Historian of early America writing about rivers and all that flow through them• Asst. Professor @NorwichNews• PhD @RutgersU • Mainer
Joined February 2011
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Zachary Bennett retweeted
Know Nothing Party members screaming, crying, throwing up rn.
VATICAN: "Pope Leo XIV has exercised his right to vote as a citizen of the United States, every time he had the opportunity. The Holy See Press Office confirms that, in line with this established practice of civic participation, the Pope has sent his ballot by mail to Chicago. The Holy Father has also confirmed that, during the years in which he resided in Peru, he exercised his right to vote every time he had the opportunity. The Holy Father expresses his conviction regarding the right and duty of citizens to participate in democratic processes.”
Zachary Bennett retweeted
Michael Pollan reveals how the introduction of caffeine completely changed human history and consciousness.
"Before caffeine, it was a very different world and a very different consciousness. People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all of the time because it was safer than water"
"Water was really how you got diseases. If you fermented things, even low alcohol, it killed a lot of the microbes. So people, even kids, drank hard cider for breakfast"
"Tea, chocolate, and coffee all arrive in the same decade in England, and things start to change... no one ate or drank boiling water or hot beverages before"
"Boiling it made it much safer. This gave this incredible public health boost to these places, and then you have the drug that fosters a kind of more linear, rational, focused way of thinking"
"People in the 1600s started writing about it saying, 'Wow, we have this new civil and sober drink that we can use.' And that, I think, makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The clip repeats the myth that pre-caffeine people were mostly drunk because water was unsafe. Historians and medieval sources show water was commonly drunk from wells/springs while weak ale provided nutrition/calories, not a substitute for bad water.
leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-gr…
slate.com/human-interest…
fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/02/02/dri…
Zachary Bennett retweeted
China consumed more coal in the last four years (2022–2025) than the entire world consumed throughout the 19th century.
Zachary Bennett retweeted
Africa’s explosive growth in cities.
The continent’s urban centers are set to expand by 19mn people annually, or by nearly two Londons a year. But urbanization is not following a familiar path.
giftarticle.ft.com/giftartic…
Zachary Bennett retweeted
On Old North's balcony, there is a cryptic bit of carved graffiti that reads "No Popery Here."
"Popery" is a derogatory term, largely fallen out of use, referring to Roman Catholic beliefs or practices.
ALT Carved graffiti in Old North Church's balcony that reads "No Popery Here."
Zachary Bennett retweeted
.@realDonaldTrump Red Sox owner John Henry is enriching uranium and now two weeks away from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Zachary Bennett retweeted
cracks me up when people are like ‘oh if i lived in the middle ages they would have burned me as a witch’ no you’d be a normal farmer just like everyone else
Zachary Bennett retweeted
I’m reading the depression-era diary from a highschooler in North Dakota and it’s making me emotional
Zachary Bennett retweeted
What makes the Covidian lesbian bar story so appealing is its quintessentially American and specifically New England character: a remote sect of true believers trying to preserve the old faith, but consumed by vicious factional conflicts over how to live up to its strictures…
Zachary Bennett retweeted
I will continue to be a broken record about this because so many people continues to insist that Bad Ideas broke the university in general, the humanities specifically, and that is a fairy tale. The bad ideas were the weeds that grew over the earth the corporate model pre-salted.
Zachary Bennett retweeted
Was it darker than this day?
If the game goes ahead on Sunday it will be one of the darkest days in Ireland's history. There must be some players who don't want their name to be permanently stained by that.
#stopthegame
@FAIreland
Zachary Bennett retweeted
New book on the way! A decade-plus in the making. And it's coming into the world with the most absurdly glorious honour guard. Couldn't be happier. press.princeton.edu/books/ha…
Zachary Bennett retweeted
Colorized and animated archeological reconstruction of the 27 mound complex at what is now riverside at downtown St. Louis, Missouri. The complex was established in A.D. 900 just before Cahokia Mounds were constructed and it was one of the outlying walled mound complexes related to Cahokia. By 1870 the entire complex and mounds had been obliterated.
Original reconstruction by Carol Hicks, animated by @SPrachniak
Zachary Bennett retweeted
As usual, manias in the West come down to people who exist in a Christian culture but who are no longer Christian, instinctively seeking ways to express their Christianity.
HT @holland_tom
A fair amount of hostility toward Israel seems to be based on resentment that Jews were victims of the holocaust and other atrocities, and that this makes Jews believe themselves to be superior.
I don’t know where that assumption comes from, but for the record being a victim, as an individual or as a collective group, doesn’t make you saintly, it just makes you a victim.
Maybe there’s something to do with western Christian assumptions that Jesus being the ultimate victim, and the ultimate goodness, suggests that victimhood is elevating. Jesus aside, it’s not.
The only positive thing one could say about your group being victimized means you weren’t the perpetrators, but it doesn’t mean that you have some generally higher moral status forever than any other group and I don’t recall ever seeing any actual Jewish person suggest suggesting otherwise.
Zachary Bennett retweeted
It's publication day for _The Death of Religion? Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith_! I am grateful to @BHAcademic, @MBTS, and my friend and co-author Byron Johnson for all their work and support getting us here.
Zachary Bennett retweeted
It is a delicious irony that a little more than a decade after Obama “learn to code,” AI excels the most (as would be expected) in fields with closed systems (math, coding) and is never going to be great in fields that require judgment and aesthetic discernment (humanities)
Zachary Bennett retweeted
I wish this was more inspiring, but it is actually lame
It seems like OpenAI got wind that a professor was close to solving a problem after dedicating a decade of his life to it, so they threw a huge amount of compute together with whatever hints they had at the problem and cracked it
It’s also not clear whether the professor had data sharing turned off, so it’s possible that his own work may have gone into training data
OpenAI should have left this alone, it would’ve been way more inspiring if someone had used their tools to crack a big problem than that they went out of their way to scoop him
I honestly kind of hold this in contempt and find it a bit depressing
Axios and Wired just reported that OpenAI claims to have solved that an internal AI model produced a proof resolving the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem
OpenAI started to search for a solution to this problem on Sep 1 "after OpenAI researchers heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been solved"
Axios reported that "10,000 concurrent agents worked on the Navier–Stokes effort, reaching the result in about 88 hours."
