I urge my friends and neighbors in Philly to support Chris Rabb. I have known Chris for many years and he is the real deal. He has been a fantastic PA state rep and promises to be a progressive champion in the US Congress if we elect him. Let’s make it so!

This is the first part of what we worked on this week at @unbreaking.org. These short briefings are our best attempt to turn the flood of events we record in our timelines into something you can understand and pass along without putting your whole brain in front of the firehose of bad news.

"Benches are where optimistic visions of civic life meet reality. To remove them, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it." NEW: Why benches are slowly disappearing from public spaces — and why we need them back:

Pure joy! And the resemblances! 💜

www.ft.com/content/caad... Smiljan Radić is a worthy winner of the Pritzker Prize. But architecture’s highest profile award has problems

Good to see you NYC!

I loved “The Midcentury Kitchen.” Found it on a lark via a tweet and it was totally worth it

"The challenge now is not whether brutalism should be admired, but whether its underlying values can be taken seriously again..."

This week, the Transgender Healthcare page added 7 new items to the timeline. These include multiple cancellations of gender-affirming care and new policies from the DOJ mandating the forced detransition of inmates. Grim stuff.

She’s here! a.co/d/0eOeNfqi

I've been contributing to the excellent work happening over at @unbreaking.org & spent some time this past week on food safety ... the disconnect btw the MAHA promises and its actual policies is *wild*!!

This was an incredible treat: a visit to one of Diego Rivera's rarely seen murals, "The People's Demand for Better Health," located in a Mexico City public hospital and thus difficult to access. Completed in 1953, the mural is a sweeping visualization of forms of ancient & modern medicine (thread)

I had missed this beautiful obituary when it was published a week ago, and wondered who wrote it, and of course it's Penelope Green! www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/b...

Let's make it clearer. This week's in-depth briefing from our volunteer collective at @unbreaking.org is on extraordinary acts of courage and decency by ordinary people fighting back against inhumane attacks on their neighbors. unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...

"I fielded mail from all manner of people...what they often evinced was better than interest, better even than bibliophilia; it was the rare & precious capacity to be interested in what they didn’t already know interested them. It was a willingness to be changed." www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

Real estate career, too.

Ok fine let‘s gather together the existing remnants of professional book reviewing and figure out how to support what still survives/expand options.

In Philly, 15 out of 17 City Councilmembers have co-sponsored @kendraphlcouncil.bsky.social's comprehensive ICE OUT legislation, making it veto-proof and all but ensuring it will be written into law. A HUGE win for all the community orgs that organized for this! www.inquirer.com/politics/phi...

As ever, the folks who think a one-day shutdown/protest is performative and useless but that their yelling at folks on the internet about performativeness is valid and helpful, remain a treat.

Meanwhile, in Canada: One of the Heated Rivalry boys gave one of the show’s fabricated Team Canada Olympics fleeces to the prime minister and this happened

Clark Park #philly

genuinely stunning image

Recent addition:

Thousands outside Terminal 1 at the Minneapolis airport now.

For people looking to get involved, Stand Up for Philly Schools is holding a rally and encouraging people to testify at the 1/29 Board of Education meeting. Follow along @/standupforphillyschools on IG! or check our linktree at linktr.ee/standupforph...

How i wish to sleep as deeply as Rocket sleeps.

VOA's headquarters, 'the Sistine Chapel of the New Deal,' faces possible destruction as part of the Trump administration's drive for "maximum value for the federal real estate footprint." wapo.st/4a5NCsq

Selling Rocky merch from a shipping container. The takeover of the Fairmont Water Works. And now the elevation of the Rocky statue to a prime perch overlooking the Parkway. Today’s column looks at Philly’s zeal to monetize the art museum’s landscaped grounds. www.inquirer.com/real-estate/...

Here's our briefing for this week. We're going deeper with a different team each week, and this week obviously had to be focused on Immigration. (We added 25+ events to our timeline this round, and that's a tiny fraction of everything we saw.)

A lot of things are bad and we keep building joy in the cracks between. buttondown.com/signs+wonder...

"Today we think about attention spans as a matter of duration, something that can be measured in seconds or minutes. Dr. Cattell’s early research, by contrast, mostly focused on the span in a spatial sense: How many objects could a person take in at a glance?" www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/o...

A reader followed up with about the books I mention therein. Sharing:

I’m terrible at reading philosophy, but ironically Plato’s The Symposium is one of the few texts I’ve grappled with, thanks to an insanely-of-its-90s-moment undergrad seminar in queer theory, with the Blessed Henry Abelove, that started with that text. A piece of music trivia from that class:

20,000 words, 150 footnotes, 100+ timeline events = our attempt at documenting and synthesizing all the ways that the federal government has attempted to destroy access to gender-affirming care since January unbreaking.org/issues/trans...

For Lit Hub, I rounded up the best book *reviews* of the year. This time, I focused on great openers. Criticism is literature! lithub.com/the-10-best-...

A photo of one of the Asawa-inspired clay murals made by NYC schoolchildren this year at their own “dough-in”

Happy Hanukkah everyone

Enjoyed this thoughtful review by Lorna Finlayson

It's Blue Stoop's annual fundraiser & we have amazing auction items, including sessions with @ericsmithrocks.bsky.social & @eshanisurya.bsky.social & @emmaceisenberg.bsky.social ... please bid! Blue Stoop does incredible work for Philly's literary community. share.google/CqblnDr0c5Dz...

If you have a book project you'd like to place with an agent, come see me! Or if you want to get a more amorphous idea ready to send around, come see me! You'll be supporting Blue Stoop, too, helping us raise funds for our financial aid program.

Bid bid bid!!

It's Blue Stoop's annual fundraiser & we have amazing auction items, including sessions with @ericsmithrocks.bsky.social & @eshanisurya.bsky.social & @emmaceisenberg.bsky.social ... please bid! Blue Stoop does incredible work for Philly's literary community. share.google/CqblnDr0c5Dz...

Hi, all. If you missed my Blue Stoop workshop on Characterization on Sunday, you can purchase it here! www.bluestoop.org/recordings/v...

Sabrina Carpenter is now the president