#history

What this server has with the tag: posts by people here, and posts from elsewhere that reached it. There's more of it on mastodon.social, sfba.social, follow.coryd.dev, newsie.social.

Cory Dransfeldt :demi:@cory@follow.coryd.dev

📖 Cults Like Us by Jane Borden (★★★★☆)

An "engrossing, unputdownable" (Amanda Montell, New York Times bestselling author) pop history that explains why the eccentric doomsday beliefs of our Puritan founders are still driving American culture today, contextualizes the current rise in far-right extremism as a natural result of our latent indoctrination, and proposes...

coryd.dev/reading/books/166800

Cory DransfeldtCults Like Us • Cory DransfeldtAn "engrossing, unputdownable" (Amanda Montell, New York Times bestselling author) pop history that explains why the eccentric doomsday beliefs of our Puritan founders are still driving American culture today, contextualizes…
Zhi Zhu 🕸️@ZhiZhu@newsie.social

"I find the prospect of predicting the incredibly dismal – even offensive. A predictable future is set in stone, immune to human agency. A predictable future runs on rails, and we're the prisoners of , tied to the tracks...

My intention isn't to demoralize you into tying yourself to history's tracks – I'm here to show you how to grab the wheel and steer off the rails altogether."
- @pluralistic

pluralistic.net/2026/10/27/tie

Headline and text from article: History is something you do (permalink) Prediction is hard. Especially about the future. That Yogi Berra gem proves that you don't have to be a science fiction writer to get irritated with people insisting that you must know what's going to happen tomorrow, but (as a sf writer), I can tell you that this is one of our main occupational hazards. Obviously, this is a self-inflicted injury. Our genre is full of big names who self-mythologized as scientific Nostradamuses. From the "future history" bar-charts in Heinlein's books (I was once on a panel with Robert Silverberg where he referred to RAH as "Robert A Timeline") to the McGuffin of Asimov's Foundation series: a "scientific" discipline that could predict the trajectory of human civilization for millennia into the future. But me, I find the prospect of predicting the future incredibly dismal – even offensive. A predictable future is set in stone, immune to human agency. A predictable future runs on rails, and we're the prisoners of history, tied to the tracks.
Cory Dransfeldt :demi:@cory@follow.coryd.dev

📖 When the Clock Broke by John Ganz (★★★★☆)

One of The New York Times 's 100 Notable Books of 2024 Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award A Barack Obama summer reading pick One of Publishers Weekly 's ten best books of 2024 A revelatory look back at the convulsions at the end of the Reagan era—and their dark legacy today. With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated,...

coryd.dev/reading/books/125039

Cory DransfeldtWhen the Clock Broke • Cory DransfeldtOne of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024 Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award A Barack Obama summer reading pick One of Publishers Weekly's ten best books of 2024 A revelatory look back at the…