Eira Tansey

If you're the kind of person who loves reading Wikipedia pages on random and arcane subjects, you should also know about the Congressional Research Service. I often browse a CRS report to get up to speed on a specific topic in a short period of time. CRS has reports on all sorts of obscure things, typically prepared with a policy lens for the needs of US lawmakers. Here's a fun one about Daylight Savings Time. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45208

I feel like I have been seeing more monarch butterflies than usual bopping around Cincinnati recently and it just fills my heart with joy!!!! It turns out that they ARE making a comeback!!! https://www.dispatch.com/story/things-to-do/garden/2026/08/15/monarch-butterfly-populations-are-on-the-rise/91246652007/

There should be a reverse Bechdel test along the lines of whether men in a mixed gender group will express curiosity in the lives of women they are not related to. I can think of very few men who have ever passed this bar!!!!

I'm so glad to see someone else talking shit about the weird sentence-as-paragraph style of writing endemic on LinkedIn and Substack. I cannot stand it, some of y'all do not have the attention spans for a full paragraph and it shows!!!! @catherineshannon@substack.com

Having a real "archivist heal thyself" moment whenever I encounter claims in the professional literature about how no one has written about this before (when my nearly two decades worth of professional literature review notes say otherwise)

Gosh it feels GREAT to have relaunched the Memory Rising newsletter!!! This is my free monthly business newsletter. If you're interested in cultural heritage and climate change, it's one of the best things you can get in your inbox. Here's a sample of what to expect! https://buttondown.com/memoryrising/archive/memory-rising-september-2026-newsletter/

Took the Substack app off my phone and I've felt 5% more sane in the last few days because as it turns out the prolific notes users on the Substack app have really made it into the new Twitter (derogatory)

(you know things are bad when even I think a particular platform becomes excessively sanctimonious)

Dating apps should allow you to designate a proxy so your overwhelmed friends can task one of their other friends with playing matchmaker and swiping for them for a while. I’m a queer woman who regularly hits the end of hinge but just saw my dear wonderful straight friends hinge and would not mind swiping on her behalf for a while, or even handling some of the initial conversations. How can we do this if we’re not always in physical proximity?

I’m sorry but when it is 94 degrees in September in Ohio this is a homophobic attack on me personally

Somehow I got to 40 without being super familiar with the output of Annie Lennox, Sinead O’Connor, and Janet Jackson. I’m now correcting this and wow my life is much richer for it!

Is there anyone on the Fediverse who works in sustainable finance/ESG investing who would be open to an informational interview? I'm an archivist who works in climate change who likes to regularly kick the tires of a potential career change, I've always been casually interested in finance/economics, and would love to get my bearings on what careers in this sector look like. #climate #esg #finance #investing

Here's an interesting map about climate tipping points https://www.climatetippingpoints.com/

This week's essay on Al Gore's internet https://archives.vastunregulated.net/archive/compulsory-heterosexuality-is-a-hell-of-a-drug/

Been listening to Joni Mitchell's ALL I WANT a lot recently and can we talk about how "I want to make you feel free" is probably the most exquisite line ever penned about love, and how only a woman could ever come up with a line like that?

The real reason I want to be obscenely wealthy is so I can name names of all the men in GLAM who suck because please believe I know way, way, way more than a lot of people think. Being a nice midwesterner is an underrated super power. I’ll let people continue to think that because I live in Ohio I’m dumb, but being coded as a nice midwesterner means I am often read as a safe person to share the truth with and I have almost two decades worth of this knowledge stored up.

Updating my syllabus and realized I had Archie Motley's article OUT OF THE HOLLINGER BOX on it not once but TWICE. A criminally underappreciated article that goes harder than potentially any other article ever written by an American archivist, a classic of the 1970s social justice archivist genre when they were REALLY cooking https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/archivalissues/article/id/10430/

Ben Goldman and I are working on a big research project about environmental collections in US academic archives. The survey will not be launching until later this year, but we're beginning to promote it and you can sign up now to be alerted when it goes lives. See more here: https://survey.psu.edu/archives #archives #archivists #environment #climatechange

Why are Leninists the most annoying writers on earth? Do they not understand the power of brevity? Why does it feel like they’ve never had a conversation with a real human being? Truly the levels of self delusion that these people have who also think they are going to usher in the revolution my god

No Adobe, I do not want to generate a podcast from my IRS EIN address update form

The HER app is kind of a train wreck (though I have made hands down some amazing queer friends through it) but the one thing it has going for it over Hinge is you can report unicorn hunters.

dhfklahdkgfhdjlbfgjl I LOVE IT WHEN CAPRICORNS WRITE COMMUNICATION ETIQUETTE GUIDES https://www.autostraddle.com/direct-communication-rules-ghosting-sucks-lets-all-say-what-we-mean/

TIL that weird little fold behind a cat’s ear has a name….! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%27s_pocket

dude how do I get a gig on a corporate board of directors? reading a company proxy report right now and it seems like a sweet gig for a few meetings a year

I devoured Belle Burden's divorce memoir Strangers in one day which is remarkable for me as a slow reader. I am not rich which is why I originally avoided the memoir but like Belle my spouse very suddenly blindsided me and left abruptly. She captures perfectly what the emotional fallout is like.

Devoured Strangers by Belle Burden in just the space of a few hours. 10/10. I am typically a slow reader, so for me to read a book in one day has not been a thing since I was a kid. While I'm not a Vanderbilt heiress, I have also experienced the trauma of my ex-husband very suddenly leaving me and she absolutely nails the emotional devastation and fallout in a way that is so hard to get across to people who have never experienced this level of betrayal.

Isn't there a conference dedicated to slow/minimal computing? I can't track it down (paging @ed@digipres.club)

Can't say I recommend divorce as a way to stop doomscrolling but it certainly helps https://archives.vastunregulated.net/archive/how-an-unexpected-divorce-caused-me-to-chill-out/

I have a 2% cash back credit card that deposits a periodic amount in a Fidelity brokerage that I use just for messing around with interesting investing products (my actual retirement accounts are elsewhere). For religious reasons I don't really fuck with gambling or betting, so it scratches that particular itch. I only have mine invested in vaguely ESG and women-led index funds/ETFs/mutual funds and its 1Y returns beat the S&P 500 and DJIA by more than 10% lmao

As someone who is both extroverted and the scheduler/wrangler/cat herder for the overwhelming majority of my friendships, I genuinely think in a parallel universe people like me should receive fat government grants for our hands on work to reduce isolation and loneliness. I am 100% serious.

I'm so fucking tired of filling out forms to get paid and then mf not paying me goddammit

Over on my personal newsletter, part 2 of how I became a Quaker, including the letter I wrote for membership. If you like what I write please consider subscribing! I'd love to get to 100 overall subscribers and 25 paid subscribers by the end of June. https://archives.vastunregulated.net/archive/how-i-became-a-quaker-part-2/

Nice

I'm always on a quest for informative and succinct resources for teaching climate change, and this video about the ten year anniversary of the Paris Agreement from DW is quite good, and going into my current syllabus revision https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUIY2wyLdx4

I'm doing a lot of reading on AI right now for both client and professional development reasons and this MIT Technology Review is one of my favorites I've encountered so far for understanding the interactions between data centers and the electrical grid https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

@RVLara23@mastodon.social I regret to inform you I get new ideas every day from the hellscape of dating apps! (Also great name - I have a James Bond blog)

This description of Midwestern state school upper middle class cultural norms is so spot on. I was in this class until my divorce (so now I’m in the strange position of being downwardly mobile as I’m barely making any money at the moment but have the retirement accounts of someone who was married to a high income earner for nearly a decade) and still have family and friends solidly within this class demographic. https://open.substack.com/pub/drunkwisconsin/p/the-state-school-upper-middle-class?r=sx43&utm_medium=ios

Nice to see my friend Micco quoted in this WIRED story about IA https://www.wired.com/story/the-internets-most-powerful-archiving-tool-is-in-mortal-peril/

It will never fail to amaze me when I try to gently enforce some boundaries around professional conversations (my expectations that people don't put all the scheduling burdens on me, not use it as an opportunity to trauma dump if we do not already have a close personal connection, etc), their reaction is to suddenly say they'll cancel the meeting or plans. Perhaps they think they're imposing, but they're not. This does not bode well for someone's ability to navigate professional situations.

this is so minor and the tiniest violin but I miss the old Google Workspace logos and I normally don't care about stuff like this

TIL about the Great Blue Hole archive https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads5624

It happened to me: I accidentally cut my bangs too short and now I look like I was making a dumbass attempt to look like Bettie Page

has "the last chopper out of Nam" been a Discourse Shorthand going further back than the last couple years? For anyone not in the loop, you often see it around discussion of modern dating, often from smug married people who are like "glad I caught the last chopper out of Nam" or frustrated single people like "everyone normal and fun isn't on the apps because they caught the last chopper out of Nam"

I've loved attending ASEH, the American Society for Environmental History, in the past. And now I'm delighted to learn there is an International Congress of EH organizations! https://www.iceho.org/eh-map