipe for “good Germans”
January 16, 2026 at 2:20 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
What’s referred to as “identity politics” here could as easily be labelled “anti-woke,” if for some reason you need a culture war keyword to describe it at all; it’s even more straightforwardly specified as Islamophobia and racism, in a province that has already forgotten the Quebec mosque shooting
January 15, 2026 at 5:29 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
This is FoxNews, using video of ICE murdering an unarmed civilian as a snuff film for its conservative audience of snuff film addicts.

What can be seen clearly is not the point; the point is the thrill of watching people you have been told to hate — which is why Fox exists — be killed in your name.
January 8, 2026 at 1:13 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
A library based on access to subscription databases that vanish completely as soon as the payments stop is, in an important sense, not a library. It is not a repository. It's just a viewing platform.
They still make ViewMasters, don't they?
January 6, 2026 at 9:31 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
January 6, 2026 at 9:21 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
Encampment, Toronto, 2024. *This* was the speech nobody could tolerate.
January 6, 2026 at 4:14 AM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
Last of the year’s W. S. Merwin, enjoy
The Wild Geese It was always for the animals that I grieved most for the animals I had seen and for those I had only heard of or dreamed about or seen in cages or lying beside the road for those forgotten and those long remembered for the lost ones that were never found again among people there were words we all knew even if we did not say them and although they were always inadequate when we said them they were there if we wanted them when the time came with the animals always there was only presence as long as it was present and then only absence suddenly and no word for it in all the great written wisdom of China where are the animals when were they lost where are the ancestors who knew the way without them all the wise words are bits of sand twitching on the dunes where the forests once whispered in their echoing ancient tongue and the animals knew their way among the trees only in the old poems does their presence survive the gibbons call from the mountain gorges the old words all deepen the great absence the vastness of all that has been lost it is still there when the poet in exile looks up long ago hearing the voices of wild geese far above him flying home
December 21, 2025 at 9:34 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
are there no MOOCs? are there no certificate programs?
Alastair Sim inviting applications for his online Great Men, Big Explosions course
December 19, 2025 at 11:39 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
the old “stonks” meme but it says “science” instead
December 18, 2025 at 3:41 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
Look at these two paragraphs, from a BBC piece on the Brown shooting. Does the first one add to your understanding of the shooting at Brown? Does it indicate (or even ask about) imminent action in relation to campus shootings? Does it set the shooting in a specific context?

If not, why is it there?
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Saturday, President Donald Trump said the shooting was a "terrible thing". The attack on the Ivy League university brings the number of mass shootings to 389 in the US for this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
December 14, 2025 at 6:44 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
Avery F. Gordon, *Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination*, new ed. (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 64
“To look for lessons about haunting when there are thousands of ghosts; when entire societies become haunted by terrible deeds that are systematically occurring and are simultaneously denied by every public organ of governance and communication; when the whole purpose of the verbal denial is to ensure that everyone knows just enough to scare normalization into a state of nervous exhaustion; when there are guileless ghosts and malevolent ghosts living in tight quarters; when the whole situation cries out for clearly distinguishing between truth and lies, between what is known and what is unknown, between the real and the unthinkable and yet that is what is precisely impossible; when people you know or love are there one minute and gone the next; when familiar words and things transmute into the most sinister of weapons and meanings; when an ordinary building you pass every day harbors the facade separating the scream of its terroristic activities from the hushed talk of fearful conversations; when the whole of life has become so enmeshed in the traffic of the dead and the living dead... To broach, much less settle on, a firm understanding of this social reality can make you feel like you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoul-ders. It simply cannot be carried with any delicacy, a strict requirement in these circumstances. Changing shape more readily than the scholarly analyst might like, all the bits and pieces-the screams and cries, the si-lences, the density of the nation's history, the ideological justifications, the geopolitical forces, the long-standing creative capacity for domestic terror, the cultural pathways of the tango and the pampas, the debts, the international economies of money and national pride, the courageous political resistance, and so on—do not quite add up. They can be isolated and laid bare… but it seems as if in that very act the ghosts return, demanding a different kind of knowledge, a different kind of acknowledgment.”
December 12, 2025 at 10:22 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
It’s W. S. Merwin o’clock
The Sound of the Light I hear sheep running on the path of broken limestone through brown curled leaves fallen early from walnut limbs at the end of a summer how light the bony flutter of their passage I can hear their coughing their calling and wheezing even the warm greased wool rubbing on the worn walls I hear them passing passing in the hollow lane and there is still time the shuffle of black shoes of women climbing stone ledges to church keeps flowing up the dazzling hill around the grassy rustle of voices on the far side of a slatted shutter and the small waves go on whispering on the shingle in the heat of an hour without wind it is Sunday none of the sentences begins or ends there is time again the unbroken rumble of trucks and the hiss of brakes roll upward out of the avenue I forget what season they are exploding through what year the drill on the sidewalk is smashing it is the year in which you are sitting there as you are in the morning speaking to me and I hear you through the burning day and I touch you to be sure and there is time there is still time
December 10, 2025 at 1:34 AM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
That’s funny — I saw Zeldin on a shelf at the bookstore my first year of grad school and thought, it looks fascinating but it’s not what I do and o don’t have time. Never saw it there again! These are a couple of my candidates
December 9, 2025 at 3:11 AM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
W. S. Merwin, from “Berryman”
I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write
December 9, 2025 at 2:14 AM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
a lot of great work on early modern science, and early modern history generally, has come out of the history of alchemy!
December 7, 2025 at 8:25 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
What counts as evidence is relative to the standards of the day. If only current science (be it conclusions, methods, or standards of evidence) counts as science, then ultimately science has no history. Darwin both engaged in and approvingly cited eugenic arguments; does he not count as a scientist?
Darwin, Descent of Man (1871; Penguin edition), p. 159: "With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. ... We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at" [cont'd] Darwin, Descent of Man (1871; Penguin edition), p. 160: "least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected. ... Man accumulates property and bequeaths it to his children, so that the children of the rich have an advantage over the poor in the race for success, independently of bodily or mental superiority. On the other hand, the children of parents who are short-lived, and are therefore on an average deficient in health and vigour, come into their property sooner than other children, and will be likely to marry earlier, and leave a larger number of offspring to inherit their inferior constitutions. But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil; for without the accumulation of capital the arts could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take the place of the lower races. Nor does the moderate accumulation of wealth interfere with the process of selection. When a poor man becomes moderately rich, his children enter trades or professions in which there is struggle enough, so that the able in body and mind succeed best." Darwin, Descent of Man (1871; Penguin edition), p.162: "In the case of corporeal structures, it is the selection of the slightly better-endowed and the elimination of the slightly less well-endowed individuals, and not the preservation of strongly-marked and rare anomalies, that leads to the advancement of a species. So it will be with the intellectual faculties, since the somewhat abler men in each grade of society succeed rather better than the less able, and consequently increase in number, if not otherwise prevented. ... When in any nation the standard of intellect and the number of intellectual men have increased, we may expect from the law of the deviation from an average, that prodigies of genius will, as shewn by Mr Galton, appear somewhat more frequently than before. In regard to the moral qualities, some elimination of the worst dispositions is always in progress even in the most civilised nations. Malefactors are executed, or imprisoned for long periods, so that they cannot freely transmit their bad qualities. Melancholic and insane persons are confined, or commit suicide. Violent and quarrelsome men often come to a bloody end." Darwin, Descent of Man (1871; Penguin edition), p.166: "If the various checks specified in the two last paragraphs, and perhaps others as yet unknown, do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule."
December 7, 2025 at 8:04 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
more Merwin, W. S.
December Night The cold slope is standing in darkness But the south of the trees is dry to the touch The heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers I came to watch these White plants older at night The oldest Come first to the ruins And I hear magpies kept awake by the moon The water flows through its Own fingers without end Tonight once more I find a single prayer and it is not for men
December 5, 2025 at 10:29 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
Piranesi 2028: Strong Floor, No Ceiling
November 30, 2025 at 4:10 PM
tedmccormick.bsky.social
November 26, 2025 at 7:40 PM